Syntactic Structure Quotes

Neither Aristotelian nor Russellian rules give the exact logic of any expression of ordinary language; for ordinary language has no exact logic.

Since at least the Middle Ages, philosophers and philologists have dreamed of curing natural languages of their flaws by constructing entirely new idioms according to orderly, logical principles.

Well, I've never dropped the word 'eh.' That's still at the end of my sentence, replacing the question mark.

We have as many planes of speech as does a painting planes of perspective which create perspective in a phrase. The most important word stands out most vividly defined in the very foreground of the sound plane. Less important words create a series of deeper planes.

It is impossible to disassociate language from science...To call forth a concept, a word is needed.

Of course, we have known for a long time that a word, like any verbal sign, is a unity of two components.

Elementary propositions consist of names.

The proverbial German phenomenon of the verb-at-the-end about which droll tales of absentminded professors who would begin a sentence, ramble on for an entire lecture, and then finish up by rattling off a string of verbs by which their audience, for whom the stack had long since lost its coherence, would be totally nonplussed, are told, is an excellent example of linguistic recursion.

Logic is to grammar what the sense of words is to their sound.

Further, I'm obsessed with how language contorts and creates bodies.

Then suddenly, he was struck by a powerful but simple little truth, and it was this: that English grammar is governed by rules that are almost mathematical in their strictness!

From a linguistic point of view, you can't really take much objection to the notion that a show is a show is a show.

There is a satisfactory boniness about grammar which the flesh of sheer vocabulary requires before it can become a vertebrate and walk the earth.