Top 182 Linguistic Quotes & Sayings

Would you trust the linguistic intuitions of someone who has been studying Latin or Greek for three days?

A new era in the physiological investigation of linguistic sounds was opened up by X-ray photography.

We're trapped in linguistic constructs... all that is is metaphor.

The practice of employing metaphor and image and composition and linguistic choices to move the reader through the content.

The truest writers are those who see language not as a linguistic process but as a living element.

In October 1920 I went to Leeds as Reader in English Language, with a free commission to develop the linguistic side of a large and growing School of English Studies, in which no regular provision had as yet been made for the linguistic specialist.

The most staggering linguistic turnabout for me is the one that equates green economy with 'sustained economic growth.'

You can imagine a different world in which a number of species developed with different genetically determined linguistic systems. It hasn't happened in evolution. What has happened is that one species has developed, and the genetic structure of this species happens to involve a variety of intricate abstract principles of linguistic organization that, therefore, necessarily constrain every language, and, in fact, create the basis for learning language as a way of organizing experience rather than constituting something learned from experience.

I don't have any particular desire to see words making a comeback. They are of their era, after all, and that is their identity - they form part of the linguistic color of a period.

If the English educated neglect, as they have done and even now continue, as some do, to be ignorant of their mother tongue, linguistic starvation will abide.

The most appealing side-effect of Sri Lankan cricket from where I stand, shuffling words, has been linguistic.

Language is virtually always pathological; hence the solution is to move as fast and far as possible from language to experience, from linguistic to experimental or psychological philosophy. In order to know that we are not in the linguistic maze, we need to determine, according to Berkeley, whether the things we are talking about exist; hence we need to look for the relevant perceptions. For him, this usually means retiring into himself and trying to imagine whether x exists, having formed the best definition possible of x.

I have resisted the term sociolinguistics for many years, since it implies that there can be a successful linguistic theory or practice which is not social.

I think that I am strongest in linguistic and musical intelligence, and I continue to work on my interpersonal and intrapersonal intelligence.

If what distinguishes us from other species is speech, then poetry, which is the supreme linguistic operation, is our anthropological - indeed, genetic - goal.

Linguistic danger to spiritual freedom.- Every word is a prejudice.

Part of what our problem as blacks in America is that we don't claim that. Partly, you see, because of the linguistic environment in which we live.

The ambiguities of language, both in terms of vocabulary and syntax, are fascinating: how important connotation is, what is lost and what is gained in the linguistic transition.

Dance, like music, knows no geographical boundaries, no linguistic barriers and no racial divisions. All walls crumble where art is concerned. It is a great unifying and integrating force.

Death is a displaced name for a linguistic predicament.

Although many texters enjoy breaking linguistic rules, they also know they need to be understood.

I believe that political correctness can be a form of linguistic fascism, and it sends shivers down the spine of my generation who went to war against fascism.

Precisely constructed models for linguistic structure can play an important role, both negative and positive, in the process of discovery itself. By pushing a precise but inadequate formulation to an unacceptable conclusion, we can often expose the exact source of this inadequacy and, consequently, gain a deep understanding of the linguistic data. More positively, a formalized theory may automatically provide solutions for many problems other than those for which it was explicitly designed.

I can't help but admire the structural linguists who have carved out for themselves a linguistic discipline based on the deterioration of written communication. Another case of men devoting their lives to studying more and more about less and less - filling volumes and libraries with the subtle linguistic analysis of the grunt.

Language is inherently not concerned with logic. As an expression of the psychological activities of humankind, it simply follows a linear process as it seeks actualisation. Moreover, it does not obey the objective concepts of time and space that belong to the physical world. When the discussion of time and space is imported into linguistic art from scientific aims and research methods, that linguistic art is entirely reduced to trifling pseudo-philosophical issues.

Metaphor is, as a common feature of linguistic practice, an incidental expediency, a homely administering of first-aid by mother-wit to jams or halts in expression suddenly confronting speakers, with no respectable linguistic solution immediately in sight.

We want to create a sort of linguistic Lourdes, where evil and misfortune are dispelled by a dip in the waters of euphemism

Logic and mathematics are nothing but specialised linguistic structures.

My picture-poems are linguistic margins on visual atolls.

It doesn't take a language long to disappear once the spirit to continue with it leaves its community. In fact, the speed of the decline has been one of the main findings of recent linguistic research.

Every linguistic sign is located on two axes: the axis of simultaneity and that of succession.

Linguistic sounds, considered as external, physical phenomena have two aspects, the motor and the acoustic.

I can usually find my own way out of whatever dicey literary or linguistic situations I wander into, but I have to work much harder at the science.

Men like to become Christians without crossing racial, linguistic or class barriers

Intended to serve as an introduction to both the linguistic and also the practical study of spoken English.

I think that the history of the past hundred years has shown us that, by and large, the one linguistic group to whom separatism is being preached is not moved by the arguments which are used.

For me, the term "literary fiction" means there's always attention paid to language, and linguistic experimentation, sophistication.

By sincerity, a man gains physical, mental and linguistic straightforwardness, and harmonious tendency; that is, congruence of speech and action.

It was less a literary thing than a linguistic, philosophical preoccupation... discovering how far you can go with language to create immediate, elementary experience.

There are no philosophical problems, there is only a suite of interconnected linguistic cul de sacs created by language's inability to reflect the truth.

We live in a world populated by structures - a complex mixture of geological, biological, social, and linguistic constructions that are nothing but accumulations of materials shaped and hardened by history

I have to really think hard about how to structure sentences, and do more mapping when I sit down to write, so it does impose a certain discipline, intellectual and linguistic.

There is no such thing as too much swearing. Swearing is just a piece of linguistic mechanics. The words in-between are the clever ones.

The linguistic clumsiness of tourists and students might be the price we pay for the linguistic genius we displayed as babies, just as the decrepitude of age in the price we pay for the vigor of youth.

Prescriptive grammar has spread linguistic insecurity like a plague among English speakers for centuries, numbs us to the aesthetic richness of non-standard speech, and distracts us from attending to genuine issues of linguistic style in writing.

I started my professional life as a philosopher of language and for several years took the orthodox line that meaning is an essentially linguistic phenomenon. Whether as a result of simply listening to everyday talk about meaning, or reading books of anthropology, sociology and art history, it dawned on me that there is nothing at all privileged or central about linguistic meaning.

Through the act of translation we break out of linguistic confinement and reach many other communities.

I've studied authoritarianism for a very long time - for 40 years - and they're started by people's attempts to control the ideological and linguistic territory.

Poetry is not only the most concise way of conveying the human experience; it also offers the highest possible standards for any linguistic operation.

Good cinema has no regional or linguistic boundaries.

Why does everyone cling to the masculine imagery and pronouns even though they are a mere linguistic device that has never meant that God is male?

The important thing is not the planning of an Index Verborum Prohibitorum of current noble nouns, but rather the examination of their linguistic function.

Let us be cautious in making assertions and critical in examining them, but tolerant in permitting linguistic forms.

Every individual is at once the beneficiary and the victim of the linguistic tradition into which he has been born.

Men don't need linguistic talent; they just need courage and words.

I wanted as little formal linguistic theory as I could get by with. I wanted the basic linguistic training to do a translation of the New Testament.

Try not to live in a linguistic slum.

Anybody that believes that a country can be maintained that has no ethnic core to it or no linguistic core to it, I believe, is naive in the extreme.

What we call ideology is precisely the confusion of linguistic with natural reality, of reference with phenomenalism

It has as much to do with the energy released by linguistic fission and fusion, with the buoyancy generated by cadence and tone and rhyme and stanza, as it has to do with the poem's concerns or the poet's truthfulness.