David Crystal Quotes

Semantics, or the study of meaning, remained undeveloped, while phonetics made rapid progress and even came to occupy the central place in the scientific study of language.

Linguistics is very much a science. It's a human science, one of the human sciences. And it's one of the more interesting human sciences.

My linguistics is pretty theoretical.

I have my own vocabulary. I love linguistics. That surprises people.

I am the youngest of three girls. My first linguistics book was a study of 'New York Jewish conversational style'. That was my dissertation.

I'm a linguist. I study how people talk to each other and how the ways we talk affect our relationships.

Language is something that I take great interest in.

Linguistics becomes an ever eerier area, like I feel like I'm in Oz, Just trying to tell it like it was.

We must find out what words are and how they function. They become images when written down, but images of words repeated in the mind and not of the image of the thing itself.

I'm interested in the way language is used to navigate the world around us.

The ways in which language changes never ceases to interest me.

A linguistic system is a series of differences of sound combined with a series of differences of ideas.

Within speech, words are subject to a kind of relation that is independent of the first and based on their linkage: these are syntagmatic relations, of which I have spoken.

The integers of language are sentences, and their organs are the parts of speech. Linguistic organization, then, consists in the differentiation of the parts of speech and the integration of the sentence.

I know what the structure of the language is.

As Bromberger observed, rules are understood to be elements of the computational systems that determine the sound and meaning of the infinite array of expressions of a language; the information so derived is accessed by other systems in language use.

I think that this vein is close to being mined out already, but I'll say that my knowledge of and talent for linguistics are quite limited and I'm not aware of being a hell of a lot more interested in that topic than I am in others.

Languages are true analytical methods.

I became aware that all sounds can make meaningful language.

Language makes infinite use of finite media.

I love the English language, the colors of it, the many, many nuances, the different influences. I find German stilted, in a way, by comparison.

LANGUAGE, n. The music with which we charm the serpents guarding another's treasure.

It seemed to a number of philosophers of language, myself included, that we should attempt to achieve a unification of Chomsky's syntax, with the results of the researches that were going on in semantics and pragmatics. I believe that this effort has proven to be a failure. Though Chomsky did indeed revolutionize the subject of linguistics, it is not at all clear, at the end the century, what the solid results of this revolution are. As far as I can tell there is not a single rule of syntax that all, or even most, competent linguists are prepared to agree is a rule.

Language, philosophy, and science are interwoven into the design of words, which are manipulated to create surprising illusions.

It seemed to me that the real philosophical breakthroughs of the 20th century were in terms of the understanding of language. What is language? Where does it come from, how does it work, what does it do?