Noam Chomsky Quotes

Grammar is the analysis of language.

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.

Language is not merely a set of unrelated sounds, clauses, rules, and meanings; it is a total coherent system of these integrating with each other, and with behavior, context, universe of discourse, and observer perspective.

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

You don't talk to a linguist without having what you say taken down and used in evidence against you at some point in time.

The study of gender and language might seem at first to be a narrowly focused field, but it is actually as interdisciplinary as they come.

With sociolinguistics, after covering the basics of the field, I focused on discourse analysis.

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.

I was really grateful to have a chance to have some really in-depth study about the power of language using a philosopher who taught at the University of Chicago by the name of Paul Ricoeur. I'm really happy to be in Chicago because a lot of what I do is rooted in his approach to language.

Syntax is the study of the principles and processes by which sentences are constructed in particular languages. Syntactic investigation of a given language has as its goal the construction of a grammar that can be viewed as a device of some sort for producing the sentences of the language under analysis.

Working with language is a means by which we can identify the bullshit within ourselves (and others).

Grammar is the grave of letters.

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

Devotees of grammatical studies have not been distinguished for any very remarkable felicities of expression

Some people study a text very deeply. The people are my text. I study their words and what their words sound like, over and over again.

Logic chases truth up the tree of grammar.

For one thing, studying language is by itself a part of a study of human intelligence that is, perhaps, the central aspect of human nature. And second, I think, it is a good model for studying other human properties, which ought to be studied by psychologists in the same way.

Anatomy presupposes a corpse; psychology presupposes a world of corpses.

My linguistics is pretty theoretical.

It is necessary to study these words you have written, for the words have a longer history than you have and say more than you know.

Grammar is what gives sense to language .... sentences make words yield up their meaning. Sentences actively create sense in language. And the business of the study of sentences is grammar.

The discourse on the Text should itself be nothing other than text, research, textual activity, since the Text is that social space which leaves no language safe, outside, nor any subject of the enunciation in position as judge, master, analyst, confessor, decoder. The theory of the Text can coincide only with a practice of writing.

Forcing modern speakers of English to not - whoops, not to split an infinitive because it isn't done in Latin makes about as much sense as forcing modern residents of England to wear laurels and togas.

There is no reason why we shouldn't be able to split an infinitive, any more than we should forsake instant coffee and air travel because they weren't available to the Romans.

Where does our investigation get its importance from, since it seems only to destroy everything interesting, that is, all that is great and important? (As it were all the buildings, leaving behind only bits of stone and rubble.) What we are destroying is nothing but houses of cards and we are clearing up the ground of language on which they stand.