Noam Chomsky Quotes

Grammar is the analysis of language.

Logic chases truth up the tree of grammar.

Grammar is the grave of letters.

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

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.

A schoolchild should be taught grammar—for the same reason that a medical student should study anatomy.

The first thing that confronts us in studying verbal structures is that they are arranged sequentially, and have to be read or listened to in time.

Who climbs the grammar-tree, distinctly knows Where noun, and verb, and participle grows.

The syntactic component of a grammar must specify, for each sentence, a deep structure that determines its semantic interpretationand a surface structure that determines its phonetic interpretation.

A schoolchild should be taught grammar - for the same reason that a medical student should study anatomy. Having learned about the exciting mysteries of an English sentence, the child can then go forth and speak and write any damn way he pleases.

Learning is the dictionary, but sense the grammar of science.

Throughout the past century there has always existed a significant minority of first-rate biologists who have never been able to bring themselves to accept the validity of Darwinian claims. In fact, the number of biologists who have expressed some degree of disillusionment is practically endless.

English grammar is so complex and confusing for the one very simple reason that its rules and terminology are based on Latin, a language with which it has precious little in common.

For me, language is something that I've always loved. When I read, that's what I look for. When I write, that's what I strive for.

The reason to stand up for punctuation is that without it there is no reliable way of communicating meaning.

Damn the subjunctive. It brings all our writers to shame.

No one complains of the rules of Grammar as fettering Language; because it is understood that correct use is not founded on Grammar, but Grammar on correct use. A just system of Logic or of Rhetoric is analogous, in this respect, to Grammar.

Speech sounds can be analyzed into fundamental units called phonemes; these move around like protozoa in a drop of water, and, like protozoa, join together and split up.

Mathematics is the queen of sciences and number theory is the queen of mathematics. She often condescends to render service to astronomy and other natural sciences, but in all relations she is entitled to the first rank.

We must plow through the whole of language.

...language is not the frosting, it's the cake.

Language. I loved it. And for a long time I would think of myself, of my whole body, as an ear.

The question of "unreality"is a very important one. Misled by grammar, the great majority of those logicians who have dealt with this question have dealt with it on mistaken lines. They have regarded grammatical form as a surer guide in analysis than, in fact, it is. And they have not known what differences in grammatical form are important.

No, you used nouns and verbs together in a pleasing but illogical format.