Neal Stephenson 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.

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.

My linguistics is pretty theoretical.

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

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

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

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.

At the same time we overlap, because, I do linguistics, and Ben did a first degree in Linguistics at Lancaster University, so he knows some of my subject.

I'm very concerned with questions of language. This is what I think of when I think of myself as a writer: I'm someone who writes sentences and paragraphs. I think of the sentence - not only what it shares but, in a sense, what it looks like. I like to match words not only in a way that convey a meaning, possibly an indirect meaning, but even at times words that have a kind of visual correspondence.

Grammar is the analysis of language.

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?

Languages are true analytical methods.

I became aware that all sounds can make meaningful language.

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.

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.

Language. By this we build pyramids, fight battles, ordain and administer laws, shape and teach religion, and knit man to man, cultivate each other, and ourselves.

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.

We must plow through the whole of language.

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