John Burnside Quotes

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

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.

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

As a sociolinguist, I want to know how cultural differences affect the ways people talk and listen. My research method, inspired by the work of Robin Lakoff and John Gumperz of the University of California at Berkeley, is sociolinguistic microanalysis. I tape-record and transcribe naturally occurring conversations.

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.

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

The real being of language is that into which we are taken up when we hear it - what is said.

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.

The meanings of words and the uses of words come from practice from the way people in a given culture use those words.

Language is something that I take great interest in.

My linguistics is pretty theoretical.

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

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?

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

Well, language seems to be something that obsesses me. I'm always writing about it.

Words are our life. We are human because we use language. So I think we are less human when we use less language.

Social criticism begins with grammar and the re-establishing of meanings.

The world does not speak. Only we do. The world can, once we have programmed ourselves with a language, cause us to hold beliefs. But it cannot propose a language for us to speak. Only other human beings can do that.

I became aware that all sounds can make meaningful language.

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.

My interest is in how meaning is communicated via language, and I believe the shape, positioning, even the color of the language has an effect on meaning.

Language is not simply a reporting device for experience but a defining framework for it.