John Langdon 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.

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?

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

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.

Most students of literature can pick apart a metaphor or spot an ethnic stereotype, but not many of them can say things like: 'The poem's sardonic tone is curiously at odds with its plodding syntax.'

Revelation and the nature of truth must be viewed in reference to the structure of language.

I have never designed a language for its own sake.

I enjoy the inventive ways in which language is manipulated to make meaning.

My linguistics is pretty theoretical.

Reason" in language - oh, what an old deceptive female she is! I am afraid we are not rid of God because we still have faith in grammar.

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.

Loving your language means a command of its vocabulary beyond the level of the everyday.

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.

If you decide to design your own language, there are thousands of sort of amateur language designer pitfalls.

A philosopher once said, 'Half of good philosophy is good grammar.'

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.

You can't do science in a novel, but you can do philosophy. Or, if you're really lucky, you can manage to pose a question in such a way that other people will take it on.

Language makes infinite use of finite media.

I always loved reading. I always was the spelling bee champion. I always loved words. I always wanted to know what they meant, why you used them, who first said them. I was always interested in that.

I have not written a perfect sentence, in the literary sense. It's a lot easier to throw a perfect pass than to write a perfect sentence, if that sentence is meant to perform more than a mechanical function.

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.

The way that words fit together is always interesting to me. I love words.

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.

I like the construction of sentences and the juxtaposition of words-not just how they sound or what they mean, but even what they look like.