Noam Chomsky Quotes

Grammar is the analysis of language.

Grammar is the grave of letters.

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.

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?

I know what the structure of the language is.

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

A sentence is made up of words, a statement is made in words.... Statements are made, words or sentences are used.

I once asked him what came at the end of the sentence... and he said "parole".

From now on I will consider a language to be a set (finite or infinite) of sentences, each finite in length and constructed out ofa finite set of elements. All natural languages in their spoken or written form are languages in this sense.

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 period may be defined as a portion of speech that has in itself a beginning and an end, being at the same time not too big to be taken in at a glance

The words of the world want to make sentences.

A linguistic system is a series of differences of sound combined with a series of differences of ideas.

The way that I approached numbers, think about them, the same as for language as well-acquiring vocabulary, understanding the grammar, the structures of languages, the rhythm, the music and so-on - these things obviously evolved.

Languages are true analytical methods.

Syntax, my lad. It has been restored to the highest place in the republic.

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.

Every sentence stands on its own. Whether that's fair or not, that's kind of the way it is.

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.

I'm pretty sure when I need a comma; I'm not so sure about a semicolon.

You could imagine a language exactly like English except it doesn't have connectives like 'and' that allow you to make longer expressions. An infant learning truncated English would have no idea about this: They would just pick it up as they would standard English.

Names and other proper nouns shouldn't distract from the language.

I really do not know that anything has ever been more exciting than diagramming sentences.