Northrop Frye Quotes

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.

You can have your own language. You can have your own dialect; you can have your own way of saying things, but if you don't actually understand the way the language fits together, it's chaos.

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.

We must plow through the whole of language.

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

Yet no one hears his own remarks as prose.

We have a priori reasons for believing that in every sentence there is some one order of words more effective than any other; and that this order is the one which presents the elements of the proposition in the succession in which they may be most readily put together.

The unconscious is structured like a language.

Hence, a generative grammar must be a system of rules that can iterate to generate an indefinitely large number of structures. This system of rules can be analyzed into the three major components of a generative grammar: the syntactic, phonological, and semantic components... the syntactic component of a grammar must specify, for each sentence, a deep structure that determines its semantic interpretation and a surface structure that determines its phonetic interpretation. The first of these is interpreted by the semantic component; the second, by the phonological component.

Put first things first and we get second things thrown in: put second things first & we lose both first and second things.

...physics is the study of the structure of consciousness.

It is amazing how the truth is just out there or what somebody's actually said, and you have your little knee-jerk reactions.

You can't eat language but it eases thirst.

Never before had I known the sudden quiver of understanding that travels from word to brain to heart, the way a new language can move, coil, swim into life under the eyes, the almost savage leap of comprehension, the instantaneous, joyful release of meaning, the way the words shed their printed bodies in a flash of heat and light.

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

There's an essential order you have to follow in everything. It's a way of showing respect, following everything in the correct order.

He didn't say a lot so I tend to remember what he did say. And I don't remember that he had a lot of patience with havin to say things twice so I learned to listen the first time.

You might as well talk to my baby daughter. You'll get more sense out of her

The last thing that we find in making a book is to know what we must put first.

At times, it could be a bit difficult to understand everything that's being said when just listening, but I wanted the lyrics to be the first impression.

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

I lived where I could and studied what I enjoyed studying. I took what I wanted from that education but was making my first record at the same time.

The sound of a word is at least as important as the meaning.