Genevieve Valentine Quotes

Language is a living thing. We can feel it changing. Parts of it become old: they drop off and are forgotten. New pieces bud out, spread into leaves, and become big branches, proliferating.

Every usage, no matter how bizarre or nonstandard, fascinates me, as it tells me something about the way language is evolving.

Britain's fascination with its changing language is renowned.

I have always loved the fluidity of language - delighting in dialects, dictionaries, slang and neologisms.

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

It is useful to the historian, among others, to be able to see the commonest forms of different phenomena, whether phonetic, morphological or other, and how language lives, carries on and changes over time.

That's one of the ways language evolved, by some very obscure form becoming common usage. And I must say that I'm very intrigued by use of language and slang, and criminal underground terms.

Languages are true analytical methods.

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.

Language makes infinite use of finite media.

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.

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.

Language is something that I take great interest in.

I love the English language, the colors of it, the many, many nuances, the different influences. I find German stilted, in a way, by comparison.

My linguistics is pretty theoretical.

Language does not stand still. Surprisingly, despite this knowledge, most speakers are fearful of change.

The first of these phases is that of grammar, invented by the Greeks and carried on unchanged by the French. It never had any philosophical view of a language as such.

People have been warning us that language was going to the dogs ever since Latin started turning into French. Yet the dogs in question never seem to emerge yelping on the horizon.

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.

Language changes very fast.

Greek was very much a live language, and a language still unconscious of grammar, not, like ours, dominated by definitions and trained upon dictionaries.

Words have a genealogy and it's easier to trace the evolution of a single word than the evolution of a language.

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.