Cognitive Linguistics Quotes

Language, philosophy, and science are interwoven into the design of words, which are manipulated to create surprising illusions.

We have only the language for fun and miserable, and maybe we need language for deep and shallow, meaningful and meaningless.

Metaphors hide in plain sight, and their influence is largely unconscious. We should mind our metaphors, though, because metaphors make up our minds.

Language is the mother of thought, not its handmaiden.

Was it really so far-fetched to think that words had a way of shaping a person's whole life?

Thinking about language, while thinking _in_ language, leads to puzzles and paradoxes.

I am convinced that words are things, and we simply don't have the machinery to measure what they are. I believe that words are tangible things.

Metaphor creates a kind of conceptual synesthesia, in which we understand one concept in the context of another.

Language always preserves a play or figure/ground relation between experience, and perception and its replay in expression.

Yes, metaphor. That's how the whole fabric of mental interconnections holds together. Metaphor is right at the bottom of being alive.

We think in language. The quality of our thoughts and ideas can only be as good as the quality of our language.

Metaphors think with the imagination and the senses. The hot chili peppers in them explode in the mouth and the mind.

Language serves not only to express thought but to make possible thoughts which could not exist without it.

Metaphor lives a secret life all around us. We utter about six metaphors a minute.

People do not think in English or Chinese or Apache; they think in a language of thought. This language of thought probably looks a bit like all these languagesBut compared with any given language, mentalese must be richer in some ways and simpler in others.

Ideas do not exist separately from language.

Metaphor is embodied in language.

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.

The only living language is the language in which we think and have our being.

It seems to me that right under the surface of human neurological organization is a mode shift of some sort that would make language beholdable.

Language does our thinking for us.

I can't imagine a mental life, a spiritual existence, not inextricably bound up with language of a formal, mediated nature. Telling stories, choosing an appropriate language with which to tell the story: This seems to me quintessentially human, one of the great adventures of our species.

Language is the mother, not the handmaiden, of thought; words will tell you things you never thought or felt before.

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

Moreover, metaphor is typically viewed as characteristic of language alone, a matter of words rather than thought or action. For this reason, most people think they can get along perfectly well without metaphor. We have found, on the contrary, that metaphor is pervasive in everyday life, not just in language but in thought and action. Our ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature.