As a scholar I am interested in the philosophy of language, semiotics, call it what you want, and one of the main features of the human language is the possibility of lying.
Semiotics is a general theory of all existing languages... all forms of communication - visual, tactile, and so on... There is general semiotics, which is a philosophical approach to this field, and then there are many specific semiotics.
According to scholars of linguistics, the relation between a word and its meaning is arbitrary.
I agree with Chomsky in almost nothing. When it comes to innate structures and so on, I'm very skeptical.
You could teach [George] Carlin in college. It's the construction of the word and the order of things and how they go. How all those sentences are timed perfectly.
The connection between the signifier and the signified is arbitrary.
I was really grateful to have a chance to have some really in-depth study about the power of language using a philosopher who taught at the University of Chicago by the name of Paul Ricoeur. I'm really happy to be in Chicago because a lot of what I do is rooted in his approach to language.
Poststructuralism. . . . is a form of literary criticism that uses elaborate wordplay to prove its central premise, that all language is internally contradictory and has no fixed meaning.
Meaning is what essence becomes when it is divorced from the object of reference and wedded to the word.
For the signifier is a unit in its very uniqueness, being by nature symbol only of an absence.
The powerful notion of entropy, which comes from a very special branch of physics … is certainly useful in the study of communication and quite helpful when applied in the theory of language.
Bilingualism is for me the fundamental problem of linguistics.
Languages are true analytical methods.
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.
My linguistics is pretty theoretical.
There's a theory, and I think the theory is right, that in order to make a change you've got to make the whole language of the page harmonious. Well, that's a lot easier with a computer.
I have resisted the term sociolinguistics for many years, since it implies that there can be a successful linguistic theory or practice which is not social.
Don Basilio was a forbidding-looking man with a bushy mustache who did not suffer fools and who subscribed to the theory that the liberal use of adverbs and adjectives was the mark of a pervert or someone with a vitamin deficiency.
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.
One of the most important revelations about a period comes in its theory of language, for that informs us whether language is viewed as a bridge to the noumenal or as a body of fictions convenient for grappling with transitory phenomena.
There is undoubtedly much to learn about the social uses of language, for communication or for other purposes. But at present there is not much in the way of a theory of sociolinguistics, of social uses of languages, as far as I am aware.
In fact, by universal grammar I mean just that system of principles and structures that are the prerequisites for acquisition of language, and to which every language necessarily conforms.
