Choose language

Forgot your password?

Need a Spoofbox account? Create one for FREE!

No subscription or hidden extras

Login

#linguistic

Read through the most famous quotes by topic #linguistic




It was less a literary thing than a linguistic, philosophical preoccupation... discovering how far you can go with language to create immediate, elementary experience.


Robert Morgan


#discovering #elementary #experience #far #go

... [In 'Pride and Prejudice'] Mr Collins's repulsiveness in his letter [about Lydia's elopement] does not exist only at the level of the sentence: it permeates all aspects of his rhetoric. Austen's point is that the well-formed sentence belongs to a self-enclosed mind, incapable of sympathetic connections with others and eager to inflict as much pain as is compatible with a thin veneer of politeness. Whereas Blair judged the Addisonian sentence as a completely autonomous unit, Austen judges the sentence as the product of a pre-existing moral agent. What counts is the sentence's ability to reveal that agent, not to enshrine a free-standing morsel of truth. Mr Darcy's letter to Elizabeth, in contrast, features a quite different practice of the sentence, including an odd form of punctation ... The dashes in Mr Darcy's letter transform the typographical sentence by physically making each sentence continuous with the next one. ... The dashes insist that each sentence is not self-sufficient but belongs to a larger macrostructure. Most of Mr Darcy's justification consists not of organised arguments like those of Mr Collins but of narrative. ... The letter's totality exists not in the typographical sentence but in the described event.


Andrew Elfenbein


#jane-austen #linguistics #style #grammar

I believe that political correctness can be a form of linguistic fascism, and it sends shivers down the spine of my generation who went to war against fascism.


P. D. James


#believe #correctness #down #fascism #form

The critical principle demanded an examination, for instance, of the contribution of different periods, thus to some extent embarking on historical linguistics.


Ferdinand de Saussure


#critical #demanded #different #embarking #examination

Time changes all things; there is no reason why language should escape this universal law


de Saussure


#language #linguistics #time #change

Chantal is having a relationship with a sentence. Just one of those things. A chance meeting that grew into something important for the both of them.


Neil Gaiman


#linguistics-love #only-in-my-dreams #readers-and-writers #dreams

Language is my whore, my mistress, my wife, my pen-friend, my check-out girl. Language is a complimentary moist lemon-scented cleansing square or handy freshen-up wipette. Language is the breath of God, the dew on a fresh apple, it's the soft rain of dust that falls into a shaft of morning sun when you pull from an old bookshelf a forgotten volume of erotic diaries; language is the faint scent of urine on a pair of boxer shorts, it's a half-remembered childhood birthday party, a creak on the stair, a spluttering match held to a frosted pane, the warm wet, trusting touch of a leaking nappy, the hulk of a charred Panzer, the underside of a granite boulder, the first downy growth on the upper lip of a Mediterranean girl, cobwebs long since overrun by an old Wellington boot.


Stephen Fry


#bbc #language #linguistics #writing #trust

If we ask a vague question, such as, 'What is poetry?' we expect a vague answer, such as, 'Poetry is the music of words,' or 'Poetry is the linguistic correction of disorder.'


A. R. Ammons


#ask #correction #disorder #expect #linguistic

No important national language, at least in the Occidental world, has complete regularity of grammatical structure, nor is there a single logical category which is adequately and consistently handled in terms of linguistic symbolism.


Edward Sapir


#category #complete #consistently #grammatical #handled

It is one of the aims of linguistics to define itself, to recognise what belongs within its domain. In those cases where it relies upon psychology, it will do so indirectly, remaining independent.


Ferdinand de Saussure


#belongs #cases #define #domain #independent






back to top