Top 33 Linguistic Quotes

The ambiguities of language, both in terms of vocabulary and syntax, are fascinating: how important connotation is, what is lost and what is gained in the linguistic transition.

Anybody that believes that a country can be maintained that has no ethnic core to it or no linguistic core to it, I believe, is naive in the extreme.

Part of what our problem as blacks in America is that we don’t claim that. Partly, you see, because of the linguistic environment in which we live.

Death is a displaced name for a linguistic predicament.

Linguistic supersizing is on the increase, and it may show the influence of advertising-speak and corporate jargon on language, in which everything needs to be hyped to get noticed. It means that some of our greatest words are losing their power.

There’s an old little jingle: ‘The chief use of slang is to show that you’re one of the gang.’ What that means is that every social group has its own linguistic bonding mechanism. If there’s a group of lawyers, they have their own slang. If there’s a group of doctors, they have their own slang, and so on.

There is no such thing as too much swearing. Swearing is just a piece of linguistic mechanics. The words in-between are the clever ones.

My work on what is called ‘deep reading‘ explores the range of linguistic, cognitive, and affective processes that underlie not only the emergence of creative thought when we read but also the development and strengthening of capacities like empathy and critical analysis that we can apply to the rest of our lives.

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.

In October 1920 I went to Leeds as Reader in English Language, with a free commission to develop the linguistic side of a large and growing School of English Studies, in which no regular provision had as yet been made for the linguistic specialist.

The most appealing side-effect of Sri Lankan cricket from where I stand, shuffling words, has been linguistic.

By sincerity, a man gains physical, mental and linguistic straightforwardness, and harmonious tendency; that is, congruence of speech and action.

My interest in the linguistic differences between women and men grew from research I conducted early in my career on conversations between speakers of different ethnic and regional backgrounds.

I’ve been collecting linguistic oddities for years and years, ever since I was small. I’ve got loads of notebooks where I’ve jotted down things I couldn’t make sense of.

A new era in the physiological investigation of linguistic sounds was opened up by X-ray photography.

Logical positivists have never taken psychology into account in their epistemology, but they affirm that logical beings and mathematical beings are nothing but linguistic structures.

Literature that keeps employing new linguistic and formal modes of expression to draft a panorama of society as a whole while at the same time exposing it, tearing the masks from its face – for me that would be deserving of an award.

Good cinema has no regional or linguistic boundaries.

I’ve studied authoritarianism for a very long time – for 40 years – and they’re started by people‘s attempts to control the ideological and linguistic territory.

Logic and mathematics are nothing but specialised linguistic structures.

Why does everyone cling to the masculine imagery and pronouns even though they are a mere linguistic device that has never meant that God is male?

CIA relies on a partner‘s focus, linguistic agility, and cultural depth; in return, the partner benefits from CIA’s resources, technology, and global view.

English is an outrageous tangle of those derivations and other multifarious linguistic influences, from Yiddish to Shoshone, which has grown up around a gnarly core of chewy, clangorous yawps derived from ancestors who painted themselves blue to frighten their enemies.

It doesn’t take a language long to disappear once the spirit to continue with it leaves its community. In fact, the speed of the decline has been one of the main findings of recent linguistic research.

Linguistic sounds, considered as external, physical phenomena have two aspects, the motor and the acoustic.

The Internet has given us 10 or 15 new styles of communication: long messages like blogging, and then short messages like texting and tweeting. I see it all as part of an expanding array of linguistic possibilities.

If what distinguishes us from other species is speech, then poetry, which is the supreme linguistic operation, is our anthropological – indeed, genetic – goal.

Unlike our neighbours on the mainland of Europe, we have resisted creating an academy to legislate over proper English. We each have our linguistic bugbear, but few of us would want to freeze our mother tongue.

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.

From a linguistic point of view, you can’t really take much objection to the notion that a show is a show is a show.

I wanted as little formal linguistic theory as I could get by with. I wanted the basic linguistic training to do a translation of the New Testament.

Linguistic philosophers continue to argue that probably music is not a language, that is in the philosophical debate. Another point of view is to say that music is a very profound language.

I don’t have any particular desire to see words making a comeback. They are of their era, after all, and that is their identity – they form part of the linguistic color of a period.