Quotes About Semantics

Radical Pragmatics – "words are fluid, and can mean different things in different circumstances. […] And what we draw upon in memory is not a lexicon of definitions but a network of associations among words and the kinds of events and actors they typically convey.

A good rule of thumb is that any country that has the word "democratic" in its official name, like the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (a.k.a. North Korea) or the German Democratic Republic (a.k.a. East Germany), isn't one.

Nor does the atomic nature of word meanings mean that people are ignorant of the information traditionally plunked into their definitions.

If p or q is true, and p is false, then q is true." They just wouldn't be part of the word's meaning.

In general, referring to a person by a body part, physical trait, or typical accoutrement—that is, by a metonym—is dysphemistic.

the dozens of Eskimo words for snow.

No one thinks of Thursday as Thor's Day anymore, or of breakfast as breaking a fast. Modern English has thousands of former phrases and complex words that have congealed into what people now perceive as simple words, such as business (busyness), Christmas (Christ's Mass), and spinster (one who spins).

As Richard Lederer points out in Crazy English, we drive on a parkway but park in a driveway, there is no ham in hamburger or bread in sweetbreads, and blueberries are blue but cranberries are not cran. But think about the "sane" alternative of depicting a concept so that receivers can apprehend the meaning in the form.

And fifth, the promiscuous verbs and monogamous verbs seem to convey the same kinds of meanings.

grammar specifies how words may combine to express meanings;

Polysemy refers to a word's having a number of distinct but related senses, and is different from two other ways in which a sound can have multiple meanings.

an exception: in the sentence I asked him what he thought of my review in his book, and his response was unprintable, the word unprintable means something much more specific than "incapable of being printed.") The

And every word has at most one inflectional suffix. We never get opensed or opensing, nor do the plural -s and possessive s stack up when several owners own something: the dogs' blanket, not the dogs's (dogzez) blanket. Finally

But this book is about semantics, and I would not make a claim on your attention if I did not think that the relation of language to our inner and outer worlds was a matter of intellectual fascination and real-world importance.

Semantics is about the relation of words to thoughts, but it is also about the relation of words to other human concerns.

Linguists call the inventory of concepts and the schemes that combine them "conceptual semantics."1 Conceptual semantics—the language of thought—must be distinct from language itself, or we would have nothing to go on when we debate what our words mean.

When the term ham sandwich can refer to a man sitting at a lunch counter, there seems to be little hope for the logician's dream that the expressions in a language can be mapped onto states of the world according to a fixed set of pointers.

If I use the verb pour, my field of vision narrows to how the water is caused to move, ignoring its destination; that's the reason we can say pour the water but not pour the glass. But if I use the verb fill, my field of vision narrows to the resulting fullness of the glass, ignoring the trajectory of the water; that's why we say fill the glass but not fill the water.

At his trial, Guiteau repeatedly said, "The doctors killed him; I just shot him." The jury was unpersuaded, and in 1882 Guiteau was hanged—another man whose fate hinged on the semantics of a verb.

The existence of language is, in a way, a continual denigration of words.

This is a word that is a pitfall to the most of us whether learned or unlearned. Probably it is the most indiscriminately used word in the language.

Some of the old similes which have outlived their usefulness and should be pensioned off, are "Sweet as sugar," "Bold as a lion," "Strong as an ox," "Quick as a flash," "Cold as ice," "Stiff as a poker," "White as snow," "Busy as a bee," "Pale as a ghost," "Rich as Croesus," "Cross as a bear" and a great many more far too numerous to mention.

Brouwer's criticisms of classical mathematics were concerned with what I shall refer to as "the debasement of meaning".

Quotation, n: The act of repeating erroneously the words of another.