Quotes About Semantics

The adjective is the banana peel of the parts of speech.

'When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, 'it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less.' 'The question is,' said Alice, 'whether you can make words mean so many different things.' 'The question is,' said Humpty Dumpty, 'which is to be master - that's all.'

Every utterance is an event, and no two events are precisely alike. The extreme view, therefore, is that no word ever means the same thing twice.

It is so subtle to write things that have no meaning

Según mi escuela de pensamiento, los nombres son simplemente algo conveniente. No tienen ningún misterio

A person whose job is deep thinking about atomic war would no more call a 'megadeath' a 'million corpses' than an embalmer would refer to a 'loved one' as a 'stiff.'

Don't flip the script on semantics," Celestial said.

Like physical events with their causal and teleological interpretations, every linguistic event had two possible interpretations: as a transmission of information and as the realization of a plan.

Look at almost any passage, and you'll find that a paragraph has five or six metaphors in it. It's not that the speaker is trying to be poetic, it's just that that's the way language works.

There are more ways of outraging speech than contradiction merely.

the result of her having filled out a form, years ago, when she'd joined Lyke, and having clicked the "submit" button. Which, come to think of it, was a pretty strange bit of semantics

It was the Germans who first spoke of the war as 'der Weltkrieg', the world war; the British preferred the 'European War' or, later, the 'Great War'.

In all countries there was a torrent of what Paul Fussell has called 'high diction': a friend became a 'comrade', a horse became a 'steed', the enemy became the 'foe'.

The Allegator is the same, as the Crocodile, and differs only in Name.

I confused things with their names: that is belief.

stat rosa pristina nomine, nomina nuda tenemus

If there is something paradoxical, in the sense of curious or bizarre, it is that the word paradox has two fairly different meanings: one which is used in logic and philosophy, and the other in rhetoric.

Así pues, para definir el ser, hay que decir es, y usar de ese modo el término definido en la definición».

I would define the poetic effect as the capacity that a text displays for continuing to generate different readings, without ever being completely consumed.

formal semantics has sought to expand a logic of truth conditions so as to recognize the legitimacy of metaphorical expressions - expressions that speak about the world by lying.

Counterfactual conditionals are always true, because the premise is false.

The understanding of signs is not a mere matter of recognition (of a stable equivalence); it is a matter of interpretation.

There is a difference between a thing and talking about a thing.

That story always seemed very symbolic to me...Yes, but I forget what it symbolised.