Quotes About Semantics

Quilty grimaces. "I don't like what comes after 'dicker.' " "What is that?" Quilty sighs. "Dickest. I mean, really: it's not a contest!

Le lingue europee sono ricche solo finché si tratta di descrivere la propria cultura, di rappresentare il proprio mondo: appena si addentrano nelle culture altrui e cercano di parlarne, rivelano subito i loro limiti, la loro povertà, la loro inadeguatezza semantica.

All names mean something.

If words are not things, or maps are not the actual territory, then, obviously, the only possible link between the objective world and the linguistic world is found in structure, and structure alone.

Let us repeat the two crucial negative premises as established firmly by all human experience: (1) Words are not the things we are speaking about; and (2) There is no such thing as an object in absolute isolation.

Any proposition containing the word is creates a linguistic structural confusion which will eventually give birth to serious fallacies.

Whatever we may say will not be the objective level, which remains fundamentally un-speakable. Thus, we can sit on the object called 'a chair', but we cannot sit on the noise we made or the name we applied to that object.

Moreover, every language having a structure, by the very nature of language, reflects in its own structure that of the world as assumed by those who evolve the language. In other words, we read unconsciously into the world the structure of the language we use.

Definitions create conditions.

LANGUAGE, n. The music with which we charm the serpents guarding another's treasure.

Dictionary, n. A malevolent literacy device for cramping the growth of a language and making it hard and inelastic.

She leaned a little closer to whisper it. "Primrose Heights. Calling a thing a different thing don't make it a different thing, now does it?" "Wouldn't know," croaked Broad, who beat men for a living and called it labour relations, "I'm no philosopher.

Because everyone uses language to talk, everyone thinks they can talk about language.

When there's a negative word or expression-immaculate, for example-but the positive is almost never used, and you choose to use it, you become rather amusing. Or pretentious. Or pretentiously amusing, which can sometimes be good. In any case, you are uncovering a buried word.

But you said the words you knew, which were not always the ones you meant.

Vi que las frases salían de su boca como pompas de las que las palabras eran sólo el revestimiento externo que, al deshacerse en sonido, dejaban al descubierto un volumen etéreo: el significado.

English is a funny language; that explains why we park our car on the driveway and drive our car on the parkway.

The truth always carries the ambiguity of the words used to express it.

A lot of my work is about text taken to the point of abstraction.

The text is a limited field of possible constructions.

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

If you have to ask what it symbolizes, it didn't.

Language disguises thought.

the meaning of a word is its use in the language.