Quotes About Syntax

Ideas about life organize perception; names of emotions organize sensations; rules of syntax organize thought. But pain comes on its own.

Eats Shoots and Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation, by Lynne Truss.

Punctuation is to words as cartilage is to bone, permitting articulation and bearing stress.

beautifully bungled prepositions. Language

Nature has her language, and she is not unveracious; but we don't know all the intricacies of her syntax just yet, and in a hasty reading we may happen to extract the very opposite of her real meaning.

There is no Chomskyan person, for whom language is pure syntax, pure form insulated from and independent of all meaning, context, perception, emotion, memory, attention, action, and the dynamic nature of communication. Moreover, human language is not a totally genetic innovation. Rather, central aspects of language arise evolutionarily from sensory, motor, and other neural systems that are present in lower animals.

'Programming' is a four-letter word.

In English every word can be verbed. Would that it were so in our programming languages.

Every director has his own syntax, his own grammar, his own words.

All the misunderstandings that tie the world up and keep people apart were quivering before me at once, waiting for me to untangle them, explain them, and I couldn't. I didn't know the words, the grammar, the syntax.

La segunda puerta que debe abrirse es la de la sintaxis mental de una persona. La sintaxis mental es el modo en que los individuos organizan sus pensamientos.

Every word is either current, or strange, or metaphorical, or ornamental, or newly-coined, or lengthened, or contracted, or altered.

It is the German who is so uncourteous to his verbs

When meter is honored over thythm, line over syntax, form over structure, even the most prodigious manipulation of traditional patterns may be rendered purely decorative.

It is because the verb BE has a plain form which does not share its shape with any of the present tense forms that we need to distinguish the plain form as a distinct inflectional form. And if we do so for BE we should do so for all verbs.

Aspect is a grammatical notion, which refers to the way the associated semantic notion of aspectuality is implemented linguistically.

I really do not know that anything has ever been more exciting than diagramming sentences.

The Germans have an inhuman way of cutting up their verbs. Now a verb has a hard time enough of it in this world when it's all together. It's downright inhuman to split it up. But that's just what those Germans do. They take part of a verb and put it down here, like a stake, and they take the other part of it and put it away over yonder like another stake, and between these two limits they just shovel in German. from Disappearance of Literature

There are ten parts of speech and they are all troublesome.

But there are some infelicities. Such as 'like' for 'as,' and the addition of an 'at' where it isn't needed. I heard an educated gentleman say, 'Like the flag-officer did.' His cook or his butler would have said, 'Like the flag-officer done.' You hear gentlemen say, 'Where have you been at?

And he plainly disagreed with the reverence for Wittgenstein's idea that mathematics, like language, was merely a tool, a set of rules or a syntax that had no inherent meaning in itself.

Proper words in proper places make the true definition of style.

the meaning of Adam's work sat on its surface, that he had no opinion of his subjects, good or bad: "Cullen's abjectness is not luxury at ease; his emptiness is not profundity; when he scribbles, his poor syntax is not a form of epigram. His crudeness is what it is – unabashed … He's a bottom-feeder, none too pernickety about taste. Every pond needs one, especially the cesspools of popular culture.

The opposite of a truth," Klaus quoted, "is a falsehood; but the opposite of a profound truth...may be another profound truth." It either is or is not August...if I assert it's August when it isn't--simply false; but if I say that life is pain, that is true, profoundly so; so, too, that life is joy; the more profound the statement, the more reversible the deep truths are sedimented in syntax, the terms can be reversed... [Niels Bohr]