Quotes About Linguistics

The dative is a pair of constructions

In traditional grammars the two phrases are called the indirect and direct objects; linguists today usually call them simply the "first object" and the "second object." The term dative, by the way, has nothing to do with dates; it comes from the Latin word for "give.

Fourth—and here's where the paradox arises—the generalization runs up against counterexamples in both directions. There are verbs that appear only with the prepositional dative: Goldie drove her minibus to the lake. *Goldie drove the lake her minibus.

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

We are verbivores, a species that lives on words.

This one broaches the topic in still another way: what we can learn about our makeup from the way people put their thoughts and feelings in words.

We concoct neologisms (quark, meme, clone, deep structure), invent slang (to spam, to diss, to flame, to surf the web, a spin doctor), borrow useful words from other languages (joie de vivre, schlemiel, angst, machismo), or coin new metaphors (waste time, vote with your feet, push the outside of the envelope).

Language is a window into human nature, exposing deep and universal features of our thoughts and feelings.

The idea that language shapes thinking seemed plausible when scientists were in the dark about how thinking works or even how to study it. Now that cognitive scientists know how to think about thinking, there is less of a temptation to equate it with language just because words are more palpable than thoughts.

grammar specifies how words may combine to express 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

according to the transition probabilities of English. Remember Chomsky's sentence Colorless green ideas sleep furiously. He contrived it not only to show that nonsense can be grammatical but also to show that improbable word sequences can be grammatical. In English texts the probability that the word colorless is followed by the word green is surely zero. So is the probability that green is followed by ideas, ideas by sleep, and sleep by furiously.

It is about the relation of words to a community—how a new word, which arises in an act of creation by a single speaker, comes to evoke the same idea in the rest of a population, so people can understand one another when they use it.

This new usage may fall deadborn from the innovator's lips or be welcomed into a segment of the community with open arms. The reception is partly capricious (as we shall see in chapter 6), but when a new combination does catch on, it could involve the later adopters' grasping the rationale with a stroke of insight recapitulating that of the original coiner, their dumbly memorizing the verb in that construction, or something in between.

if some metaphors can persist in the language as fossils, it puts every metaphor under a cloud of suspicion.

language often allows us to express that aspect as a noun, whether or not it is a physical object. For example, when we say I have three reasons for leaving, we are counting reasons as if they were objects (though of course we do not literally think that a reason can sit on a table or be kicked across a room).

Contrary to popular belief, the Eskimos do not have more words for snow than do speakers of English. They do not have four hundred words for snow, as it has been claimed in print, or two hundred, or one hundred, or forty-eight, or even nine. One dictionary puts the figure at two.

Language is re-created every generation as it passes through the minds of the humans who speak it.

Chinese, in contrast, lacks a subjunctive and any other simple grammatical construction that directly expresses a counterfactual.

I have my own vocabulary. I love linguistics. That surprises people.

I must tell you that the supply of words on the world market is plentiful, but the demand is falling.

I love to laugh, it's my main thing. I love to abuse the English language.

Pointing is, as well, a crucial precursor to the development of language. To name something—to use the word for the thing—is essentially to point to it, to specify it against everything else, to isolate it for use individually and socially.