Would you convey my compliments to the purist who reads your proofs and tell him or her that I write in a sort of broken-down pato...is which is something like the way a Swiss waiter talks, and that when I split an infinitive, God damn it, I split it so it will stay split, and when I interrupt the velvety smoothness of my more or less literate syntax with a few sudden words of bar- room vernacular, that is done with the eyes wide open and the mind relaxed but attentive.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Syntax is the study of the principles and processes by which sentences are constructed in particular languages. Syntactic investig...ation of a given language has as its goal the construction of a grammar that can be viewed as a device of some sort for producing the sentences of the language under analysis.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Ideas about life organize perception; names of emotions organize sensations; rules of syntax organize thought. But pain comes on i...ts own.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I ascribe a basic importance to the phenomenon of language.... To speak means to be in a position to use a certain syntax, to gras...p the morphology of this or that language, but it means above all to assume a culture, to support the weight of a civilization.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I take it that computational processes are both symbolic and formal. They are symbolic because they are defined over representatio...ns, and they are formal because they apply to representations, in virtue of (roughly) the syntax of the representations.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Syntax and vocabulary are overwhelming constraints--the rules that run us. Language is using us to talk--we think we're using the ...language, but language is doing the thinking, we're its slavish agents.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Both art and physics are unique forms of language. Each has a specialized lexicon of symbols that is used in a distinctive syntax.... Their very different and specific contexts obscure their connection to everyday language as well as to each other. Nevertheless, it is noteworthy just how often the terms of one can be applied to the concepts of the other. "Volume," "space," "mass," "force," "light," "color," "tension," "relationship," and "density" are descriptive words that are heard repeatedly if you trail along with a museum docent. They also appear on the blackboards of freshman college physics lectures. The proponents of these two diverse endeavors wax poetic about elegance, symmetry, beauty, and aesthetics. While physicists demonstrate that A equals B or that X is the same as Y, artists often choose signs, symbols, and allegories to equate a painterly image with a feature of experience. Both of these techniques reveal previously hidden relationships.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The syntactic component of a grammar must specify, for each sentence, a deep structure that determines its semantic interpretation... and a surface structure that determines its phonetic interpretation.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Hence, a generative grammar must be a system of rules that can iterate to generate an indefinitely large number of structures. Thi...s system of rules can be analyzed into the three major components of a generative grammar: the syntactic, phonological, and semantic components.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »