To anyone who still feels that there must be an identity of logical form between language and reality, I can only plead that the c...onception of language as a mirror of reality is radically mistaken. We find out soon enough that the universe is not capricious: the child who learns that fire burns and knife-edges cut knows that there are inexorable limits set upon his desires. Language must conform to the discovered regularities and irregularities of experience. But in order to do so, it is enough that it should be apt for the expression of everything that is or might be the case. To be content with less would be to be satisfied to be inarticulate; to ask for more is to desire the impossible. No roads lead from grammar to metaphysics.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 »
We thus make a fundamental distinction between the competence (the speaker-hearer's knowledge of his language) and performance (th...e actual use of language in concrete situations).LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
UG [universal grammar] may be regarded as a characterization of the genetically determined language faculty. One may think of this... faculty as a 'language acquisition device,' an innate component of the human mind that yields a particular language through interaction with present experience, a device that converts experience into a system of knowledge attained: knowledge of one or another language.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The core problem of human language ... I take to be this: having mastered a language, one is able to understand an indefinite numb...er of expressions that are new to one's experience, they bear no simple physical resemblance and are in no simple way analogous to the expressions that constitute one's linguistic experience; and one is able, with greater or less facility, to produce such expressions on an appropriate occasion, despite their novelty, and independently of detecting stimulus configurations, and to be understood by others who share this mysterious ability.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
One day the Nouns were clustered in the street. An Adjective walked by, with her dark beauty.... The Nouns were struck, moved, changed. The next day a Verb drove up, and created the Sentence.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
As the adjective is lost in the sentence, So I am lost in your eyes, ears, nose, and throat--... You have enchanted me with a single kiss Which can never be undone Until the destruction of language.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Maybe it is only I, but conditions are such these days, that if you use studiously correct grammar, people suspect you of homosexu...al tendencies.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »