Discover the most popular and inspiring quotes and sayings on the topic of Morphology. Share them with your friends on social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, or your personal blogs, and let the world be inspired by their powerful messages. Here are the Top 100 Morphology Quotes And Sayings by 88 Authors including Jose Saramago,Lori Roy,Elizabeth Drew,Noam Chomsky,Jim Holt for you to enjoy and share.
Words have their own hierarchy, their own protocol, their own artistic titles, their own plebeian stigmas.
Writing's in the nouns.
Language is like soil. However rich, it is subject to erosion, and its fertility is constantly threatened by uses that exhaust itsvitality. It needs constant re-invigoration if it is not to become arid and sterile.
The syntactic component of a grammar must specify, for each sentence, a deep structure that determines its semantic interpretationand a surface structure that determines its phonetic interpretation.
(It is interesting that the words "cosmos" and "cosmetic" have the same root, the Greek word for "adornment" or "arrangement.")
In the lives of individuals and societies, language is a factor of greater importance than any other. For the study of language to remain solely the business of a handful of specialists would be a quite unacceptable state of affairs.
When the whole and the parts are seen at once, as mutually producing and explaining each other, as unity in multeity, there results shapeliness.
It is high time we turned to Grammar now," said Doctor Cornelius, in a loud voice. "Will your Royal Highness be pleased to open Pulverulentus Siccus at the fourth page of his 'Grammatical Garden or the Arbour of Accidence pleasantlie open'd to Tender Wits?
a nose of a delicate Hebrew model, but with a breadth of nostril unusual in similar formations; a
Never should an unfamiliar word be passed over without elucidation, for, with a little conscientious research, we may each day add to our conquests in the realm of philology and become more and more ready for graceful independent expression.
Men of Science would do well to talk plain English. The most abstruse questions can very well be discussed in our own tongue ... I make a particular appeal to the botanists, who appear to delight in troublesome words.
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 only since linguistics has become more aware of its object of study, i.e. perceives the whole extent of it, that it is evident that this science can make a contribution to a range of studies that will be of interest to almost anyone.
The classical scholars have kept alive the tradition of the superiority of the ancient languages
a kaleidoscopic mass of suffixes and prefixes, supposed to represent an infinite shading of meaning. It is a character they share with the Ojibway and the Zulu.
Language is fossil poetry. As the limestone of the continent consists of infinite masses of the shells of animalcules, so language is made up of images, or tropes, which now, in their secondary use, have long ceased to remind us of their poetic origin.
Linguistics becomes an ever eerier area, like I feel like I'm in Oz, Just trying to tell it like it was.
The conventions of language reveal the ways we see the world.
The independent role of morphology in mate choice is revealed by the rare instances where the usual association between song and morphology is disrupted.
The universal principle of etymology in all languages: words are carried over from bodies and from the properties of bodies to express the things of the mind and spirit. The order of ideas must follow the order of things.
Different persons growing up in the same language are like different bushes trimmed and trained to take the shape of identical elephants. The anatomical details of twigs and branches will fulfill the elephantine form differently from bush to bush, but the overall outward results are alike.
Memetics provides a new approach to the evolution of language in which we apply Darwinian thinking to two replicators, not one. On this theory, memetic selection, as well as genetic selection, does the work of creating language.
As Emerson observes, "The etymologist finds the deadest word to have been once a brilliant picture. Language is fossil poetry."4
I believe it is imperative to see modern English grammar as a rich and diverse linguistic system deposited on our [England's] shores 1,500 years ago, and left with us unweakened, though substantially changed by the social and political events of the intervening period.
The makers of dictionaries are dependent upon specialists for their definitions. A specialist's definition may be true or it may be erroneous. But its truth cannot be increased or its error diminished by its acceptance by the lexicographer. Each definition must stand on its own merits.
A parsimony of words prodigal of sense.
It is curious how in English embroideries there has always been a predilection on the part of the designers for interlacing stems, and for the inconsequent introduction of birds and beasts.
English orthography satisfies all the requirements of the canons of reputability under the law of conspicuous waste. It is archaic, cumbrous, and ineffective; its acquisition consumes much time and effort; failure to acquire it is easy of detection.
In learning the art of storytelling by animation, I have discovered that language has an anatomy.
For example, from nouns to verbs to aspects of grammar, we each store language in different areas, recruiting different regions for different components.
Linguistics will have to recognise laws operating universally in language, and in a strictly rational manner, separating general phenomena from those restricted to one branch of languages or another.
The thing is to sift out
the important sounds, little syllables and vowels that bring
hints of their lost words, and not to mistake the fossil for
the life, or the kiss for the love, not to mistake the fragment
for the sentence.
Cadus spoke the local Greek better than I did; they stretch the vowels here, and round them off, so that words that look the same on the written page sound as if they are spoken by a goat with catarrh.
The very natural tendency to use terms derived from traditional grammar like verb, noun, adjective, passive voice, in describing languages outside of Indo-European is fraught with grave possibilities of misunderstanding.
The flesh of prose gets its shape and strength from the bones of grammar.
Between words and objects one can create new relations and specify characteristics of language and objects generally ignored in everyday life.
It is one of the aims of linguistics to define itself, to recognise what belongs within its domain. In those cases where it relies upon psychology, it will do so indirectly, remaining independent.
No important national language, at least in the Occidental world, has complete regularity of grammatical structure, nor is there a single logical category which is adequately and consistently handled in terms of linguistic symbolism.
Typography is what language looks like.
For, though the origin of most of our words is forgotten, each word was at first a stroke of genius, and obtained currency, because for the moment it symbolized the world to the first speaker and to the hearer. The etymologist finds the deadest word to have been once a brilliant picture.
Out of the simple consonants of the alphabet and our eleven vowels and diphthongs all possible syllables of a certain sort were constructed, a vowel sound being placed between two consonants.
Language, never forget, is more fashion than science, and matters of usage, spelling and pronunciation tend to wander around like hemlines.
Smell and taste differentiate, whereas language, like sight and hearing, integrates.
Lexicography is a chastening as well as an illuminating and fascinating art.
Grammar A stratum of consciousness Leading to beauty
The question is whether distinct cognitive structures can be identified, which interact in the real use of language and linguistic judgments, the grammatical system being one of these. Certainly,
[Latin] allows you to adore words, take them apart and find out where they came from.
We cannot alter the essential shape of a single letter without at the same time destroying the familiar printed face of our language, and thereby rendering it useless.
The whole of language is a continuous process of metaphor, and the history of semantics is an aspect of the history of culture; language is at the same time a living thing and a museum of fossils of life and civilisations.
Grammar, which is the art of using words properly, comprises four parts: Orthography, Etymology, Syntax, and Prosody.
It's a four-letter word for a part of the human anatomy but it's not m-i-n-d.
I do not pretend that language is science. It isan instrument for the attainment of science.
Like everything metaphysical the harmony between thought and reality is to be found in the grammar of the language.
Zoology, eh? That's a big word, isn't it."
"No, actually it isn't," said Tiffany. "Patronizing is a big word. Zoology is really quite short.
[L]anguage functions best when we mediate between the descriptive and prescriptive influences, changing the rules to better suit some things, but sticking to them for others.
Linguistic sounds, considered as external, physical phenomena have two aspects, the motor and the acoustic.
The grammarians are arguing.
Words have their genealogy, their history, their economy, their literature, their art and music, as too they have their weddings and divorces, their successes and defeats, their fevers, their undiagnosable ailments, their sudden deaths. They also have their moral and social distinctions.
Grammatici certant et adhuc sub iudice lis est. - Grammarians dispute, and the case it still before the courts.
Within speech, words are subject to a kind of relation that is independent of the first and based on their linkage: these are syntagmatic relations, of which I have spoken.
Basically, morphic fields are fields of habit, and they've been set up through habits of thought, through habits of activity, and through habits of speech. Most of our culture is habitual ...
Language does not leave fossils, at least not until it has become written.
A slavish concern for the composition of words is the sign of a bankrupt intellect. Be gone, odious wasp! You smell of decayed syllables.
There were the years - years of childhood and innocence - when I had believed that carminative meant - well, carminative. And now, before me lies the rest of my life - a day, perhaps, ten years, half a century, when I shall know that carminative means windtreibend.
Words play an enormous part in our lives and are therefore deserving of the closest study.
Language is fossil Poetry.
An alliterative prefix served as an ornament of oratory.
The business, task or object of the scientific study of languages will if possible be 1) to trace the history of all known languages. Naturally this is possible only to a very limited extent and for very few languages.
The survival or preservation of certain favoured words in the struggle for existence is natural selection.
The [mental] organization of grammar [is] a case where complexity in the mind is not caused by learning; learning is caused by complexity in the mind.
The truth is that grammar is always interesting, always useful. Mastering the logic of grammar contributes, in a mysterious way that again evokes some process of osmosis, to the logic of thought.
Language is an archaeological vehicle ... the language we speak is a whole palimpsest of human effort and history.
Botany is the art of insulting flowers in Greek and Latin.
To lovers of the long and intricate history of language the disuse and final death of certain words is a matter of regret. Yet every age bears witness to the inevitableness of such loss.
I must beg you to indulge me in the matter of hyphens ... You will find that I have marked out a great many in the proofs. We arein danger of Germanizing our printing by using them so much, and I have a very decided preference in the matter.
Everything and anything about a culture can be inferred from the shape of its language - and
When we put words together - adjective with noun, noun with verb, verb with object - we start to talk to each other.
How had it come about that these particular designs were chosen as our letters? Who decreed what sound would accompany each shape? And how was it decided the manner they would come together to form a word?
'Why is this so?' I demanded to know.
To eat, to speak, to sing (need we add: to kiss?) are operations which have the same site of the body for origin.
It normally happens that if you put two words together, or two syllables together, one of them will attract more weight, more emphasis, than the other. In other words, most so-called spondees can be read as either iambs or trochees.
Language is something that springs from the biological matrix, and the neurological matrix, within us.
There are a lot of other things besides nouns.
Grammar is the grave of letters.
I ascribe a basic importance to the phenomenon of language. To speak means to be in a position to use a certain syntax, to grasp the morphology of this or that language, but it means above all to assume a culture, to support the weight of a civilization.
Man, whose organization is regarded as the highest, departs from the vertebrate archetype; and it is because the study of anatomy is usually commenced from, and often confined to, his structure, that a knowledge of the archetype has been so long hidden from anatomists.
J, n. A consonant in English, but some nations use it as a vowel ... from a Latin verb, "jacere", "to throw," because when a stone is thrown at a dog the dog's tail assumes that shape.
Like all numinous contents, they have a tendency to self-amplification, that is to say they form the nuclei for an aggregation of synonyms. These
Words fashioned with somewhat over precise diction are like shapes turned out by a cookie cutter.
It all began with the word itself. "Grass. Gramina. The family Gramineae. Grasses." "Oh," I responded doubtfully. The picture in my mind was only of a vague area in parks edged with benches for the idle.
dentition and witch-like pointed features.
Words have a universe of qualities other than those of descriptive relation: Hardness, Density, Sound-Shape, Vector-Force, & Degrees of Transparency/Opacity.
The science of systematics has long been affected by profound philosophical preconceptions, which have been all the more influential for being usually covert, even subconscious.
Descriptive anatomy is to physiology what geography is to history, and just as it is not enough to know the typography of a country to understand its history, so also it is not enough to know the anatomy of organs to understand their functions.
Our investigation is a grammatical one. Such an investigation sheds light on our problem by clearing misunderstandings away. Misunderstandings concerning the use of words, caused, among other things, by certain analogies between the forms of expression in different regions of language.
The English language is nobody's special property. It is the property of the imagination: it is the property of the language itself.
A text is evolutionary by its very nature.
Statistics is the grammar of science.
Definitions, contrary to popular opinion, tell us nothing about things. They only describe people's linguistic habits; that is, they tell us what noises people make under what conditions.
as Nick Ellis (2007: 23) puts it, 'language is not a collection of rules and target forms to be acquired, but rather a by-product of communicative processes',
Each portion of matter may be conceived of as a garden full of plants, and as a pond full of fishes. But each branch of the plant, each member of the animal, each drop of its humors, is also such a garden or such a pond.
As a former English professor, I can assure you that grammar is the qualitative interpolation of language. Adjectives, pronouns, predicates, past pluperfect indicative - ridiculous. It has qualities, shadings, differentiations, rhythmic structures of symbolic meaning.