Syntax Quotes

“It seemed to a number of philosophers of language, myself included, that we should attempt to achieve a unification of Chomsky's syntax, with the results of the researches that were going on in semantics and pragmatics. I believe that this effort has proven to be a failure. Though Chomsky did indeed revolutionize the subject of linguistics, it is not at all clear, at the end the century, what the solid results of this revolution are. As far as I can tell there is not a single rule of syntax that all, or even most, competent linguists are prepared to agree is a rule.”

“You must know in what way you are going to use the morphology and syntax to build your 'how”

“I was never ready and could you see it in the way time collapsed in my syntax? Because melancholia is the inability to sequentialize.”

“Our memory fragments don't have any coherence until they're imagined in words. Time is a property of language, of syntax, and tense.”

“When the style is fully formed if it has a sweet undersong we call it beautiful and the writer may do what he likes in words or syntax.”

“It's hard to get motivated fixing a compile-time syntax error when you can buy a powder that turns a house into a monster.”

“Grammar and ordinary language are bad guides to metaphysics. A great book might be written showing the influence of syntax on philosophy.”

“There's life for you. Spend the best years of your life studying penmanship and rhetoric and syntax and Beowulf and George Eliot, and then somebody steals your pencil.”

“A letter is always better than a phone call. People write things in letters they would never say in person. They permit themselves to write down feelings and observations using emotional syntax far more intimate and powerful than speech will allow.”

“Long looking at paintings is equivalent to being dropped into a foreign city, where gradually, out of desire and despair, a few key words, then a little syntax make a clearing in the silence. Art... is a foreign city, and we deceive ourselves when we think it familiar... We have to recognize that the language of art, all art, is not our mother-tongue.”