QUOTATIONS FROM MY OFFICE DOOR

"Those of us who come from very stable and highly focused societies may find it difficult to distinguish stereotypes about "normal transmission" from the real facts about language use, variation, and change in use, since we are so accustomed to think in terms of idealized, reified, discrete systems; but it is essential to see all language questions in terms of activity between individuals as they form social groups, even in the most static and highly focused societies."
[Le Page, Robert B. 1992. "You can never tell where a word comes from": language contact in a diffuse setting. In Ernest Håkon Jahr (ed.) Language contact: Theoretical and empirical studies. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter, pp. 71-101 (p. 98).]

"Up until the time of the earliest vernacular grammars--in other words, up until the late fifteenth century--lingua or tongue or habla was less like one drawer in a bureau than one color in a spectrum. The comprehensibility of speech was comparable to the intensity of a color."
[Illich, Ivan, and Barry Sanders. 1988. ABC: The alphabetization of the popular mind. San Francisco: North Point Press.(pp. 62-3)]

"Moreover, I have tried, for reasons given in Le Page 1969, 1975b, to avoid the point of view which requires that every speech event must belong to a nameable language system. Rather, I regard it as a reflex of the total behavioral system of the person who utters it, interacting with the context in which it is uttered; each speech act is therefore the reflex of an 'instant pidgin', related to the linguistic competence of more than one person (unless one can envisage an utterly solipsist speaker-hearer)."
[Le Page, Robert. 1977. Processes of pidginization and creolization. In Albert Valdeman (ed.). Pidgin and creole linguistics. Bloomington IN: Indiana University Press, pp. 222-255. Pp. 222-23.]

"One is led to conclude that the notion of 'a language' is one whose applicability to the Pacific region, and in fact to most situations outside those found within modern European type nation-states, is extremely limited."
[Mühlhäusler, Peter. 1996. Linguistic ecology: Language change and linguistic imperialism in the Pacific region. London and New York: Routledge. (p. 7)]

"In science it is necessary to give priority to the evidence over traditional theory or a priori assumptions. If the evidence shows that any two people, or the same person at different times, are partly alike and partly different communicatively, and that any two groups are likewise partly alike and partly different, then we should have a theory that mirrors these observations, rather than one that reflects a uniformity that does not exist."
[Yngve, Victor H. 1986. Linguistics as a science. Bloomington IN: Indiana University Press. (p. 91)]

"If a standard language is to be subjected to generative analysis, the conscious human cultural artifacts which it contains must be eliminated from consideration. Otherwise the analysis will be as misleading as a geologist's attempt to deal with Mount Rushmore, Stonehenge, or St. Paul's Cathedral as if they were natural rock formations."
[Joseph, John Earl. 1987. Eloquence and power: The rise of language standards and standard languages. London: Frances Pinter. (p. 19)]

"I agree with Joseph that standardization dramatically affects the course of evolution of a variety in an unnatural way by deliberate human intervention, thus rendering standard languages as artificial objects. I use the term 'objects' here deliberately to emphasize even more their special ontological status (see Le Page and Tabouret-Keller 1985; and Popper's 1972 remarks on Third World objects). Because standard languages are taught in schools, their acquisition proceeds in a way which is nothing like that of natural languages."
[Romaine, Suzanne. 1989. Review of John E. Joseph, Eloquence and power: The rise of language standards and standard languages. Linguistics 27: 574-79 (p. 577).]

"How twentieth-century linguists managed to persuade themselves that they were analysing the spoken word by imposing the structure of the written word upon it is an intriguing topic, but one which cannot be pursued here."
[Harris, Roy. Language and speech, in Roy Harris (ed.). Approaches to language. Oxford et al: Pergamon Press. 1983, pp. 1-15. (p. 13)]

"To put the point epigrammatically, in human history it was the invention of writing that made speech speech and language language. For any literate society, there can be no going back to that primal innocence in which logos has a single manifestation, and rationality, language and speech are one. By the same token, there can be no future for a falsely naive linguistics which tries to pretend that somehow or other that fall from pre-literate grace had never occurred."
[Harris, Roy. Language and speech, in Roy Harris (ed.). Approaches to language. Oxford et al: Pergamon Press. 1983, pp. 1-15. (p. 15)]

"When I took the first survey of my undertaking, I found our speech copious without order, and energetick without rules: wherever I turned my view, there was perplexity to be disentangled, and confusion to be regulated; choice was to be made out of boundless variety, without any established principle of selection..."
[Samuel Johnson, Preface to the Dictionary.]

"Beginning in the seventeenth century, however, a correlation may be noted between (a) the tendency of a society to accelerate technical progress and to turn toward more modern forms of social organization, and (b) moves to control and order the structures of the language of that society in the direction of rationalization, standardization, simplification, specialization, and greater precision."
[Gallagher, Charles F. 1969. Language rationalization and scientific progress. In The Social reality of Scientific Myth, edited by Kalman H. Silvert. New York: American Universities Field Staff, Inc., pp. 58-87. (p. 60).]

"The view of prose as natural, which has commanded assent, is at odds with a set of facts that are undisputable. Literary scholarship is well aware that prose is not omnipresent. It has not always been present in all cultures, even in literate ones."
[Kittay, Jeffrey, and Wlad Godzich. 1987. The emergence of prose: an essay in prosaics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. (p. xi)]

"Li and Thompson (1976) have proposed a language typology which includes topic prominent language, in which noun phrases of a sentence are unordered and unmarked for case relations (e.g. Mandarin), and subject prominent languages, which are characterized by abstract grammatical markers of case relations or by strict word order (e.g. English). The comprehension of sentences of a topic prominent language often depends on semantic and speech contexts, whereas the comprehension of subject prominent sentences may be independent of context."
[Washabaugh, William. 1979. Linguistic anti-structure. Journal of Anthropological research 35: 30-46. (p. 38).]

"It may well be that scientific language is not meant to be read other than superficially. Everyone who has tried to teach Chomsky to the uncommitted must know the sense of difficulty they experience. Perhaps facility in reading language of this sort comes from an agreement to read the surface as though it were an untransformed realization of the underlying structure--as we mentioned at the beginning of the chapter; and part of learning to be a scientist is precisely about this. It does involve accepting an unreal world where principles construct sentences, where investigations have goals, and sincerity might well play golf."
[Kress, Gunther, and Robert Hodge. 1979. Language as Ideology. London, Boston and Henley: Routledge & Kegan Paul. p. 31]

"The subject matter commonly called Semantics thus lies in a "middle" range of meaning. It is more specific and concrete than the subject matter called Syntax, whose meanings are so abstract that we do not comprehend them consciously, and thus rarely consider them meanings at all. On the other hand, Semantics is more general and abstract than the subject matter called Pragmatics, which can be highly complex, various and specific, and which may seem not to be meaning at all, but rather merely "what is"."
[Ruhl, Charles. 1989. On monosemy: A study in linguistic semantics. Albany NY: State University of New York Press. (p.130).]

"A ...shortcoming of modern work ... is the sharp emphasis on separating components (e.g., syntactic, semantic, pragmatic) and attempting to study the grammatical or meaning structure of expressions independently of their function in building up discourse, and independently of their use in reasoning and communication. In fact, discourse configurations are highly organized and complex within wider social and cultural contexts, and the raison d'être of grammatical constructions and the words within them is to provide us with (imperfect) clues as to what discourse configurations to set up."
[Fauconnier, Gilles. 1997. Mappings in Thought and Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, (p.5).]

"From the foregoing remarks it is already self-evident that by the form of language we are by no means alluding merely to the so-called grammatical form. The distinction we are accustomed to draw between grammar and vocabulary can serve only for the practical purpose of learning a language; it can lay down neither limits nor rules for true linguistic research."
[Wilhelm von Humboldt. 1988 [1836]. On language: The diversity of human language-structure and its influence on the mental development of mankind. Translated by Peter Heath. Cambridge, etc.: Cambridge University Press. (p. 51)].

"To summarize, theories of competence grammar have excluded various aspects of language use in pursuit of more fundamental generalizations. Facts about language use are explained in terms of abstract, domain-specific knowledge structures that are remotely related to the child's experience. Language therefore gives the appearance of being unlearnable and unrelated to other aspects of cognition. More recent studies suggest that acquisition and processing are driven by exactly the kinds of information that competence grammar has traditionally excluded."
[Seidenberg, Mark S. 1997. Language acquisition and use: Learning and applying probabilistic constraints. Science 275: 1599-1603. p. 1601]

"Learning to talk is learning to act. The actions constituting speech are continuous with such performances as manipulating, crawling, or walking. But the deeds that are speech share the additional character of being social actions, ones bound by custom. The child must master these various customs.
"Acquiring a first language is straightforwardly a matter of acculturation, the coming to a command of various convention-governed ways of interacting, So the proper discipline for studying first language, and through that, language use in general, is cultural anthropology."
[Canfield, John V. 1993. The living language: Wittgenstein and the empirical study of communication. Language Sciences 15: 165-93.(pp. 172-73)]

Other, quite commonplace, observations also stand in the way of any simply equation of understanding with interpreting. Consider an ambiguous utterance: I dislike playing cards, for example. Encouraged to take it as an example of an ambiguous utterance (which means, in particular, not being given any context for it), you will hear it first as one sentence, then as another--suddenly. Did you interpret it one way and then in another? Did you decide to interpret it one way and then the other? Could you choose which way you interpreted it first? If I said to you I don't mind playing chess. I dislike playing cards would there be any doubt as to what you would hear?

The situation is analogous to that in which one looks at an ambiguous figure like the Necker cube or Wittgenstein's 'duck-rabbit'. First one sees it one way and then the other--suddenly. When the figure is placed in a context of objects seen from above, or rabbits, I see only a cube looked at from above, only a rabbit.
[Thorne, J.P. 1966. On hearing sentences. In J. Lyons and R.J. Wales (eds.) Psycholinguistic papers: The proceedings of the 1966 Edinburgh Conference. Edinburgh University Press, pp. 3-10. (p.5)]

Because we can produce such comprehensive and precise statements of our knowledge of linguistic structure it becomes difficult for us not to think of the process of understanding utterances as involving the use of this knowledge. Even more dangerous, it becomes difficult not to think of it actually involving the use of these statements. Hence the perceptual process appears an instantaneous intellectual process. Linguists, in particular, are apt to talk about understanding an utterance as if it were like running through the analysis of an example in a linguistics textbook at top speed.
[ibid. (p. 9)]

[The quotation below is the only sign I've seen of "Creationists" attempting to appeal to Chomsky's views as support for their position. I've always wondered why they didn't rush to advertise his views. I don't know of Chomsky's ever having expressed himself directly on creationism, but Steven Pinker (The language instinct. P. 355) denies that he's a "crypto-creationist", and I know of no reason to doubt that he knows whereof he speaks.]

"We submit that a transformational linguist's innatism has significant features consonant with a creationist view in terms of (1) a distinction of man from primates with respect to (at least) one qualitatively different mental organ and, consequently, (2) its consistency as an account of man's unique possession of an instrument for the expression of abstract thought."
[Wilson, Clifford A. and Donald W. McKeon (with a response by Marvin Keene Mayers). c1984. The Language gap. Grand Rapids MI: Dallas TX: Zondervan Pub. House ; Probe Ministries International. (p. 166)]

Very slowly, during this period of time, these new facts initiated a frame change in my own thinking about language. I had always been interested in Uriel Weinreich's observation that, "Language is its own metalanguage." But after frame change, I knew that, as a metalanguage, English, at least, was its own worst enemy. And I knew that there was something more than mysticism to Whorf's ideas. At this point, curiously enough, when everything seemed to fall into place for me, it became harder to talk to others about the new facts. For now I was speaking across the chasm of frame conflict.

I mention these things because I want to suggest at the outset that the discussion that follows is a marvelous opportunity for one of those failures to communicate which we are concerned to prevent. It is a little bit like the joke about Whorf. If I am right in what I believe about frames, then it may well be difficult to convince you, because the frames I am talking about exist in you and will resist the change. For my part, in writing this, I have made strenuous efforts to remember what it was like before I shifted frames, and how long it took before the "new facts" made sense to me. At the same time, I should like to request that you, on your side, make yourselves receptive to what may be a serious alteration of consciousness.
[Reddy, Michael J. 1979. The conduit metaphor: A case of frame conflict in our language about language. In Andrew Ortony (ed.). Metaphor and Thought. Cambridge: CUP, pp. 284-324. (p. 286)]

"The usual situation in language is that an interpretation of a sentence differs from what is determined by syntax and lexical meaning."
[Ruhl, Charles. 1989. On monosemy: A study in linguistic semantics. Albany NY: State University of New York Press. P. 33.]

"Although Chomsky does not recognize it linguistics seems to be in a similar position to political analysis in that academic linguistics cannot help but reflect and reproduce the prejudices, preconceptions, and ideologies of our culture..."
[Davis, Hayley G. 1990. Introduction. In Hayley G. Davis and Talbot J. Taylor (eds.) Redefining linguistics. London and New York: Routledge. p. 10]

"The view of prose as natural, which has commanded assent, is at odds with a set of facts that are undisputable. Literary scholarship is well aware that prose is not omnipresent. It has not always been present in all cultures, even in literate ones."
[Kittay, Jeffrey, and Wlad Godzich. 1987. The emergence of prose: an essay in prosaics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. p. xi]

"Descriptive linguistics is just another way of doing normative linguistics, and an ideologically deceptive one at that. If, in language, our situation is one in which there is no escape from the mechanisms of power, then it is better that we be aware of our situation."
[Taylor, Talbot J. 1990. Which is to be master? The institutionalization of authority in the science of language. In John E. Joseph & Talbot J. Taylor (eds.). Ideologies of language. London and New York: Routledge. p. 25]

"In effect, one does not translate LANGUAGES, one translates CULTURES. Ethnography may, in fact, be thought of as a form of translation. That it is possible to translate one language into another at all attests to the universalities in culture, to common vicissitudes of human life, and to the like capabilities of men throughout the earth, as well as to the inherent nature of language and the character of the communication process itself; and, a cynic might add, to the arrogance of the translator."
[Casagrande, Joseph B. The ends of translation. IJAL 20:335-40, 1954. (p. 338).]

"We must not be misled by the fact that, as we have already noted, high-contact situations have, in the last few centuries, become much more common than low-contact situations -- we must not be misled into thinking that they are more important. It may be that it is not really that Caucasian consonant systems are genuinely linguistically abnormal, but rather that, these days, low-contact situations are unusual."
[Trudgill, Peter. 1989. Contact and isolation in linguistic change. In Leiv Egil Breivik and Ernst Håkon Jahr (eds.) Language change: Contributions to the study of its causes. Trends in linguistics, studies and monographs, 43, pp. 227-37. (p. 236).]

"But the fact remains: You can't use a new language unless you change the consciousness that is tied to the old one, unless you stretch beyond the circle of grammar and dictionary, out of the old world and into a new one. And Americans are famous for thinking they've got the best consciousness around."
[Agar, Michael. 1994. Language Shock: Understanding the culture of conversation. New York: William Morrow and Co. (p. 22).]

"The most important vehicle of reality-maintenance is conversation... It is important to stress, however, that the greater part of reality-maintenance in conversation is implicit, not explicit. Most conversation does not in so many words define the nature of the world. Rather, it takes place against the background of a world that is silently taken for granted. Thus, an example such as, 'Well, it's time for me to get to the station,' and 'Fine, darling, have a good day at the office' implies an entire world within which these apparently simple propositions make sense. By virtue of this implication the exchange confirms the subjective reality of this world."
[Berger, Peter L., and Thomas Luckmann. 1966. The social construction of reality: A treatise in the sociology of knowledge. Anchor Books. Garden City NY: Doubleday & Co. (pp. 52-3)]

"A pointer here is provided by the apparent willingness of the educated European to entertain certain rather remarkable propositions concerning languages. For example, among the most remarkable is the proposition that languages are translatable. In no way is this something which could plausibly be said to be intuitively obvious."
[Harris, Roy. 1980. The Language-Makers. Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press. (p. 4)]

"As is well known, systematicity has implications for translation. Translation from one language into another is at best approximate. A translation may inescapably fail to transfer correctly the division between what is said and not said, or between what is assumed and asserted: that is, it may run afoul of different semantic-pragmatic divisions in the two languages."
[Ruhl, Charles. 1989. On monosemy: A study in linguistic semantics. Albany NY: State University of New York Press. (p.9).]

"Western culture has made, through language, a provisional analysis of reality and, without correctives, holds resolutely to that analysis as final. The only correctives lie in all those other tongues which by aeons of independent evolution have arrived at different, but equally logical, provisional analyses."
[Whorf, Benjamin Lee. 1941. Languages and logic. (Originally published in The Technology Review 43 (6)). Reprinted in John B. Carroll (ed.). Language, thought, and reality: Selected writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf. London/New York: John Wiley and Sons and the Technology Press. (p.244).]

"Once on an adult camping trip he [sc. Gregory Bateson] asked about the current state of thinking on what is called the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, the hypothesis that there is a causal link between thought and language, so that the patterns of thought of speakers of different languages differ. 'I suppose,' he said, 'that it's one of those things that cannot not be true.' I agreed but pointed out that efforts to prove it were unsatisfying. 'Get it said right,' he said, 'and then it will be self-evident.'"
[Bateson, Mary Catherine. 1984. With a daughter's eye: A memoir of Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson. New York: Morrow (pp. 221-22)]

"One reason, or rather one explanation of why languages differ is that speech communities differ with respect to the ways they use their language(s) and the communicative functions that languages fulfill."
[Coulmas, Florian (ed.). 1989. Language adaptation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (p. 2)]

"Novel linguistic structures have recently emerged in Chinese in response to Western pressure in order to close a translation gap between Chinese and Western languages. A certain number of such structures have gained currency; but their use still remains far from freely productive."
[Bloom, Alfred H. 1981. The linguistic shaping of thought: A study of the impact of language on thinking in China and the West. Hillsdale NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. (p. 44).]

"The finite sentence as the basic unit of Japanese texts, Yanabu contends, is really a result of the enormous amount of translations of Western books accompanying the opening of Japan to the West in the nineteenth century."
[Coulmas, Florian (ed.). 1989. Language adaptation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (p. 18)]

"The Turkish case is instructive because the Turks were the first non-Western people to become fully aware of protomodern European technical and scientific capacities as early as the first half of the eighteenth century. They were the first Asian society to grasp the idea that internal language backwardness was related to technical lag, and to talk openly of basic structural reform rather than of mere surface refurbishment. The thoroughgoing nature of the Turkish reforms is shown by the fact that, even putting aside the romanization of the script, Ottoman Turkish texts of around 1900 are essentially unrecognizable foreign documents to the modern Turk."
[Gallagher, Charles F. 1969. Language rationalization and scientific progress. In The Social reality of Scientific Myth, edited by Kalman H. Silvert. New York: American Universities Field Staff, Inc., pp. 58-87. (p. 65.)]

"Le Page's terms focused and diffuse require some discussion. Le Page and Tabouret-Keller have pointed out (1985) that speech communities, and therefore language varieties, vary from the relatively focused to the relatively diffuse. The better-known European languages tend to be of the focused type: the language is felt to be clearly distinct from other languages; its 'boundaries' are clearly delineated; and members of the speech community show a high level of agreement as to what does and does not constitute 'the language'. In other parts of the world, however, this may not be so at all, and we may have instead a relatively diffuse situation: speakers may have no very clear idea about what language they are speaking; and what does and does not constitute the language will be perceived as an issue of no great importance."
[Trudgill, Peter. 1986. Dialects in contact. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. (pp. 85-86)]

"The hardest thing to do in Burma or Java or any place foreign is to know when something somebody has told you is original with that person or has a past in that culture which everyone there would recognize. Prior text is the real a priori of language, not some logical deep structure or anything like that. Prior text is the real source, the real a priori of speaking, in the view that I'm trying to develop here."
[Becker, A. L. 1988. Language in particular: A lecture. In Deborah Tannen (ed.). Linguistics in context: Connecting observations and understanding. (Vol. XXIX in Advances in Discourse Processes, ed. by Roy O. Freedle). Norwood NJ: Ablex Publishing Corporation, pp. 17-35. p. 26]

"Grammar in the Port-Royal sense (and in the sense of most linguistic discussion of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries) is not conceived as a structure immanent in a language, nor as a set of rules which themselves constitute a language. Grammar studies the art of successful communication, of speaking in such a way that thought is fully and clearly expressed by the form of expression chosen. Grammar, therefore, is the study of an activity, not of a system (of rules, words, or sentences)."
[Harris, Roy and Talbot J. Taylor (eds.). Landmarks in linguistic thought. Routledge. 1989. (p. 99).]

"But if a language is treated, not as the communal property of a group, but as the psychological possession of an individual, then since the linguistic experience of every individual is unique, we may expect the language (the I-language) that he possesses to be at least slightly different from that of every other individual. And if no two speakers have exactly the same system, then clearly, no ready-made answer to the question how communication is possible is to be had by referring to shared possession of the system. Hence a tendency to play down the role of an account of communication in shaping a linguistic theory."
[Love, Nigel. 1990. The locus of languages in a redefined linguistics. In Hayley G. Davis and Talbot J. Taylor (eds.) Redefining linguistics. London and New York: Routledge, pp. 53-117. p.84]

"The number of memorized complete clauses and sentences known to the mature English speaker is probably many thousands. Much more numerous still, however, is a class of phraseological expressions each of which is something less than a completely specified clause."
[Pawley, Andrew and Frances H. Syder. 1983. Two puzzles for linguistic theory: Nativelike selection and nativelike fluency. In Jack C. Richards and Richard W. Schmidt (eds.). Language and communication. London: Longman, pp. 191-225. p. 205]

"The most fundamental change is in the view of what language is and how it is organised. In order to make sense of speech formulas it is necessary to regard a language as a collection of ways of talking about things...., expressing ideas (old and new) in a manner that is conventional (grammatical, idiomatic, etc.)."
[Pawley, Andrew. 1985. On speech formulas and linguistic competence. Lenguas Modernas 12: 84-104 (p. 102).]

"Perhaps it will not be too long before it will be acceptable to argue that once we have a coherent theory of change governing the evolution of developing systems, we would not need a theory of grammar."
[Suzanne Romaine. 1988. Contributions from pidgin and creole studies to a sociolinguistic theory of language change. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 71: 59-66. p. 66]

"Oral discourse, and thought too, are orders of schemata to which grammatical conventions are attached. Grammar is an optional add-on."
[Tyler, Stephen A. 1987. The unspeakable: Discourse, dialogue, and rhetoric in the postmodern world. The University of Wisconsin Press. (p. 106).]

"[I]n knowing how to use their language, speakers know how to create and recognize associations between semantically interpreted sentences and particular types of situations."
[Fillmore, Charles J., Paul Kay, and Mary Catherine O'Connor. 1988. Regularity and idiomaticity in grammatical constructions: The case of let alone. Lg. 64: 501-38 (p. 502).]

"If pragmatics includes both semantics and syntax, the distinction introduced in earlier years as an a priori programmatic partitioning of the domain of study may no longer be necessary. A restructuring may be possible and appropriate. Human linguistics is that restructuring: it moves the treatment of all the phenomena over from the logical side of the barrier to the physical side. Thus human linguistics can be viewed as pragmatics freed from any ties to signs, language, and grammar."
[Yngve, Victor H. 1986. Linguistics as a science. Bloomington IN: Indiana University Press. (p. 101).]

"Contrary to received wisdom (e.g. Moravcsik 1978, Thomason & Kaufman 1988: 21), it is not the case that substantial borrowing always precedes other kinds of contact-induced change. Conversely, extensive borrowing may occur without widespread bilingual contact, as in the cases of modern Japanese (from English) (Thomason & Kaufman 1976: 169) and Middle English (from French) (Thomason & Kaufman 1988: 314-15). Thus although lexical borrowing and other kinds of contact-induced change may occur simultaneously, they are separate phenomena. In cases where the emblematic function of the lexicon is particularly significant, lexical borrowing is especially limited (as Gumperz and Wilson 1971 observe)."
[Ross, Malcolm D. 1996. Contact-induced change and the comparative method : Cases from Papua New Guinea. In Mark Durie and Malcolm Ross (eds.). The comparative method reviewed: Regularity and irregularity in language change. New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996, pp. 180-217. pp. 209-210]

"As far as strictly linguistic possibilities go, any linguistic feature can be transferred from any language to any other language; and the implicational universals that depend solely on linguistic properties are similarly invalid. This assertion flatly contradicts most older views on the subject and some newer ones as well, but solid evidence has been available and in print for many years."
[Thomason, Sarah Grey, and Terrence Kaufman. 1988. Language contact, creolization, and genetic linguistics. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press. P14.]

"I do not believe that anyone will ever be able to represent a language well if he does not disabuse himself of the striving for a complete system, for every language is more or less a ruin, in which the plan of the architect cannot be discovered, until one has learned to supply from other works by the same hand what is missing in order to grasp the original design. Every attentive student of a language will grant me this, and then he will also have to condemn the way in which in this country people have endeavoured to find a strict system in such language ruins as Javanese and Malay."
[Van der Tuuk, H. N. 1971. A grammar of Toba Batak [A translation by Jeune Scott-Kemball of Tabasche Spraakunst (1864/1867)]. Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde, Translation Series 13. The Hague: Martinuc Nijhoff (xliii)]

"… ask yourself whether our language is complete;-- whether it was so before the symbolism of chemistry and the notation of the infinitesimal calculus were incorporated in it; for these are, so to speak, suburbs of our language. (And how many houses or streets does it take before a town begins to be a town?) Our language can be seen as an ancient city: a maze of little streets and squares, of old and new houses, and of houses with additions from various periods; and this surrounded by a multitude of new boroughs with straight regular streets and uniform houses."
[Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1958. Philosophical investigations. Translated by G. E. M. Anscombe. 2nd Ed. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. (no. 18, p. 8e).]

"There is also a possibility that the phonetic detail rules can be eliminated or simplified if, instead of working out the phonetic details for each segment in each relevant context, a general account of the "basis of articulation" in the language can do that once and for all."
[Fillmore, Charles J. Lexical semantics and text semantics. In James E. Copeland, ed., New directions in linguistics and semiotics, 1984 (p. 130).]

"In order to understand what another person is saying, you must assume it is true and try to imagine what it could be true of. "
[George Miller [quoted by Keith H. Basso, Cultural Anthropology 3: 107, 1988]]

"That the evolution of a defensible concept of literal meaning should be long and difficult runs counter to both our commonsensical assumptions and our current cognitive theories."
[Olson, David R. 1994. The world on paper: The conceptual and cognitive implications of writing and reading. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (p. 156).]

"Bloomfield states (1933: 29): 'A group of people who use the same system of speech-signals is a speech community.' This means essentially that the members of such a community have a shared grammar. On the other hand, he also says (1933: 42): 'A speech community is a group of people who interact by means of speech.' These definitions are not equivalent."
[Silverstein, Michael. 1972. Chinook Jargon: Language contact and the problem of multi-level generative systems, II. Lg. 48:596-625. (p. 623)]

"Man is a creature who lives not by bread alone, but principally by catchwords."
[(R.L. Stevenson, Virginibus Puerisque (Part II), 1881), quoted by Eric Partridge, A dictionary of catch phrases, 2nd edition. London, etc." Routledge & Kegan Paul. p. x]

"If a language is to be a means of communication there must be agreement not only in the definitions but also (queer as this may sound) in judgments."
[Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1958. Philosophical investigations. (Transl. by G.E.M. Anscombe). Oxford: Basil Blackwell (88e).]

"Whorf considered that socially generated and sustained patterns of language use become physically entrenched in cognition and in doing so condition physiological (including neurological) structures, processes, or associated energy fields and bring about adjustments to the overall patterning of mental behavior. He did not claim that all conceptual activity is linguistic in origin or character nor did he claim that the sole function of language is to facilitate conceptual activity. He did, however, claim that it is the species specific ability to talk that characterizes what is distinctive about human cognition."
[Penny Lee. 1996. The Whorf theory complex: A critical reconstruction. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. (pp. 30-31 {as quoted in a review by John E. Joseph, Lg 74 (1998): 634-36 (p. 634). }]