Grammar Quotes - Page 11

• UG [universal grammar] may be regarded as a characterization of the genetically determined language faculty. One may think of thisfaculty 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.

  Noam Chomsky

  Thinking, Yield, Mind

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• 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.

  Benjamin Lee Whorf

  Passive Voice, Nouns, Adjectives

  Benjamin Lee Whorf, John B. Carroll, Stephen C. Levinson, Penny Lee (2012). “Language, Thought, and Reality: Selected Writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf”, p.113, MIT Press

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• A writer who can't write in a grammerly manner better shut up shop.

  Artemas Ward

  Writing, Shut Up, Shops

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• 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.

  Noam Chomsky

  Language, Interpretation, Surface

  Noam Chomsky (2014). “Aspects of the Theory of Syntax”, p.15, MIT Press

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• You always end up with too much, so it's good to be part of the conversation about not just what you can omit, but how you are going to do the grammar of the omission, how you make things continue to work when there's something missing. It's your last chance to rewrite.

  Tom Stoppard

  Omission, Missing, Too Much

  Source: deadline.com

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• There was this wonderful day where we sat and listened to all of Andy's [Kim] songs throughout the years, and I think we spent around six hours at my house, and then we played all these tunes of mine that have never found any version. And "Heaven Without a Gun" is one of them, and it struck him. If you can find a compadre who doesn't live in the literal world 'cos you're not always fighting to explain yourself to make sense, that maybe it's the dyslexia, maybe it's the dreamer, maybe it's the idea that grammar was not your foreplay - excuse me - see what I mean, your forte.

  Kevin Drew

  Song, Mean, Fighting

  Source: www.popmatters.com

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• India was China's teacher in religion and imaginative literature, and the world's teacher in trignometry, quandratic equations, grammar, phonetics, Arabian Nights, animal fables, chess, as well as in philosophy, and that she inspired Boccaccio, Goethe, Herder, Schopenhauer, Emerson, and probably also old Aesop.

  Lin Yutang

  Teacher, Philosophy, Animal

  "The wisdom of China and India". Book by Lin Yutang, p. 3-4, 1942.

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• My mother was a schoolteacher and very keen that I go to a city school, so although it was fairly impoverished times, I traveled every day to the Auckland Grammar School.

  Edmund Hillary

  Mother, School, Cities

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• The sculptor, and the painter also, should be trained in these liberal arts: grammar, geometry, philosophy, medicine, astronomy, perspective, history, anatomy, theory of design, arithmetic.

  Lorenzo Ghiberti

  Art, Philosophy, Medicine

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• The speaker does not feel the grammatical rules he is said to apply in composing sentences, and men spoke grammatically for thousands of years before anyone knew there were rules.

  B. F. Skinner

  Men, Years, Doe

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• I like commas. I detest semi-colons — I don’t think they belong in a story. And I gave up quotation marks long ago. I found I didn’t need them, they were fly-specks on the page.

  E. L. Doctorow

  Thinking, Long Ago, Needs

  "EL Doctorow: 'I don't have a style, but the books do'" by Sarah Crown, www.theguardian.com. January 22, 2010.

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• Considering the multitude of mortals that handle the pen in these days, and can mostly spell, and write without glaring violations of grammar, the question naturally arises: How is it, then, that no work proceeds from them, bearing any stamp of authenticity and permanence; of worth for more than one day?

  Thomas Carlyle

  Writing, One Day, Authenticity

  Thomas Carlyle (1872). “Works”, p.63

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• No matter what any of the grammar teachers say, punctuation is an arbitrary matter. It should be used to make sentences clear.

  Andy Rooney

  Teacher, Arbitrary, Matter

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• The violent illiteracies of the graffiti, the clenched silence of the adolescent, the nonsense cries from the stage-happening, are resolutely strategic. The insurgent and the freak-out have broken off discourse with a cultural system which they despise as a cruel, antiquated fraud. They will not bandy words with it. Accept, even momentarily, the conventions of literate linguistic exchange, and you are caught in the net of the old values, of the grammars that can condescend or enslave.

  George Steiner

  Broken, Silence, Society

  George Steiner (1987). “George Steiner: A Reader”, p.432, Oxford University Press on Demand

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• There's no reason why you can't deliver a grammar-school curriculum to an all-ability intake.

  Toby Young

  School, Curriculum, Reason Why

  "Can Toby Young's free school succeed?". Interview with Peter Wilby, www.theguardian.com. April 5, 2011.

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• Maybe this will be the beginning of a trend? Flat taxes, cutting foreign aid, a referendum on Europe, grammar schools. Who knows?

  Nigel Farage

  School, Cutting, Europe

  "Theresa May accused of lifting cat anecdote from Ukip leader" by Patrick Wintour, www.theguardian.com. October 7, 2011.

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• In the most basic way, writers are defined not by the stories they tell, or their politics, or their gender, or their race, but by the words they use. Writing begins with language, and it is in that initial choosing, as one sifts through the wayward lushness of our wonderful mongrel English, that choice of vocabulary and grammar and tone, the selection on the palette, that determines who's sitting at that desk. Language creates the writer's attitude toward the particular story he's decided to tell.

  Donald E. Westlake

  Attitude, Writing, Vocabulary

  Donald E. Westlake (2014). “The Getaway Car: A Donald Westlake Nonfiction Miscellany”, p.28, University of Chicago Press

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• Must you write complete sentences each time, every time? Perish the thought. If your work consists only of fragments and floating clauses, the Grammar Police aren't going to come and take you away. Even William Strunk, that Mussolini of rhetoric, recognized the delicious pliability of language. "It is an old observation," he writes, "that the best writers sometimes disregard the rules of rhetoric." Yet he goes on to add this thought, which I urge you to consider: "Unless he is certain of doing well, [the writer] will probably do best to follow the rules."

  Stephen King

  Writing, Police, Add

  Stephen King (2002). “On Writing”, p.113, Simon and Schuster

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• I am of the firm belief that everybody could write books and I never understand why they don't. After all, everybody speaks. Once the grammar has been learnt it is simply talking on paper and in time learning what not to say.

  Beryl Bainbridge

  Book, Writing, Talking

  1976 In D L Kirkpatrick (ed) Contemporary Novelists.

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• I suppose you could switch grammars once you've seen 'use strict subs'.

  Larry Wall

  Use, Strict

  Usenet postings, 1998.

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• Cut in dressmaking is like grammar in language. A good design should be like a well made sentence and it should only express one idea at a time.

  Charles James

  Cutting, Ideas, Design

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• George Moore wrote brilliant English until he discovered grammar.

  Oscar Wilde

  Writing, Brilliant

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• I got into trouble a while ago for saying that I thought the internet led to increased literacy - people scolded me about the shocking grammar to be found online - but I was talking about fundamentals: quite simply, you can't use the net unless you can read.

  Margaret Atwood

  Talking, Simply You, People

  "Margaret Atwood: why Wattpad works" by Margaret Atwood, www.theguardian.com. July 6, 2012.

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• What’s strange is how many beginning writers seem to think that grammar is irrelevant, or that they are somehow above or beyond this subject more fit for a schoolchild than the future author of great literature.

  Francine Prose

  Thinking, Literature, Strange

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• Grammar school never taught me anything about grammar.

  Isaac Goldberg

  School, Taught, Grammar School

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