Language has a creative character: it is typically innovative without bounds, appropriate to circumstance but not caused by them – a crucial distinction – and can engender thoughts in others that they recognise they could have expressed themselves.

It is, indeed, virtual dogma that the function of language is communication.

If you're teaching, say, physics, there's no point in persuading a student that you're right. You want to encourage them to find out what the truth is, which is probably that you're wrong.

Languages are not tools that humans design but biological objects, like the visual or immune or digestive system.

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.