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It is not easy to determine what are the units of speech. Some would say speech sounds, others phonemes... The general opinion is, however, that words, not phones or phonemes or phoneme systems, are the units of speech.

— John Rupert Firth

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More quotes by John Rupert Firth

The complete meaning of a word is always contextual, and no study of meaning apart from context can be taken seriously.

A western scholar must de-europeanize himself, and, in view of the most universal use of English, an Englishman must de-Anglicize himself as well.

J. R. Firth (1956)

The phonetic animal par excellence is man. All men are born with an infinite capacity for making noises and using them.

Research into the detailed contextual distribution of sociologically important words, what one might call focal or pivotal words, is only just beginning.

You shall know a word by the company it keeps.

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Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man.

Francis Bacon Meditationes sacræ (1597)

Strength of creative writing lies in the skill of handling words and articulating artistic expression of feelings.”

Suman Pokhrel

The free-lance writer is a man who is paid per piece or per word or perhaps.

Robert Benchley

Three sleepless nights I passed in sounding on,
Through words and things, a dim and perilous way.

William Wordsworth Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed (1919)

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: John Rupert Firth (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.