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The various structures of sentences in any given language, comprising for example at least two nominal pieces and a verbal piece must be collated, and such categories as voice, mood, affirmative, negative, tense, aspect, gender, number, person and case, if found applicable and valid in descriptive statement, are to be abstracted from, and referred back to the sentence as a whole.

— 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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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.