Michel Bréal: Generation

Michel Bréal was French philologist. Explore interesting quotes on generation.

Michel Bréal: 20 quotes10 likes

“My intention was to give a general outline, to sketch a general division and, as it were, a provisional plan of a domain that has not been studied so far and which should be the result of work for many generations of linguists. The reader is therefore requested to consider this book a simple introduction to the science which I propose to call semantics.”

Source: Essai de semantique, 1897, p. 9 ; as cited in: Schaff (1962:3).

“There is a constant succession of books on the subject of comparative grammar, for the use both of students and of the general public; yet it does not seem that we are offered what we really need. Language is full of lessons for those who know how to question it. Through all the centuries humanity has deposited in Language the acquisitions of material and moral life. But it must be approached from the side on which it appeals to the mind. If we limit ourselves to the changes of vowels and consonants, the study is reduced to the proportions of a merely secondary branch of acoustics and physiology; if we think it enough to enumerate the losses undergone *by the machinery of grammar, we give the impression of a building that is falling into ruins; if we confine ourselves to vague theories on the origin of Language, we merely add an unprofitable chapter to the history of systems.”

Source: Essai de semantique, 1897, p. 1; lead paragraph

“There is another kind of studies which distinguished from the sometimes opposed to comparative grammar. It is known under the name of general or philosophical grammar, whose principles and observations were articulated by Port Royal and which deals with the relation of the form of language to the operations of the mind.”

Michel Bréal (1886), cited in Jacek Juliusz Jadacki, Witold Strawiński. In the World of Signs: Essays in Honour of Professor Jerzy Pelc. 1998, p. 255