“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

Source: "A synopsis of linguistic theory 1930-1955." 1957, p. 20

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John Rupert Firth14
English linguist 1890–1960

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