Michel Bréal Quotes

8 Sourced Quotes

We define law, using the word in the philosophic sense, as the constant relation discoverable in a series of phenomena.

Michel Bréal
Historical grammar is now in a position to confirm or to refute.

Michel Bréal
We must realize the extent to which it is necessary that our knowledge of language be based on history. Only history can impart to words that degree of precision which we need in order to understand them well.

Michel Bréal
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.

Michel Bréal
In modern society, the meaning of words changes much more quickly than it did in antiquity or even in the recent past. This arises from the intermingling of social classes, the struggle of interests and opinions, the struggle of political parties and the variety of aspirations and tastes.

Michel Bréal
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
Sometimes is a synonym which extends itself, and contrasts by just much the domain of its colleague. At other times it is an historical event which comes to modify and renew the vocabulary.

Michel Bréal
In that second part we propose to investigate how it happens that words, once created and endowed with a certain meaning, extend that meaning or contract it, transfer it from one group of notions on to another, raise its value or lower it, in a word — bring about changes. It is this second part that constitutes semantics, i.e. science of meaning.

Michel Bréal