"There is always the danger that the use of traditional grammatical terms with reference to a wide variety of languages may be taken to imply a secret belief in universal grammar. Every analysis of a particular ‘language’ must of necessity determine the values of the ad hoc categories to which traditional names are given. What is here being sketched is a general linguistic theory applicable to particular linguistic descriptions, not a theory of universals for general linguistic description."

“Collocations are actual words in habitual company. A word in a usual collocation stares you in the face just as it is. Colligations cannot be of words as such. Colligations of grammatical categories related in a grammatical structure do not necessarily follow word divisions or even sub-divisions of words.”

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

“In English we have noticed twenty-five consonant and about twenty vowel phonemes. Although individual pronunciations may differ, the phonemic habits of the same group or class will be similar. They will make similar use of. Words not phonetically separated — that is,s — may be separated by function or by experiential context”

“You shall know a word by the company it keeps.”

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

“The study of such words as work, labour, trade, employ, occupy, play, leisure, time, hours, means, self-respect, in all their derivatives and compounds in sociologically significant contexts during the last twenty years would be quite enlightening. So would the study of words particularly associated with the dress, occupations, and ambitions of women, or the language of advertising, especially of quackery, entertainments, food, drink, or of political movements and propaganda.”