Famous quotes containing the words function and/or defined:
“We are thus able to distinguish thinking as the function which is to a large extent linguistic.”
—Benjamin Lee Whorf (1897–1934)
“There is no such thing as a language, not if a language is anything like what many philosophers and linguists have supposed. There is therefore no such thing to be learned, mastered, or born with. We must give up the idea of a clearly defined shared structure which language-users acquire and then apply to cases.”
—Donald Davidson (b. 1917)