Wednesday, June 28, 2006

'Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.'


I've loved that sentence for some time. It's a hard relationship to be in love with language - she keeps changing and wearing different masks to the ball.
The following schematic is easily followed and is courtesy of Wikepedia, as is the following text:

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jump to: navigation, search

Approximate X-Bar representation of "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously." See Phrase structure rules."Colorless green ideas sleep furiously" is a sentence composed by Noam Chomsky in 1957 as an example of a sentence whose grammar is correct but whose meaning is nonsensical. It was used to show inadequacy of the then-popular probabilistic models of grammar, and the need for more structured models.

The full passage says:

(1) Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.
(2) Furiously sleep ideas green colorless.
It is fair to assume that neither sentence (1) nor (2) (nor indeed any part of these sentences) had ever occurred in an English discourse. Hence, in any statistical model for grammaticalness, these sentences will be ruled out on identical grounds as equally `remote' from English. Yet (1), though nonsensical, is grammatical, while (2) is not.

No comments: