Re: colorless green ideas

Andreas Johansson scripsit:

> Quoting Ray Brown <ray.brown@...>:
>
> > In view of the richness of our language and the wide use of metaphor
> > in 'ordinary' English (one doesn't have o resort to 'poetry'),
> > I wonder if it is, in fact, possible to produce a sentence using
> > standard English words in acceptable grammatically formed sentence
> > that is completely stupid from a semantic point of view. Now there's
> > a challenge  :)
>
> The easy solution would seem to be oxymorons: He's got a five-wheeled
> trike.
I think it would be worthwhile at this point to recall Chomsky's original
motive for constructing the CGISF sentence.  He was not directly concerned
with semantics at all: rather, he was refuting a false theory of syntax.

A behaviorist (I don't remember who) had proposed that syntax was
associational: in particular, that a sentence was grammatical if and only
if each pair of consecutive words had a high collocational frequency in
the known corpus of the language.  But by devising the CGISF sentence,
Chomsky showed that even though "colorless green", "green ideas",
"ideas sleep", and "sleep furiously" were all extremely rare if not
nonexistent collocations, the sentence as a whole was still grammatical.

Consequently, syntax had to be (broadly) generative: it had to have
the capability of constructing utterly novel sentences.

--
"You're a brave man! Go and break through the           John Cowan
lines, and remember while you're out there              jcowan@reutershealth.com
risking life and limb through shot and shell,           www.ccil.org/~cowan
we'll be in here thinking what a sucker you are!"       www.reutershealth.com
        --Rufus T. Firefly

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