"Colorless green ideas sleep furiously." This sentence was invented by Noam Chomsky as an example of a sentence whose grammar is correct but for which the semantics are nonsense.
Afair he invented it to shop sentence, which grammar was correct, but
probablity of appearance of every word after its precedensor was almost zero,
and it had nothing to do with semantics, but with criticizing some probablity-based theories
of language.
Oh boy. I had remembered it as intending to show that the function of a word was dictated by its position in a sentence. For instance, that in English, adjectives come before nouns and adverbs come after verbs.
Wasn't the "word placement dictates function" sentence composed of nonsense words to emphasize the point? The one I learned was "The gostak distims the doshes". Despite the nonsense, an English speaker is able to determine that something called a gostak is currently performing an action called "distimming" to multiple instances of some other thing called a dosh. I'm pretty sure this predates Chomsky too. --
PaulDrye
I don't know. My recollection of Chomsky and syntax was that Chomsky took it a step further with some complex formula (supposedly?) showing the universal syntax of language. Yes, universal, as in all languages. Reading it I quickly got over my head, but it seemed that that was no less than his claim. Probably a question for
Jan Hidders, who knows about such things. :-) --
KQ
You may be thinking of the
Chomsky hierarchy. There's a link to it from the
Noam Chomsky page. He proved mathematically that every partially decidable language has a type-0 grammar. That's pretty universal.
But, this uses a very mathematical definition of "language" and "grammar". It may not be relevant to human spoken languages. The set of valid sentences that can be spoken by a human with bounded lifespan and talking speed is just a "finite language". This can be generated by a very boring kind of type-3 grammar. That "grammar" is just a simple list of all valid sentences. That doesn't say anything about the structure of the language. -LC
Thanks. --KQ
Chomsky's linguistics ideas have resulted in the insult: "Chomsky is the Freud of linguistics". This insult derives from the notion that Chomsky and Freud both completely ignored the scientific method in creating their "theories".
I guess NPOV has changed in definition to mean "we completely ignore things". Well, that's peachy. GregLindahl
HJH: Well before qualifiying the linguistic theory of Chomsky it should be stated first. Then you might come up with other peoples views. And possibly give some evidence supporting the claim ...
- I contributed what I have to contribute. I am not qualified to state the linguistic theory of Chomsky. And what evidence is required that people say that about Chomsky? The parallel is very striking, but it isn't necessary to support it in order to state that people say it. GregLindahl
- So they message here is that people will delete my contributions. That makes me so so motivated to contribute to Wikipedia. That's OK, why bother mentioning that Chomsky (and Freud) have legions of detractors, that must not be very important in NPOV articles about Chomsky and Freud. GregLindahl
- Now, Greg, don't get too upset. I personally regard Chomsky as a kook and a half on toast. I don't think this article should be uncritical, but I think even detractors have to work to write our criticisms in a way that will be acceptable to supporters. It's an iterative process. --Jimbo Wales
Jimbo, I shouldn't have to jump through hoops to simply note that he has detractors. Since it was made too hard for me to make that simple statement, I've given up. From what I can tell, simply deleting someone's text is against Wikipedia policy, and that's what was done. Go look at the text, which is quoted above. Pretty straightforward: "Detractors say X". That doesn't mean I should have to justify X. You can iterate all you like, I don't like getting screwed. GregLindahl
- It is worth noting that almost everything about Noam Chomsky's ideas are controversial, both in linguistics and politics. He has a great many detractors both in academia and the general public; he has a great number of supporters among radicals and anarchists.
I don't think that supporters of his linguistic ideas are mainly 'radicals and anarchists'. --Taw
I took that last to refer to his politics, not his linguistics. I'll reword. --KQ
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