"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
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