MAKING SENSE OUT OF NONSENSE (1971)
The Story of my Friend, Whose Colorless Green Ideas Sleep Furiously
by Y. R. Chao (after Noam Chomsky)
I have a friend who is always full of ideas, good ideas and
bad ideas, fine ideas and crude ideas, old ideas and new ideas. Before
putting his new ideas into practice, he usually sleeps over them to
let them mature and ripen. However, when he is in a hurry, he
sometimes puts his ideas into practice before they are quite ripe, in
other words, while they are still green. Some of his green ideas are
quite lively and colorful, but not always, some being quite plain and
colorless. When he remembers that some of his colorless ideas are
still too green to use, he will sleep over them, or let them sleep, as
he puts it. Bu... (查看原文)
Thus Adam's Eden-plot in far-off time:
Colour-rampant fowers, trees a myriad green;
Helped by God-bless'd wind and temp'rate clime.
The path to primate knowledge unforseen,
He sleeps in peace at eve with Eve.
One apple later, he looks curiously
At the gardens of dichromates, in whom
colourless green ideas sleep furiously
then rage for birth each morning, until doom
Brings rainbows they at last perceive.
D. A. H. Byatt
It can only be the thought of verdure to come, which prompts us in the autumn
to buy these dormant white lumps of vegetable matter covered by a brown
papery skin, and lovingly to plant them and care for them. It is a marvel
to me that under this cover they are labouring unseen at such a rate
within to give us the sudden awesome beauty of spring flowering bulbs.
While winter r... (查看原文)
Thus phrase structure, taken as a linguistic level, has the fundamentally different and nontrivial character which, as we saw in the last paragraph of § 3, is required for some linguistic level. We cannot set up a hierarchy among the various representations of "the man hit the ball" ; we cannot subdivide the system of phrase structure into a finite set of levels, ordered from higher to lower, with one representation for each sentence on each of these sublevels. For example, there is no way of ordering the elements NP and VP relative to one another. Noun phrases are contained within verb phrases, and verb phrases within noun phrases, in English. Phrase structure must be considered as a single level, with a set of representations for each sentence of the language. (查看原文)
(20) (a) the scene - of the movie - was in Chicago
(b) the scene - of the play - was in Chicago
(21) the scene - of the movie and of the play - was in Chicago. (查看原文)
In fact, the possibility of conjunction offers one of the best criteria for the initial determination of phrase structure. We can simplify the description of conjunction if we try to set up constituents in such a way that the following rule will hold :
(26) If S1 and S2 are grammatical sentences, and S1 differs from S2 only in that X appears in S1 where Y appears in S2 (i.e., S1 = . .X. . and S2= . . Y. .), and X and Y are constituents of the same type in S1 and S2 respectively, then S3 is a sentence, where S3 is the result of replacing X by X + and+ Y in S1 (i.e., S3= . .X+and+Y..).
Even though additional qualification is necessary here, the grammar is enormously simplified if we set up constituents in such a way that (26) holds even approximately.
[...]
But we now face the following diff... (查看原文)
Notice that in order to set aims of grammar significantly it is sufficient to assume a partial knowledge of sentences and non-sentences. That is, we may assume for this discussion that certain sequences of phonemes are definitely sentences and that certain other sequences are definitely non-sentences. This is a familiar feature of explication1. (查看原文)
A certain number of clear cases, then, will provide us with a criterion of adquacy for any particular grammar. For a single language, taken in isolation, this provides only a weak test of adquacy, since many different grammars may handle the clears cases properly. This can be generalized to a very strong condition, however, if we insist that the clear cases be handled properly for each language by grammars all of which are constructed by the same method. That is, each grammar is related to the corpus of sentences in the language it describes in a way fixed in advance for all grammars by a given linguistic theory. We then have a very strong test of adquacy for a linguitic theory that attempts to give a general explanation for the notion of "grammatical sentences" in terms of "observed sente... (查看原文)
2.2
On what basis do we actually go about separating grammatical sequences from ungrammatical sequences? I shall not attempt to give a complete answer to this question here, but I would like to point out that several answers that immediately suggest themselves could not be correct. First, it is obvious that the set grammatical sentences cannot be identified with any particular corpus of utterances obtained by the linguist in his field work. Any grammar of a language will project the finite and somewhat accidental corpus of observed utterances to a set (presumebly infinite) of grammatical utterances. In this respect, a grammar mirrors the behavior of the speaker who, on the basis of a finite and accidental experience with language, ca produce and understand an indefinite number of new sente... (查看原文)
2.3 Second, the notion "grammatical" cannot be identified with "meaningful" or "significant" in any semantic sense. Sentences (1) and (2) are equally nonsential, but any speaker of English will recognize that only the former is grammatical.
(1) Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.
(2) Furiously sleep ideas green colorless.
Similarly, there is no semantic reason to prefer (3) to (5) or (4) to (6), but only (3) and (4) are grammtical sentences of English.
(3) have you a book on modern music?
(4) the book seems interesting.
(5) read you a book on modern music?
(6) the child seems sleeping.
Such examples suggest that any search for semantically based definition of "grammaticalness" will be futile. We shall see, in fact, in § 7, that there are deep structural reasons for distinguishing (3... (查看原文)
2.4 Third, the notion "grammatical in English" cannot be identified in any way with the notion "high order of statistical approximation to English." It is fair to assume that neither sentence (1) nor (2) (nor indeed any part of these sentences) has 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 nonsentential, is grammatical while (2) is not. Presented with these sentences, a speaker of English will read (1) with a normal sentence intonation, but he will read (2) with a falling intonation on each word; in fact with just the intonation pattern given to any sequence of unrelated words. He treats each word in (2) as a separate phrase. Similarly, h... (查看原文)
Noam Chomsky's Syntactic Structures was the snowball which began the avalanche of the modem "cognitive revolution." The cognitive perspective originated in the seventeenth century and now construes modem linguistics as part of psychology and human biology
……
However, what is striking about this little book is that it contains nothing on cognitive representations, nothing on grammars as mental systems triggered by childhood exposure to initial linguistic experiences. Chomsky arrived at some conclusions and developed some lines of thought which naturally provoked a radical re-thinking of the status of grammatical descriptions, but, to judge from the earliest texts, it appears that he did this without any particular concern for cognitive representations.
(查看原文)
“…by pushing a precise but inadequate formulation to an unacceptable conclusion, we can often expose the exact source of this inadequacy and, consequently, gain a deeper understanding of the linguistic data" (p.5) .This was a foretaste of a strategy that Chomsky has pursued throughout his career (查看原文)
The application of this (passive transformation), or any transformational rule can be described by a very formal-looking 'structural analysis' and 'structural change'. I'm not sure what use this rigid symbolic apparatus is but it does make the theory seem scientific.
Chomsky himself is currently enjoying comfortable obscurity as a tenured professor of linguistics at MIT, where he is perhaps more famous for his stamp collection than his linguistic theories. (查看原文)
One way to test the adequacy of a grammar proposed for L is to determine whether or not the sequences that it generates are actually grammatical, i.e. acceptable to a native speaker, etc.
We can take certain steps towards providing a behavioral criterion for grammaticalness so that this test of adequacy can be carried out. (查看原文)
Despite the undeniable interest and importance of semantic and statistical studies of language, they appear to have no direct relevance to the problem of determining or characterizing the set of grammatical utterances.
I think we are forced to conclude that grammar is autonomous and independent of meaning, and those probabilistic models give no particular insight into some of the basic problems of syntactic structure. (查看原文)
