Colorless Green Ideas Sleep Furiously - Details

Details

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) 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 nonsensical, is grammatical, while (2) is not grammatical.

While the meaninglessness of the sentence is often considered fundamental to Chomsky's point, Chomsky was only relying on the sentences' having never been spoken before. Thus, even if one were to prescribe a likely and reasonable meaning to the sentence, the grammaticality of the sentence is concrete despite being the first time a person had ever uttered the statement, or any part thereof in such a combination. This was used then as a counter-example to the idea that the human speech engine was based upon statistical models, such as a Markov chain, or simple statistics of words following others.

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