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Concept
Colorless green ideas sleep furiously
Summary
Colorless green ideas sleep furiously was composed by Noam Chomsky in his 1957 book Syntactic Structures as an example of a sentence that is grammatically well-formed, but semantically nonsensical. The sentence was originally used in his 1955 thesis The Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory and in his 1956 paper "Three Models for the Description of Language". There is no obvious understandable meaning that can be derived from it, which demonstrates the distinction between syntax and semantics, and the idea that a syntactically well-formed sentence is not guaranteed to be semantically well-formed as well. As an example of a , it was used to show the inadequacy of certain probabilistic models of grammar, and the need for more structured models.
Chomsky wrote in his 1957 book Syntactic Structures:
Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.
Furiously sleep ideas green colorless.It is fair to assume that neither sentence (1) nor (2) (nor indeed any part of these sentences) had ever previously occurred in an English discourse. Hence, in any statistical model that accounts for grammaticality, 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.
Colorless green ideas – which functions as the subject of the sentence – is an anomalous string for at least two reasons:
The adjective colorless can be understood as dull, uninteresting, or lacking in color, and so when it combines with the adjective green, this is nonsensical: an object cannot simultaneously lack color and have the color of green.
In the phrase, colorless green ideas the abstract noun idea is described as being colorless and green. However, due to its abstract nature, an idea cannot have or lack color.
Sleep furiously – which functions as the predicate of the sentence – is structurally well-formed; in other words, it is grammatical. However the meaning that it expresses is peculiar, as the activity of sleeping is not generally taken to be something that can be done in a furious fashion.
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