31 January 2007
Quote of the Week
This week, Noam Chomsky's famous sentence:
"Colorless green ideas sleep furiously."
[Tofutti Cutie and I were talking about linguistics the other day, and ever since then I've had it stuck in my head. Unfortunately, I can't quite remember why this sentence is so important.
Tof, Jack -- help!]
"Colorless green ideas sleep furiously."
[Tofutti Cutie and I were talking about linguistics the other day, and ever since then I've had it stuck in my head. Unfortunately, I can't quite remember why this sentence is so important.
Tof, Jack -- help!]
Labels: grammar
# posted by mamurd @ 3:17 PM 
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I believe he was illustrating that meaning and function are separate aspects of words. That's a grammatically correct sentence (so the words are functioning correctly), but it's meaningless because, well, it doesn't mean anything.
He used it as an example of why somebody else's model of language didn't work and his model was so much more awesome and useful.
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He used it as an example of why somebody else's model of language didn't work and his model was so much more awesome and useful.
# posted by 
: 5:12 PM
: 5:12 PM << Home
