From cowan Tue Nov 21 11:49:56 1995 Subject: Re: Colourless green ideas From: John Cowan To: lojban@cuvmb.cc.columbia.edu (Lojban List) Date: Tue, 21 Nov 1995 11:49:56 -0500 (EST) In-Reply-To: <199511211456.JAA13938@locke.ccil.org> from "Dylan Thurston" at Nov 21, 95 01:52:13 am X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL24] Content-Type: text Content-Length: 752 Status: OR Message-ID: <3AHfztPS5OO.A.YuB.y50kLB@chain.digitalkingdom.org> la dilyn. cusku di'e > Chomsky gave this sentence as an example of a perfectly grammatical > statement with no meaning in the real world. This is a widely believed falsehood. Chomsky devised the sentence to refute a then-current theory of grammaticality that attempty to quantify it based on the occurrence probability of consecutive words: thus, "I went to the store" counted as grammatical because "I went", "went to", "to the", and "the store" are all high-probability pairs. In "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously", however, none of the word pairs has any significant probability of occurrence, yet the sentence is grammatical. Its plausibility as a sentence was not at issue. -- John Cowan cowan@ccil.org e'osai ko sarji la lojban.