Colorless green ideas sleep furiously - Wikipedia

Abstraction: Chomsky's canonical example sentence separating syntax from semantics

Key points:

• Coined by Noam Chomsky in 1957 Syntactic Structures to show a sentence can be grammatically well-formed yet semantically meaningless
• Used to argue against probabilistic/statistical models of grammar: both "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously" and its scrambled version would be equally "remote" under Markov models, yet only the former is grammatical
• Fernando Pereira (2000) showed a statistical Markov model still assigns the grammatical ordering ~200,000x higher probability than the ungrammatical one, partially rehabilitating statistical approaches
• Three s-selection violations: colorless contradicts green, furiously requires animate anger, sleep requires a subject capable of sleeping
• Literary competition at Stanford (1985) challenged contestants to make the sentence meaningful in under 100 words
• Inspired poems by Dell Hymes, Roman Jakobson, John Hollander, and Yuen Ren Chao

Connections: Noam Chomsky · Linguistics · Syntax · Semantics · Natural Language Processing

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colorless_green_ideas_sleep_furiously