Colorless green ideas sleep furiously
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"Colorless green ideas sleep furiously" is a sentence composed by Noam Chomsky in his 1957 Syntactic Structures as an example of a sentence that is grammatically correct (logical form) but semantically nonsensical. The term was originally used in his 1955 thesis "Logical Structures of Linguistic Theory". Although the sentence is grammatically correct, no obvious understandable meaning can be derived from it, and thus it demonstrates the distinction between syntax and semantics. As an example of a category mistake, it was used to show inadequacy of the then-popular probabilistic models of grammar, and the need for more structured models.
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See also
- Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo
- Moore's paradox
- Poverty of the stimulus
- Universal grammar
Unless indicated otherwise, the text in this article is either based on Wikipedia article "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously" or another language Wikipedia page thereof used under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License; or on original research by Jahsonic and friends. See Art and Popular Culture's copyright notice.
