[lit-ideas] Re: Grice's Colourless Green Ideas Sleep Furiously
- From: Omar Kusturica <omarkusto@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Tue, 29 Apr 2014 17:17:16 +0200
Actually, the Wiki entry on Mary Pratt doesn't even mention any Gricean
influence, it mentions that she was influenced by the research of Vladimir
Labov. Any attempt to apply Grice's categories to literature, even to
literary dialogues, would have to go against his own statement that the
Co-Operative Maxims are suspended in 'fictions.' (And without the Maxims
you cannot have implicatures, either.)
O.K.
On Tue, Apr 29, 2014 at 4:44 PM, Omar Kusturica <omarkusto@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> I don't think that Mary Pratt's analysis has been terribly influential in
> literary studies; I remember her being mentioned occasionally, but that is
> about it. I can see how some form of Griecian analysis could be applied to
> novelistic dialogues, and perhaps to some forms of drama. Pratt was also
> pointing out that literary narration originated from oral narrative, but I
> don't think that Grice would have much to say that is illuminating about
> 'fictions', whether oral or written. (At most, he would say that the
> co-operative maxims are suspended here, which makes them also inapplicable.)
>
> O.K.
>
>
> On Tue, Apr 29, 2014 at 1:54 PM, Redacted sender Jlsperanza@xxxxxxx for
> DMARC <dmarc-noreply@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
>> In a message dated 4/28/2014 4:10:04 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time,
>> donalmcevoyuk@xxxxxxxxxxx writes:
>> It might be interesting for JLS (or anyone) to point to any philosophical
>> doctrine of "sense and nonsense" that addresses my point that no such
>> doctrine (afaik) offers anything like an adequate account of the "sense"
>> of
>> poetry (as opposed to an account that merely dismisses poetry as
>> nonsense or
>> hides behind an unenlightening claim such as the claim that its sense is
>> metaphorical etc).
>>
>> Well, surely I would NOT (or even NEVER) consider the claim that the
>> 'sense' of poetry (provided you find me uttering generalities) is
>> unenlightening. Enlighenment is in the 'mind' of the one being
>> enlightnened, I trust.
>>
>> Sorry if I read the post in ways that motivated me: I thought the link
>> with
>> 'truth' and a 'truth-conditional' account to utterances was _neat_. :(
>>
>> I think it was Mary Louise Pratt, of UC/Berkeley, who offered a general
>> theoretical framework for the interpretation of literature (and stuff --
>> including poetry) along Griciean lines. G. N. Leech, in Lancaster (but
>> educated
>> UCL, London) was doing more or less the same thing, but the credit usually
>> goes to Pratt.
>>
>> Then there's Heidegger. Didn't he write on "Poetry and Truth"? That would
>> neatly touch on the important topic Popper was mentioning, or one of them
>> anyway.
>>
>> I would also reconsider Reeve's intention. Surely his inspiration was
>> Chomsky, and we must perhaps go back to the original context where
>> Chomsky said
>> what he did about the utterance that provoked Reeve's quatrain.
>>
>> D. Ritchie was exploring 'senses' of 'green' ('green' ideas as in 'green
>> politics'?). Lakoff and Johnson, who incidentally, quote both Grice and
>> Davidson -- as proponents of a literalist approach to the world -- argue
>> in
>> "Metaphors we live by" that GREEN IS IMMATURE (or something like that)
>> is a
>> folk-psychological slogan and that it would be hard to find purely
>> literal
>> uses of 'green'. One problem with this is Occam, and his razor, which
>> Grice
>> reads as "Do not multiply SENSES beyond necessity".
>>
>> There are not various 'senses' of "green". "Green" is not polysemous, but
>> monosemous. It is not 'ambiguous', but 'uniguous'. Only on the basis of
>> 'green' having a literal sense -- which would be the topic of the
>> scientist
>> with the aid of the philosopher of perception -- to identify and
>> isolate, do
>> 'figurative' extensions (or 'uses') of the etymological one and only
>> sense
>> make, er, sense.
>>
>> I would not consider Chomsky a philosopher, though. He did teach
>> "Linguistics and Philosophy", but never just "Philosophy". I mention this
>> because
>> McEvoy is generalising about what philosophers have to say about sense
>> and
>> nonsense when Chomsky is notably NOT a philosopher. So what he has to say
>> about sense and nonsense applies to linguistics, rather. ---- NOW Grice
>> is a
>> different animal (a sort of bird in Scotland, figuratively, and a pig in
>> the
>> old Anglo-Norman language).
>>
>> "Colourless green ideas sleep furiously"
>>
>> then, and for the record, is a "sentence" (rather than an utterance)
>> artificially composed by Noam Chomsky in his 1957 Syntactic Structures as
>> an
>> example of a sentence that is grammatically correct, but semantically
>> nonsensical.
>>
>> By 1958, J. L. Austin and H. P. Grice were reading "Syntactic Structures"
>> at their Saturday morning meetings -- at the 'sentence' level, i.e.
>> analysing each and every sentence produced by Chomsky. This within the
>> context of
>> their "Play Group" (They met at St. John's).
>>
>> The sentence was, since R. Paul was mentioning dissertations and life's
>> achievements, originally used in Chomsky's 1955 thesis "Logical
>> Structures of
>> Linguistic Theory" and also 1956 paper "Three Models for the Description
>> of Language".
>>
>> J. L. Austin and H. P. Grice would not know about that. Chomsky's PhD
>> dissertation was only LATER to be published (officially).
>>
>> 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.
>>
>> Chomsky writes:
>>
>> Colourless green ideas sleep furiously.
>>
>> Furiously sleep ideas green colorless.
>>
>> In fact he wants to compare things:
>>
>> i. Colourless green ideas sleep furiously.
>> ii. Furiously sleep ideas green colourless.
>>
>> Chomsky writes:
>>
>> "It is fair to assume that neither sentence (i) nor (ii) (nor indeed any
>> part of these sentences)
>> has ever occurred in an English discourse."
>>
>> _so far_, Austin reprimands.
>>
>> Chomsky goes on:
>>
>> "Hence, in any statistical model for grammaticalness, these sentences will
>> be ruled out on identical grounds as equally "remote" from English."
>>
>> Or Chomsky's English, Grice would reprimand ("People tend to assume there
>> is such a thing as English, but I'm always reminded of Cole Porter, what
>> is
>> this thing called love.").
>>
>> Chomsky goes on:
>>
>> "Yet (i), though nonsensical, is grammatical, while (ii) is not
>> grammatical."
>>
>> Grice would say, "and thus, not a sentence". "Sentence," like 'tree', is a
>> 'value-oriented' concept. Only good xs count as x. (Grice gives another
>> example of this: 'reasoning'. Only valid reasoning counts as reasoning).
>>
>> While the "meaninglessness" of the sentence is often considered
>> fundamental
>> to Chomsky's point, Chomsky was only relying on the sentences' having
>> never been spoken before -- or 'uttered' before, as Grice would prefer.
>> For
>> surely, by uttering a piece of nonsense, an utterer can MEAN. And it's
>> UTTERER's meaning that the philosopher is mainly interested in ("Not
>> Witters,
>> alas", he adds).
>>
>> Thus, even if one were to prescribe a likely and reasonable meaning to the
>> sentence -- as Reeve allegedly does -- the grammaticality of the sentence
>> is concrete despite being the first time a person had ever uttered the
>> statement, or any part thereof in such a combination.
>>
>> What Reeve should perhaps do is compose a quatrain for (ii).
>>
>> Furiously sleep ideas green colourless.
>>
>> This was used then by Chomsky as a counter-example to the idea that the
>> human speech engine was based upon statistical models, such as a Markov
>> chain,
>> or simple statistics of words following others.
>>
>> The sentence can be partially interpreted through polysemy --which Grice
>> interprets implicaturally.
>>
>> Indeed, both "green" and "colourless" have figurative meanings (or 'uses')
>> which allow "colourless" to be interpreted as "nondescript" and "green" as
>> "immature".
>>
>> The sentence can therefore be construed as
>>
>> Nondescript immature ideas have violent nightmares.
>>
>> -- a phrase with less oblique semantics, allegedly (Although vide Grice,
>> "You're the cream in my coffee" as a metaphor that RELIES on its category
>> mistake -- vis–à–vis ideas rather than those who hold them, as having
>> nightmares.
>>
>> In particular, the phrase can have legitimate meaning too, if "green" is
>> understood to mean "newly formed" and "to sleep" can be used to
>> figuratively
>> express some mental or verbal dormancy.
>>
>> "Furiously" remains problematic when applied to the verb "sleep", since
>> "furiously" denotes "angrily", "violently", and "intensely energetically",
>> meanings which are generally incompatible with sleep, dormancy, and
>> unconscious agents typically construed as conscious ones, e.g. animals
>> or humans,
>> which truly "sleep".
>>
>> But surely Witters could find a 'form of life' in some lion (whose
>> language
>> "we will never understand") where the furious lion sleep furiously.
>>
>> Writers have attempted to provide the sentence meaning through context,
>> the
>> first of which was written by Chinese linguist Yuen Ren Chao, in English.
>>
>> In 1985, a literary competition was held at Stanford University in which
>> the contestants were invited to make Chomsky's sentence meaningful using
>> not
>> more than 100 words of prose or 14 lines of verse.
>>
>> An example entry from the competition, from C.M. Street, is:
>>
>> It can only be the thought of verdure to come, which prompts us in the
>> autumn to buy these dormant white lumps of vegetable matter covered by a
>> brown
>> papery skin, and lovingly to plant them and care for them. It is a marvel
>> to me that under this cover they are labouring unseen at such a rate
>> within
>> to give us the sudden awesome beauty of spring flowering bulbs. While
>> winter reigns the earth reposes but these colourless green ideas sleep
>> furiously.
>>
>> Fernando Pereira of the University of Pennsylvania has fitted a simple
>> statistical Markov model to a body of newspaper text, and shown that
>> under this
>> model,
>>
>> ii. Furiously sleep ideas green colourless.
>>
>> is, indeed, about 200,000 times less probable than
>>
>> i. Colourless green ideas sleep furiously.
>>
>> which is still improbable (vide Popper on 'Improbability and
>> inverisimilitude').
>>
>> Pereira's statistical model defines a similarity metric, whereby sentences
>> which are more like those within a corpus in certain respects are assigned
>> higher values than sentences less alike.
>>
>> Pereira's model assigns an ungrammatical version of the same sentence a
>> lower probability than the syntactically correct form demonstrating that
>> statistical models can learn grammaticality distinctions with minimal
>> linguistic
>> assumptions.
>>
>> However, it is not clear that the model assigns every ungrammatical
>> sentence a lower probability than every grammatical sentence.
>>
>> That is,
>>
>> Colourless green ideas sleep furiously.
>>
>> may still be statistically more "remote" from English than some
>> ungrammatical sentences.
>>
>> It's different now after Reeve's quatrain, and the Stanford contest.
>> (Oddly
>> Grice loved Stanford and would held joint seminars with Stanford faculty
>> while on the Berkeley hills -- "Hands across the Bay", he poetically
>> entitled the series (seeing that J. O. Urmson and S. N. Hampshire, and
>> other
>> former members of the Oxonian Play Group had settled, albeit temporarily,
>> 'across the bay').
>>
>> To this, it may be argued that no current theory of grammar is capable of
>> distinguishing all grammatical English sentences from ungrammatical ones.
>>
>> There is at least one earlier example of such a sentence, and probably
>> many more.
>>
>> The pioneering French syntactician Lucien Tesnière came up with the French
>> sentence
>>
>> Le silence vertébral indispose la voile licite.
>>
>> The vertebral silence indisposes the licit sail
>>
>> And Adriano Palma with
>>
>> Bananas are frozen music.
>>
>> Also Carnap:
>>
>> Caesar is a prime number
>>
>> and
>>
>> Pirots karulise elatically
>>
>> (vide: Grice: How pirots karulise elatically: some simpler ways")
>>
>> The game of cadavre exquis (1925) is a method for generating nonsense
>> sentences.
>>
>> It was named after the first sentence generated
>>
>> Le cadavre exquis boira le vin nouveau.
>>
>> The exquisite corpse will drink the new wine.
>>
>> In the popular game of "Mad Libs", a chosen player asks each other player
>> to provide parts of speech without providing any contextual information
>> (e.g., "Give me a proper noun", or "Give me an adjective"), and these
>> words are
>> inserted into pre-composed sentences with a correct grammatical
>> structure,
>> but in which certain words have been omitted.
>>
>> The alleged Griceian humour of the game lies in its implicature, i.e. in
>> the generation of sentences (as uttered by Griceian utterers) which are
>> grammatical but which are meaningless or have absurd or ambiguous
>> meanings (such
>> as 'loud sharks') -- "which may still IMPLICATE this or that", to use
>> Grice's moral.
>>
>> The game also tends to generate humorous double entendres ("some of a
>> risqué nature," Grice grants).
>>
>> There are doubtlessly earlier examples of such sentences, possibly from
>> the
>> philosophy of language literature, but not necessarily uncontroversial
>> ones, given that the focus has been mostly on borderline cases.
>>
>> For example, followers of logical positivism held that "metaphysical"
>> (i.e.
>> not empirically verifiable) statements are simply meaningless; e.g.
>> Rudolf
>> Carnap wrote an article where he argued that almost every sentence from
>> Heidegger was grammatically correct, yet meaningless.
>>
>> Nothings noths.
>>
>> Carnap will go on to write a book on this: the logical syntax.
>>
>> Of course, some philosophers who were not logical positivists disagreed
>> with this -- such as Popper.
>>
>> The philosopher Bertrand Russell used the sentence
>>
>> Quadruplicity drinks procrastination.
>>
>> and Ryle
>>
>> Monday is in bed with Saturday.
>>
>> to make a similar point.
>>
>> W.V. Quine (closer to Chomsky's territory, on the same side of the
>> Charles,
>> but across township, into Cambridge, and the oldest university in America
>> -- his dissertation in mathematics, rather than philosoophy) took issue
>> with Russell on the grounds that for a sentence to be false is nothing
>> more
>> than for it not to be true.
>>
>> And since quadruplicity doesn't drink anything, the sentence is simply
>> false, not meaningless.
>>
>> Similarly, Grice argues:
>>
>> It is false that colourless green ideas sleep furiously.
>>
>> One problem with Grice is Strawson's 'ditto' theory of truth and
>> falsehood.
>> Thus, the above seems to implicate that someone held it to be true,
>> allegedly Chomsky (which he didn't).
>>
>> Examples like Tesnière's and Chomsky's are the least controversially
>> nonsensical, and Chomsky's example remains by far, and perhaps oddly for
>> that
>> reason, the most infamous.
>>
>> John Hollander wrote a poem titled "Coiled Alizarine" in his book The
>> Night
>> Mirror. It ends with Chomsky's sentence. So did Reeve.
>>
>> Clive James wrote a poem titled "A Line and a Theme from Noam Chomsky" in
>> his book Other Passports: Poems 1958-1985.
>>
>> It opens with Chomsky's second meaningless sentence and discusses the
>> Vietnam War.
>>
>> Another approach is to create a syntactically-correct, easily parsable
>> sentence using nonsense words; a famous such example is
>>
>> The gostak distims the doshes.
>>
>> Lewis Carroll's Jabberwocky is also famous for using this technique,
>> although in this case for literary purposes.
>>
>> And Humpty Dumpty (usually taken as a parody of Grice) famously explicates
>> all the implicatures behind this poem that fascinated, for some reason,
>> Alice Hargreaves.
>>
>> Similar sentences used in neuroscience experiments are thus called
>> Jabberwocky sentences (after C. L. Dodgson). And Jabberwocky has been
>> translated
>> to Latin.
>>
>> In Russian schools of linguistics, the glokaya kuzdra example has similar
>> characteristics.
>>
>> Other arguably "meaningless utterances" are ones that make sense, are
>> grammatical, but have no reference to the present state of the world,
>> such as
>>
>> The King of France is bald.
>>
>> since there is no King of France today (see Neal, Definite descriptions).
>>
>> Cfr.
>>
>> Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo
>>
>> James while John had...had a better effect on the teacher
>>
>> Moore's paradox: It is raining, but I don't believe it.
>>
>> Poverty of the stimulus
>>
>> Universal grammar
>>
>> The Invisible Pink Unicorn and Meinong's Square Triangle (item of world
>> 3?)
>>
>> Cheers,
>>
>> Speranza
>>
>> ----
>>
>> References:
>>
>> Chomsky, Noam (September 1956). "Three Models for the Description of
>> Language". IRE Transactions on Information Theory 2 (3): 113–124.
>> Chomsky, Noam (1957). Syntactic Structures. The Hague/Paris: Mouton. p.
>> 15. ISBN 3-11-017279-8.
>> "Furiously" American Heritage Dictionary, 2014.
>> http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/furiously?s=t
>> Chao, Yuen Ren. "Making Sense Out of Nonsense". The Sesquipedalian, vol.
>> VII, no. 32 (June 12, 1997). Archived from the original.
>> "LINGUIST List 2.457".
>> Pereira, Fernando (2000). "Formal grammar and information theory:
>> together
>> again?". Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society 358 (1769):
>> 1239–
>> 1253 -- and related post Language Log.
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> ------------------------------------------------------------------
>> To change your Lit-Ideas settings (subscribe/unsub, vacation on/off,
>> digest on/off), visit www.andreas.com/faq-lit-ideas.html
>>
>
>
Other related posts:
