R. Paul is right. In the slim essay, "Syntactic Structures" (one of the two J.
L. Austin's 'desert island readings,' along with Frege's "Number"), A. N,
Chomsky mentions, but never uses:
i. Colourless green ideas sleep furiously.
and
ii. Furiously sleep ideas green colourless.
and expands: "It is fair"
i. e. just
"to assume that neither sentence (1) nor (2) (nor indeed any part of these
sentences) has ever occurred in an English discourse."
So far: as Geary prefers: ever say ever.
"Hence, in any statistical model for grammaticalness, these sentences will be
ruled out on identical grounds as equally "remote" from English."
Not counting, statistically the 5,000 occurrences in "Syntactic Structures"
(such was the tirade by Mouton of this slim volume)
"Yet (1), though nonsensical, is grammatical, while (2) is not grammatical."
Not EVEN grammatical, but 'nonsensical,' too.
Yet, and this is Grice's point, while, to use Helm's wording, the words don't
mean, an utterer, such as Chomsky, MAY mean by uttering them, and successfully
too.
Chomsky ain't being original. (1) resembles, from his "Introduction to
Semantics," Carnap's
(3) Pirots carulise elatically.
(Vide: Grice, How pirots carulise elatically: some simple lessons, Bancroft),
while (2) resembles Carnap's
(4) is number prime Caesar a.
Ziff argues that a professor may utter (4) or (2) intending his addressee to
recognise that he (the professor) is crazy (Ziff actually uses a sentence which
is meaningless in English but not in Hopi).
Cheers
Speranza------------------------------------------------------------------
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