By uttering "Colourless green ideas sleep furiously," Chomsky intends Grice
to believe that Chomsky believes that colourless green ideas sleep
furiously.
Nonsense.
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If you go to
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/meaning/#toc
you should find an account of Grice's theory (?) of meaning beginning at
3.1.1
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In Chomsky's *Syntactic Structures* he introduces the infamous sentences:
1. Colorless ideas sleep furiously.
2. Furiously sleep ideas green colorless.
He then explains their function.
'It is fair to assume that neither sentence (1) nor (2) (nor indeed any
part of these sentences) has ever occurred in an English discourse. Hence,
in any statistical model for grammaticalness, these sentences will be ruled
out on identical grounds as equally "remote" from English. Yet (1), though
nonsensical, is grammatical, while (2) is not grammatical.'
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(These sentences later starred in an Alfred Hitchcock movie.)
Robert Paul
