Thursday, September 17, 2009

[colorless green ideas synax tree]


  1. Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.
  2. Furiously sleep ideas green colorless.

It is fair to assume that neither sentence (1) nor (2) (nor indeed any part of these sentences) had 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.[1]


無色の緑のアイデア / colorless green ideas

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