"Colorless green dreams sleep furiously". Noam Chomsky |
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| Votes: 503 |
Comments: 22 |
Added: August 2003 |
Comments:
| TDOL - 3rd September 2003 23:01
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| If the person who voted 'meaningful' reads this, would they mind telling me what it means as I cannot work it out. ;-)
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| Dennis - 22nd September 2003 18:27
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| I dont know what Mr. Chomsky may have intended it to mean. I read it more as a poetic sentence. I understood it as "green dreams" meaning the desire for money. In all the statement says to me that Mr. Chomsky was making a statement about the desire for wealth in America, by those who dont know how to get it.
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| Stu Nickum - 9th October 2003 19:19
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| Look at each of the terms in the sentence. They are all contradictory. Colorless things cannot be green, dreams cannot simply be green, dreams themselves cannot sleep, and it is impossible to sleep in a furious manner. The point is that gramatical structures do not necessarily give language its meaning. A sentence can be gramatically correct (as this one is), and still be complete gibberish.
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| Willbut - 9th November 2003 21:34
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| Andrew Marvell wrote of 'green thoughts in a green shade' in The Garden. If he could have 'green thoughts' couldn't someone have 'green dreams'? Especially an ecologist?
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| Kevin Maynard - 12th November 2003 18:13
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| 'Meaningless' is a pretty categorical judgement. The human brain is programmed to extract meaning from even the most unpromising material. (Hence the popularity of John Ashbery.) The question could be rephrased more helpfully as 'Is this logical?' or 'Is this grammatical?'
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| tdol - 20th November 2003 17:47
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| Chomsky used it as an example of something that was grammatically correct but made no sense as a way of showing the limitations of conventional grammars. ;-)
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| chongrak - 13th February 2004 01:18
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Literally it appears meaningless, though when viewed as a poetic work, it does make sense.
http://home.tiac.net/~cri/1997/choms
ky.html
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| duncanw - 27th April 2005 22:29
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"'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe."
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| duncanw - 27th April 2005 22:47
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Just a bit of CS Lewis to argue the poetic pint. ;-)
I think that any meaning in the sentence is purely semiotic - an understanding of shared cultural signifiers that impart meaning. Narratively, forget it. Grammatically, it's a perfectly functioning sentence.
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| MrTrilby - 1st February 2006 12:52
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| "Jabberwocky", unfortunately, isn't nonsense - Lewis provided a glossary to the terms elsewhere in his writings (letters), which kind of ruined the poem for me. :(
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| howdy - 4th April 2006 21:55
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| you realize this is chomsky's example of how a gramatically correct sentence can have no meaning at all, right?
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| dr - 12th October 2006 08:38
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| c.s. lewis? come now, he didn't write jabberwocky. surely you mean our dear friend the reverend dodgson.
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| pléonasme - 18th October 2006 18:41
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I know some people have pointed this out, but...
Noam Chomsky is a profressor of linguistics and more particularly theoretical linguistics. This sentence was only made to show that it could be grammaticaly correct, yet , meaningless (as has already been said).
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| macbeth - 23rd February 2007 04:18
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| I use this sentence to teach word order in English (I'm an ESL teacher). My students are creating "magnetic poetry." Mr. Chomsky's nonsense line makes sense to them!
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| pamutron - 3rd May 2007 06:13
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| I think asking if this is meaningful/meaningless is entirely the wrong question to ask. The point of this example is to show that meaning is not limited to the word-level, but also created by the grammar. We are able to assess some kind of meaning from the sentence because it follows English rules of grammar, and we cannot help but try to parse it. If we were to rearrange the words in an entirely ungrammatical way, e.g. "sleep dreams furiously colorless green," it is quite difficult to extract a meaning, even a poetic or abstract one.
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| l - 17th July 2007 16:13
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This is an example of a sentence that is grammatically correct according to the syntax parameters of the English language. Except for the fact that it makes no sense, we can tell that it sounds like a sentence of English, whereas “Sleep colorless ideas green furiously” does not even sound like a sentence in English but rather the reading of a list of words with no coherence. The purpose for this sentence was to support the Innatist perspective for human language acquisition. 1) The human brain can both create and recognize sentences that have never before been uttered. 2) Because of an innate pre-wiring of language principles that all human beings have, the human brain can recognize a sentence to be in correct syntactic order according to the individual’s language even though the sentence has never been heard before and even though the sentence carries no intrinsic meaning.
I voted that the sentence does indeed have meaning, just not semantic meaning. Rather it carries meaning in the other sense of the word – Purpose.
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| sociolx - 3rd October 2007 15:47
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| as others have said chomsky is a linguist...generative grammar and all that. meant to show that grammar alone doesn't impart meaning...there's the semantic aspect as well....it's not poetry...chomsky is nothing like a poet!
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| Robert - 9th November 2007 04:13
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| Its meaningless. Chomsky came up with this to show that a sentence can be grammatically correct but make no sense
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| Raby - 24th January 2008 18:02
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| grammatically we can say that this utterance is perfect(subject verb and adverb) but it has no meaning..Chomsky gave it as an example to show the ability of understanding things and distinguishing wether they're correct or incorrect so it's about competence and performence.
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| Ben XO - 15th February 2008 01:53
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The fact that it is both arguably meaningless AND arguably meaningful demonstrates that adequately that meaning can be partial - and that's the whole point. The sentence's true purpose (utterly distinct from its meaning or lack of meaning) is to demonstrate how meaning can be assigned, and what words cannot do by themselves.
Of course, the sentence has the capacity to make perfect sense to everyone, if everyone substitutes different (specific) meanings for the noun 'dreams', the adjective 'colorless' and the adverb 'furiously'. For example, if I interpret 'dreams' to mean 'humans', 'colorless' to mean 'boring' and 'furiously' to mean 'peacefully', then I have a new language (that only I speak) in which that sentence makes sense.
But in either language, English or my invented one, nobody can ever argue that the sentence is grammatically incorrect.
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| Wabe - 29th March 2008 21:57
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| Um...Lewis Carrol wrote Jabberwocky...it is part of Through the Looking-glass and What Alice Found There....more commonly recongized as pertaining to Alice in Wonderland. Also, the fact that this is grammatical gives it at least functional meaning. However, the semantics give it a poetic sense as well, showing freedom in the english language to even make unlogical concepts grammatical and poetic.
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| Me - 8th April 2008 00:42
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| Stu Nickum, got it right in the third comment. It's a grammatically correct statement that was constructed to be meaningless to show that grammar is not the root of the meaningfulness of language. grammatically correct content doesn't infer any meaning whatsoever.
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