“Colorless Green Ideas Sleep furiously”

When we were discussing syntax in class, I was sure we would touch on the sentence “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously” since it is the classic sentence used to talk about English syntax, so common that it is very cliché. The sentence shows that English syntax rules can be very misleading, a fact that was explored in Noam Chomsky’s popular 1957 book, Syntactic Structures. Chomsky used “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously” to show that even sentences with correct “logical form” can be nonsensical. 

Many people have tried, and successfully found ways to use this sentence in a way that makes sense.

However, Most “acceptable” uses of this sentence are in poems, for example,

“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 laboring 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 colorless green ideas sleep furiously.”

The impact of this sentence was so large because Chomsky “challenged the popular concept of structuralism” by showing and arguing that linguists should study native speakers’ unconscious understanding of language, and not the syntax or the language they produce. I found a lot of differing opinions on whether the Chomsky sentence is really meaningless.  In fact, many philosophers say that the sentence is simple to understand—they argue that the sentence is not just meaningful but also true. They interpret Chomsky’s sentence as saying that every idea that is both colorless and green and does a certain thing: sleep in a furious way.  That is, any and every colorless green idea sleeps furiously.  They interpret this as: if something is a colorless green idea, then it sleeps furiously.  So, in order for the sentence to be false There would need to be a counterexample—they believe that the only way his sentence is false is if there is a colorless green idea that does not sleep furiously. Philosophers use this argument to show that even nonsensical, but syntactically sound sentences can be “true.”

The overarching importance of the sentence and why it has been so widely discussed, why it auto-fills in Google, and why I am writing this blog post is because Chomsky proved that probabilistic models of grammar are inadequate, Leila showed us her research work that attempts to predict the semantics of a word based on what the object is, and she mentioned her model is not a deterministic model. Similarly, Chomsky showed that there can never be a completely deterministic model for semantics, and syntax in particular cannot be used for creating such a model. I think that a good model can be created; just due to the fact that technology is advancing incredibly fast, and we already have artificial intelligence such as Siri.

Sophia Jung: The Ongoing Battle Between Articles

In class today, we learned about the constituency of words. Today, we learned about the constituency of words in class. We learned about the constituency of words in class today.

When working with the words ‘a,’ ‘the,’ ‘the,’ ‘skunk,’ ‘boy,’ ‘hall,’ ‘large,’ ‘across,’ ‘and,’ ‘walked,’ ‘threw,’ and ‘down’ to create sentences, one comment that was brought up was that ‘a’ and ‘the’ can be interchanged to create syntactically correct sentences. For example, “A boy walked across the hall and threw the large skunk down,” “the boy walked across a hall and threw the large skunk down,” and “the boy walked across the hall and threw a large skunk down” are all grammatically correct.

However, the meanings of those sentences are slightly different. This reminded me of last weekend, when my 3rd grader cousin in Korea asked me what the difference between using ‘a’ and using ‘the’ is. She could not figure out when it is necessary to use an article before a noun, and when it is appropriate to not use anything at all. She sent me the following picture:

and told me she is quite happy she doesn’t live in the United States because English is way too difficult! Defensively, I tried to convince her that English is way easier than Korean (and I promise it is), and that I could clearly explain to her what the difference between the article usages are. However, that proved to be much more difficult than I had predicted.

How do we explain ‘a’ and ‘the’ to foreigners? This goes back to the point that native speakers develop language by gathering information through usage, while foreigners learn a language by learning specific rules regarding that language. I’m not a native speaker of English myself, and I probably first learned how to use ‘a’ and ‘the’ through rules. However, over the years, I’ve completely forgotten the rules and have come to use the English articles without necessarily thinking about them. I know instinctively when to use ‘a,’ when to use ‘the,’ and when not to use anything at all.

Therefore, to native speakers, the difference is intuitive and perhaps difficult to explain in words. “A boy walked down the hall” is different from “the boy walked down a hall.” Simply put, I think ‘the’ emphasizes the noun immediately following it, and ‘a’ makes a generic claim about the noun. Turns out, ‘the’ is called the definite article, and ‘a’ is the indefinite article! (https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/540/01/) But how was I to explain the answer to #5 to my cousin?

“Elephants live in water,” “elephants live in the water,” and “elephants live in a water.” The first two make sense, but the third does not. I ended up calling my cousin to try and teach her by speaking the differences, but that proved to be a futile effort. In the end, I ended up explaining to her in the most twisted equivalents I could possibly think of in Korean.

My question is, when are the English articles ‘a/an’ and ‘the’ necessary? Is it possible to devise a clean-cut rule for when to use them and when not to? Can anyone think of an example where exchanging ‘a’ and ‘the’ in a sentence create grammatically incorrect sentences?

[Word Count: 540]

Nguyen

Every inch of my eight-year-old frame froze. I clasped my lips together and squeezed even tighter into my “criss-cross applesauce” cross-legged sitting position, trying to hide my anticipation. This was the moment my elementary school principal announced the second-grade recipient of the McNeil Elementary Horseshoe Award – the award given to the best student in each grade, and the most prestigious award I’ve ever had the pleasure of leaving out of my resume. My second-grade self wanted it more than an infinite supply of happy meal toys.

            The school principal raised the microphone to his lips, savoring the attentive silence of the 500 wide-eyed children in front of him. I shut my eyes and inhaled the cold tension of the cafeteria turned auditorium. “This year’s second grade winner… from Ms. Rushing’s class… IS DYLAN NUG-EYE-IN!” The crowd broke out in polite adolescent applause, and I stood up to begin the long trek to the stage to accept my award. This was far from the glory I hoped for though; rather, it was perhaps the first moment where I truly questioned the purpose of my existence. My principal, the most important person in the room, butchered his attempt to pronounce my last name and I, the second most important person in the room for the next 60 seconds, realized that this man knew nothing about me other than what was on the cue card he held in his hands. My moment of prepubescent victory turned into an awkward handshake and a silent shrug.

            My last name is Nguyen. The way I explain how to pronounce it is usually rather simple: It’s like win, but you attach the “ng” from singer to the beginning. The “ng” sound is the velar nasal ŋ, a sound never found in initial position in the English language. The Linguistic term for this restriction is Phonotactic constraint. As a result, most non-Vietnamese speakers find it very difficult to pronounce, and none I’ve met have found it intuitive. Although my anecdote above may suggest otherwise, I’ve never been offended when someone mispronounced my name and I have no problem repeating or explaining it. My name has, however, constantly reminded me the difficulty of learning foreign sounds.

According to the critical period hypothesis, there is a point at which language acquisition becomes increasingly difficult. Although the veracity of a critical period is under debate in Linguistics, there is significant evidence for a critical period for the learning of phonemes; research has shown that after about 5 years old, most individuals cannot accurately differentiate or produce phonemes other than those in their native language. What’s interesting about the velar nasal ŋ – the sound in my name that people can rarely pronounce - is that it’s a phoneme commonly used in the English language; the difficulty arises because it’s at the beginning of my name, rather than the end. “Can you pronounce that again? I’m having trouble hearing the n-g part” is a question I expect of a phoneme that doesn’t exist in the English language. My understanding of the critical period of phoneme learning doesn’t explain why moving a phoneme to a position it usually does not occupy leads to the same effects as introducing a completely foreign phoneme.

            This seems to fall somewhere the inability to pronounce phonemes and the difficulty of learning a new language, and one possible explanation could be that there is a critical period for learning Phonotactic Constraints. There have been many instances where trying to explain the pronunciation of my last name was like trying to teach a dog to talk – it was just impossible. I’m confident this is indicative of a larger Linguistic pattern in language acquisition, and it certainly pushes me towards believing that the critical period hypothesis is true.