Мағынасыз сөздердің грамматикалық құрылысы

Syntactically well formed, semantically incongruous phrase

Colorless green ideas sleep furiously was composed by Noam Chomsky in his 1957 book Syntactic Structures as an example of a sentence that is grammatically well formed, but semantically nonsensical. The sentence was originally used in his 1955 thesis The Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory and in his 1956 paper "Three Models for the Description of Language". There is no obvious understandable meaning that can be derived from it, which demonstrates the distinction between syntax and semantics, and the idea that a syntactically well formed sentence is not guaranteed to also be semantically well formed. As an example of a category mistake, it was intended to show the inadequacy of certain probabilistic models of grammar, and the need for more structured models.

Chomsky's "colorless green" inspired written works, which all try to create meaning from the semantically meaningless utterance through added context. In 1958, linguist and anthropologist Dell Hymes presented his work to show that nonsense words can develop into something meaningful when in the right sequence. Russian American linguist and literary theorist Roman Jakobson (1959) interpreted "colorless green" as a pale green, and "sleep furiously" as the wildness of "a state like sleep, as that of inertness, torpidity, numbness." Jakobson gave the example that if "[someone's] hatred never slept, why then, cannot someone's ideas fall into sleep?" John Hollander, an American poet and literary critic, argued that the sentence operates in a vacuum as it is without context. He went on to write a poem based on that idea, entitled Coiled Alizarine that was included in his book, The Night Mirror (1971). Years later, Hollander contacted Chomsky about whether the color choice of 'green' was intentional; however, Chomsky denied any intentions or influences, especially the hypothesized influence from Andrew Marvell's lines from "The Garden" (1681). One of the first writers to have attempted to provide the sentence meaning through context is Chinese linguist Yuen Ren Chao (1997). Chao's poem, entitled Making Sense Out of Nonsense: The Story of My Friend Whose "Colorless Green Ideas Sleep Furiously" (after Noam Chomsky) was published in 1971. This poem attempts to explain what "colorless green ideas" are and how they are able to "sleep furiously". Chao interprets "colorless" as plain, "green" as unripened, and "sleep furiously" as putting the ideas to rest; sleeping on them overnight whilst having internal conflict with these ideas. British linguist Angus McIntosh was unable to accept that Chomsky's utterance was entirely meaningless because to him, "colorless green ideas may well sleep furiously". As if to prove that the sentences are in fact meaningful, McIntosh wrote two poems influenced by Chomsky's utterance, one of which was entitled Nightmare I.

In 1985, a literary competition was held at Stanford University in which the contestants were invited to make Chomsky's sentence meaningful using not more than 100 words of prose or 14 lines of verse. An example entry from the competition, by C. M. Street, is:

Research has been done by implementing this into conversations on text. Research led by Bruno Galantucci at Yeshiva University has implemented the meaningless sentence into real conversations to test reactions. They ran 30 conversations with 1 male and 1 female slipping "colorless green ideas sleep furiously" eight minutes into the conversation during silence. After the conversation, the experimenters did a post conversation questionnaire, mainly asking if they thought the conversation was unusual. Galantucci concluded that there was a trend of insensitivity to conversational coherence. There are two general theories that were garnered from this experiment. The first theory is that people tend to ignore the inconsistency of speech to protect the quality of the conversation. In particular, face to face conversation has a 33.33% lower detection rate of nonsensical sentences than online messaging. The authors further explain how humans often disregard some contents of every conversation. The second theory the authors deduced is that effective communication may be subconsciously undermined when dealing with conversational coherence. These conclusions support the idea that phatic communication plays a key role in social life.

Since the 1950s, the field has used techniques more in line with Chomsky's approach. However, this all changed in the mid 1980s, when researchers started to experiment with statistical models, convincing over 90% of the researchers in the field to switch to statistical approaches. In 2000, Fernando Pereira of the University of Pennsylvania fitted a simple statistical Markov model to a body of newspaper text, and showed that under this model, Furiously sleep ideas green colorless is about 200,000 times less probable than Colorless green ideas sleep furiously. This statistical model defines a similarity metric, whereby sentences which are more like those within a corpus in certain respects are assigned higher values than sentences less alike. Pereira's model assigns an ungrammatical version of the same sentence a lower probability than the syntactically well formed structure demonstrating that statistical models can identify variations in grammaticality with minimal linguistic assumptions. However, it is not clear that the model assigns every ungrammatical sentence a lower probability than every grammatical sentence. That is, colorless green ideas sleep furiously may still be statistically more "remote" from English than some ungrammatical sentences. To this, it may be argued that no current theory of grammar is capable of distinguishing all grammatical English sentences from ungrammatical ones.

The French syntactician Lucien Tesnière came up with the French language sentence "Le silence vertébral indispose la voile licite" ("The vertebral silence indisposes the licit sail"). In Russian schools of linguistics, the glokaya kuzdra example has similar characteristics.

The game of exquisite corpse is a method for generating nonsense sentences. It was named after the first sentence generated in the game in 1925: Le cadavre exquis boira le vin nouveau (the exquisite corpse will drink the new wine). In the popular game of "Mad Libs", a chosen player asks each other player to provide parts of speech without providing any contextual information (e. g., "Give me a proper noun", or "Give me an adjective"), and these words are inserted into pre composed sentences with a correct grammatical structure, but in which certain words have been omitted. The humor of the game is in the generation of sentences which are grammatical but which are meaningless or have absurd or ambiguous meanings (such as 'loud sharks'). The game also tends to generate humorous double entendres.

There are likely earlier examples of such sentences, possibly from the philosophy of language literature, but not necessarily uncontroversial ones, given that the focus has been mostly on borderline cases. For example, followers of logical positivism hold that "metaphysical" (i. e. not empirically verifiable) statements are simply meaningless; e. g. Rudolf Carnap wrote an article in which he argued that almost every sentence from Heidegger was grammatically well formed, yet meaningless. The philosopher Bertrand Russell used the sentence "Quadruplicity drinks procrastination" in his "An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth" from 1940, to make a similar point; W. V. Quine took issue with him on the grounds that for a sentence to be false is nothing more than for it not to be true; and since quadruplicity does not drink anything, the sentence is simply false, not meaningless. Other arguably "meaningless" utterances are ones that make sense, are grammatical, but have no reference to the present state of the world, such as Russell's "The present King of France is bald" (France does not presently have a king) from "On Denoting" (also see definite description).

Another approach is to create a syntactically well formed, easily parsable sentence using nonsense words; a famous such example is "The gostak distims the doshes". Lewis Carroll's Jabberwocky is also famous for using this technique, although in this case for literary purposes; similar sentences used in neuroscience experiments are called Jabberwocky sentences. In a sketch about linguistics, British comedy duo Fry and Laurie used the nonsensical sentence "Hold the newsreader's nose squarely, waiter, or friendly milk will countermand my trousers." The Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "Darmok" features a race that communicates entirely by referencing folklore and stories. While the vessel's universal translator correctly translates the characters and places from these stories, it fails to decipher the intended meaning, leaving Captain Picard unable to understand the alien.