VALENTINE'S DAY SPECIAL
"COLORLESS GREEN IDEAS": CHOMSKY'S CHALLENGE TO THE POETS?

In his first and ground-breaking book on linguistcs, Syntactic Structures (1957), Noam Chomsky uses the following sentence to illustrate how "semantic structure" and "syntactic structure" are two separate, distinct concepts:

"Colorless green ideas sleep furiously."

The thing to notice about this phrase is that it has proper grammatical (or syntactic) structure (subject, verb, predicate); yet it has no readily discernible meaning (what is called semantic structure).

Of course, a poet may say: "who are you to determine whether a phrase has meaning or not?" In fact, one could argue that Chomsky gives the phrase its meaning simply by using it to demonstrate that there are certain parameters on linguistic meaning. In reality, however, in Syntactic Structures Chomsky does not deal with Meaning in such a broad sense -- but only with meaning in the very mundane, narrow sense. To be sure, the phrase "colorless green ideas" may be found in any number of obscure poems and other such "far fetched contexts", to use Chomsky's words: the point is you won't find it in everyday language, the way you'd find the phrase "well ironed shirt".

Thus, poets need not fear: for the linguist has yet to place bounds (grammatical, semantic or otherwise) on their creative resources. So dream away, lover! Or, rather, dream furiously! Let not science ruin your Valentine.