Thread by @hiphilangsci

In his Syntactic Structures (1957: 15), Noam Chomsky showed the independence of grammar by referring to the meaningless, yet grammatically well-formed (and famous) utterance below.

👉 Colorless green ideas sleep furiously

He was however not the first one to do that. 1/8
#histlx

Similarly, Lucien Tesnière (1893-1954) used the French sentence below as evidence for the independence of semantics and (syntactical and morphological) well-formedness.

👉 Le silence vertébral indispose la voile licite 'The vertebral silence indisposes the licit sail'

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Rudolf Carnap (1891-1970), in "Logische Syntax der Sprache" (1934: 2), also showed that even a meaningless sentence such as the one below is well-formed on the phonological, syntactic and on the morphological level.

👉 Piroten karulieren elatisch 'Pirots karulize elatically'
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In his "An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth" (1940:166), Bertrand Russel (1872-1970) demonstrates "that no ordinary language contains syntactical rules forbidding the construction of nonsensical sentences" such as the one below.

👉 Quadruplicity drinks procrastination.

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Charles Kay Ogden (1889-1947) and Ivor Armstrong Richards (1893-1979) make the same point in their "The Meaning of Meaning" (1923: 46) using the sentence below (which they take from Andrew Ingraham’s [1903: 154] Swain School Lectures).

👉 The gostak distims the doshes.

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Furthermore, Lev Shcherba (1880-1944) made this point with the Russian sentence made up purely of grammatically well-formed, yet meaningless, words.

👉 Глокая куздра штеко будланула бокра и курдячит бокрёнка (=Glokaya kuzdra shteko budlanula bokra i kurdyachit bokryonka).

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Speculative grammarians, e.g. Petrus Helias (c. 1100-1166) or Thomas of Erfurt (around 1300), discussed grammaticality and meaningfullness as well.

👉 Socrates habet hypotheticos sotulares cum categoricis corigiis 'Socrates has hypothetical shoes with categorical shoelaces'

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So even though it is arguably the best-known one, Chomsky’s "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously" was not the first sentence of its kind. The relationship between well-formedness and meaningfulness has been a topic in linguistic and philosophical literature for centuries.

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