"Colorless green ideas sleep furiously" is a sentence composed by Noam Chomsky in his 1957 Syntactic Structures as an example of a sentence that is grammatically correct (logical form) but semantically nonsensical. The term was originally used in his 1955 thesis "Logical Structures of Linguistic Theory". Although the sentence is grammatically correct, no obvious understandable meaning can be derived from it, and thus it demonstrates the distinction between syntax and semantics. As an example of a category mistake, it was used to show inadequacy of the then-popular probabilistic models of grammar, and the need for more structured models.
Read more about Colorless Green Ideas Sleep Furiously: Details, Attempts At Meaningful Interpretations, Statistical Challenges, Related and Similar Examples
Famous quotes containing the words green, ideas and/or sleep:
“Your hooves have stamped at the black margin of the wood,
Even where horrible green parrots call and swing.
My works are all stamped down into the sultry mud.”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)
“For later in the vast gloom of cities, only there you learn
How the ideas were good only because they had to die,
Leaving you alone and skinless, a drawing by Vesalius.”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)
“When I sleep I sleep and do not dream because it is as well
that I am what I seem when I am in my bed and
dream.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)