[PLUG-TALK] liguists and poets

[John Jason Jordan]

On Sun, 3 Jun 2012 20:38:49 -0700
Michael Rasmussen <michael at jamhome.us> dijo:

>While linguists argue, poets weep among the shadows.
>http://patriciafrisella.com/index.php?date=2008-02-10

It would have been more meaningful if they had understood what Chomsky
was saying:

"Noam Chomsky, seeking a sentence that had never before been uttered,
said, colorless green ideas sleep furiously. This string of words has
been discussed by linguists and spawned a literary competition which
challenged writers to make the sentence meaningful."

That is not correct. Chomsky was not seeking a sentence that had never
before been uttered. He was seeking a sentence that made no semantic
sense, yet was grammatically perfect. His point was that syntax is
separate from semantics. That's all he was trying to say.  And no one,
at least no linguist that I know of, has ever tried to make the
sentence more meaningful, because doing so would make it meaningless.