2.4 Just talking nonsense?

Figure 3 A clockwork orange.

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An orange cut in half showing gears and mechanisms inside.

Figure 3 A clockwork orange.

Purely in terms of grammatical structure, it is possible to put almost any adjective in front of any noun. But this could easily produce nonsense: a round square, heavy feathers, jealous parsnips. Squares are, by definition, not round, feathers are proverbially light, and root vegetables don’t have emotions (so far as we know!). But these examples are not ungrammatical – it’s just that the meaning doesn’t match up with the world as we know it. In fact with a bit of imagination we can probably think of a context in which the phrases work. A children’s story about talking (and emotional) vegetables isn’t too hard to imagine, and if someone in a science fiction story was shrunk to the size of a flea they probably would find feathers rather weighty. The round square still poses a challenge, but not necessarily because of grammar.

As you can see, apparent nonsense can challenge us to produce creative interpretations. This is something that has been exploited by writers down the ages. A famous example comes from George Orwell’s Animal Farm (1945):

If things are equal, they are the same as each other (at least in some way), so how can something be ‘more’ the same? The ironic explanation is that some of the animals in Orwell’s political parable are in fact more privileged than others.

Another example comes from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet:

How can something unpleasant (sorrow) also be pleasant (sweet)? It is, of course, all part of the crazy mixed-up experience of young love!

We can find further examples in everyday language: a living death, a deafening silence. These may once have been original and attention-grabbing, but repetition has long since turned them into the clichés.

Activity 4 Famous nonsense

Timing: This activity should take around 10 minutes

This is one of the most famous (and supposedly nonsensical) sentences in modern linguistics:

Colourless green ideas sleep furiously

What do you think it might mean? Why do you think it was written?

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Watch the video to find out if you were right.

Download this video clip.Video player: Video 1 The meaning of colourless green ideas

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Transcript: Video 1 The meaning of colourless green ideas

NARRATOR

In his early and very influential book Syntactic Structures 1957, the American linguist Noam Chomsky wanted to show that grammar was independent of meaning. To do this, he presented this sentence. Colourless green ideas sleep furiously. He contrasted this with the following string of exactly the same words. Furiously sleep ideas green colourless. He argued that we recognise the grammaticality of the first string of words. In other words, that it is a sentence while we see that the second is just the list of words.

The supposedly meaningless but grammatical sentence colourless green ideas sleep furiously caught the imagination of some of Chomsky's peers. It also piqued the interest of many others who had never read any of his work. Take a moment now to think about what this sentence might mean. There have been various attempts to provide a context in which colourless green ideas sleep furiously has a plausible meaning and it has been worked into more than one poem.

It helps that green doesn't have to refer to colour as it has several other meanings. Naive, inexperienced, environmental, envious, etc And colourless can mean lacking strong character. All this imaginative activity seems to have rather puzzled Chomsky himself, but it doesn't invalidate his basic point.

It certainly reminds us that we have an instinct to find meaning in language even when it seems to make little sense. This interpretive ability of ours is an essential part of what makes communication possible and it may be just as important to successful communication as our knowledge of the rules of grammar. It also may help to explain why computers which can already beat us at sums, chess and other strictly rule based activities are still a long way from being able to communicate freely in human language.

End transcript: Video 1 The meaning of colourless green ideas

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Video 1 The meaning of colourless green ideas

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Comment

The point of colourless green ideas sleep furiously was to create a sentence which was grammatically correct, but which had no possible meaning. However, our understanding of language isn’t as simple as Chomsky suggested. If we try hard enough, we can start to imagine scenarios where this sentence might make some sense even though, at first, it might seem like nonsense. If you came up with any possible meanings for the sentence, you were not alone!