Colorless Green Ideas: The Experiment

"Colorless green ideas sleep furiously."

- Noam Chomsky

This revolutionary sentence was composed by Noam Chomsky in 1957 to demonstrate that, contrary to popular opinion of the time, grammar is NOT the fundamental underlying structure of language. The sentence, though in agreement with the grammatical structure of Standard English, is nonsensical. In other words, meaning is not necessarily dependent on sentence structure.

I will break down Chomsky's sentence structure word-by-word: Adjective. Adjective. Subject. Verb. Adverb.

Now I will write a new sentence that makes more concrete sense but which follows the exact same grammatical structure:

"Colorful little fish swim quickly."

What I will do next is to mix up the word order of my sensical, structurally sound (by mainstream English standards) sentence and see if meaning may still be derived from it:

"Quickly swim fish little colorful." (Adv. V. Sub. Adj. Adj.)
"Fish colorful little swim quickly." (Sub. Adj. Adj. V. Adv.)
"Little fish colorful quickly swim." (Adj. Sub. Adj. Adv. V.)
"Swim little colorful fish quickly." (V. Adj. Adj. Sub. Adv.)
"Colorful swim quickly little fish." (Adj. V. Adv. Adj. Sub.)

What these sentences do is to make a mishmash of ideas (colorless green ones, of course) that form a picture in the mind of, well, colorful little fish swimming quickly. DEFINITE MEANING MAY STILL BE DERIVED FROM A NON-STRUCTURALLY SOUND SENTENCE, HOWEVER NOT FROM A STRUCTURALLY SOUND SENTENCE THAT HAS NO DEFINITE MEANING IN ITSELF.

If I were to alter the sentence "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously" in the same way, it would also make about as much sense as in its original form. :)