IQ issue

[William S. Lear]

On Mon, February 8, 1999 at 07:22:10 (-0500) Margaret writes:
>...
>He does indeed think form and content are distinct.
>He's a little bit famous in psycholinguistics for the
>now-universally-accepted notion of 'deep structure'
>(content) vs 'surface structure' (form).  
>
>The famous example of Chomsky's alluded to by Paul is
>illustrative -- 'colorless green ideas sleep
>furiously'.   If we're native speakers, we immediately
>recognise that the form is fine -- it conforms to all
>our syntactic rules for sentences -- and that
>'well-formedness' by itself conveys a tantalising sense
>of meaningfulness.   
>
>But looking at the deep structure of the sentence --
>the actual meaning -- reveals that it's nonsensical.
>The rules of deep structure say, for example, that
>concepts cannot meaningfully have contradictory values.
>Thus, even if we grant that the concept of 'idea' can
>somehow (poetically, maybe) have a color property, that
>color property cannot have both 'colorless' and 'green'
>values at the same time.  
>
>Form is fine, content is rubbish.  Two different
>issues. 

Actually, I think your example is completely wrong.  You are confusing
form/content with deep/surface structures.  According to Chomsky, "the
syntactic component of a grammar must specify, for each sentence, a
*deep structure* that determines its semantic interpretation and a
*surface structure* that determines its phonetic interpretation.  The
first of these is interpreted by the semantic component; the second,
by the phonological component" (*Aspects of the Theory of Syntax*,
p. 16).

Incidentally, here's an interview found on http://www.worldmedia.com:

Chomsky:
Well, a small industry has been spawned by one linguistic
example, namely, Colorless green ideas sleep furiously,
which has been the source of poems and arguments and
music and so on. 

Howard Lasnik:
This is a very interesting sentence because it shows that syntax can
be separated from semantics, that form can be separated from
meaning. Colorless green ideas sleep furiously. Doesn't seem to mean
anything coherent but sounds like an English sentence. If you read it
back to front -- furiously sleep ideas green colorless -- that
wouldn't sound like English at all.

Chomsky:
Well that tells us that there's more to what determines the structure
of a sentence than whether it has meaning or not...

Howard Lasnik:
For a sentence to be sentence of English in terms of its structure, it
doesn't seem to matter much what the words mean or whether they go
together in a meaningful way, [what matters is] just that they're
together in a way that obeys the rules of syntax.

Bill