At 3:25 pm -0600 15/9/99, Ed Heil wrote:
>Leaving aside the question of the autonomy of syntax and semantics, I
>think there is a deep issue hidden in things like "colorless green
>ideas sleep furiously,"

[a lot of good stuff snipped]

>The maintained connection with "green" would be useful because if the
>rest of the sentence provided enough information that you could figure
>out what "green" must mean in this context, you can go back and encode
>that as a possible meaning of "green."
>

Yep - "colorless green ideas" makes perfectly good sense; it's just that
"green" is ambiguous out of context   :)

"green" has long had the meaning of 'unripe, immature, not perfectly
formed, inexperienced'.  I've come across many ideas in my time (some of
them being my own ideas :) which are imperfectly formed & born of
inexperience.

In more recent years we've seen "green" come to be used, particularly in a
political context, to mean 'concerned with care of the environment'; thus
'green ideas' could well mean "ideas concerned with care of the
environment" - we simply have to have the sentence in context to clear up
the asmbiguity.

"colorless"? - often means 'bland, neutral, lacking distinctive character'.
If you've never come across neutral, characterless ideas in your life, then
you're lucky!

So: "characterless, immature ideas" or "bland, neutral ideas concerning the
environment" - we need a context.

"Ah - but ideas can't sleep."  They most certainly can!  Many ideas lie
dormant for quite a time.  "But furiously dormant?" - 'furiously' surely
applies to the whole sentence?  These ideas are behaving in a furious
manner; unripe as they are, they're going around & around in the guy's head
asking the guy to let them loose so they are no longer dormant in his/her
brain but awake in the outside world.  Sounds a whole lot like some of my
conlanging ideas  :-)

Yeah - take a look among English language poets - you'll find sentences
much more enigmatic than ""colorless green ideas sleep furiously" if
they're taken out of context (a few are quite tough in context!).

>
>Tom Wier wrote:
>> Oh, I never meant to imply that they're completely unrelated --
>> indeed, there are highly related, but distinct notions.  I was merely
>> carrying on the generally accepted notion of the "autonomy of syntax":
>> a sentence like "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously" makes no
>> semantic sense whatsoever,

But it does - it just needs context.

Ray.