Where's English?

Publisher Summary Chomsky's original conception of a language was that it was a set of strings of elements (for example, strings of words, morphemes, phonemes, or phonetic segments). Membership in the set was believed to be easy to determine: Grammatical sentences would be read and reacted to normally, while ungrammatical ones would be read with a special list intonation and would elicit bizarreness reactions. This statement is well explained with the help of a famous pair of examples: “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously” and “Furiously sleep ideas green colorless”. Chomsky held the first of these to be fully grammatical, though semantically anomalous while claiming that the second, which is the same as the first except that the word order is reversed, was not only semantically anomalous but also syntactically ill-formed. The chapter discusses the experiment and its result that explains that English does not exist independently of those who speak it. The sentences of a language seem to be viewed by speakers as falling into three groups: a core, a bog, and a fringe. There are fairly clear differences between linguists and normal. There are also differences between native and foreign speakers, with the latter tending to reject more sentences than the former do and also tending strongly to make fuller use of all four grades than the former do.