Chomsky's argument doesn't hinge on whether a meaning can be found for
the sentence, and it wasn't long after the publication of Aspects of the
Theory of Syntax that people had come up with several contexts in which
the sentence would make perfect sense.  His point rather was the
discreteness of syntax and semantics, that a sentence can be
syntactically well-formed regardless of whether it makes sense
semantically or not.

Herb

-----Original Message-----

Kent,
   I'm sure my mind has been overly warped by literary criticism and
critical theory, but what are the principals by which Chomsky would call
this "nonsense?"  Is its nonsense status something we are expected to
agree on, or does he make an argument for it? Has anyone ever offered a
sensible reading of it, or tried to?

Craig

Kent Johnson wrote:

>This is a sentence Chomsky offers as example of nonsense that still
>makes grammatical sense. Someone, in a discussion elsewhere on
cognitive
>grammar, asserted that at least one of the terms could be parsed more
>than one way. I am trying to see how that could be. I think he is
>referring to "green," though without the comma one is forced to read it
>as part of the noun and not as an adjective, no? Is there more than one
>way to parse this sentence?
>
>Kent
>
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