2.
a. What is the significance of Chomsky’s made-up sentence ‘Colorless green ideas sleep furiously’?
The significance of Noam Chomsky’s nonsensical, made up sentence ‘Colorless green ideas sleep furiously’ is to prove his theory that there is a specific way to (and not to) put words together in a sentence and is also used by Chomsky as an example to demonstrate his belief that language is composed of sentences which are both finite in length, as well as being made up of a finite set of elements (Chomsky, 1957). This sentence uses normal English words and follows the rules of English syntax however it does not hold any meaning which is why it has become such a point of interest for linguists.
Chomsky has a theory of language universals which is based upon the idea that all languages are built on the same structure and that humans have the innate ability to identify this. In his work Syntactic Structures, Chomsky highlights that a speaker of English would read ‘Colorless green ideas sleep furiously’ using ‘normal sentence intonation’ (Chomsky, 1957, p.16) which proves his theory that humans have an innate understanding of what grammatical sentences should look and sound like. Speakers would identify Chomsky’s sentence as grammatically correct and recite it in the same way they would any grammatically correct sentence which thus supports Chomsky’s theory of language universals.
One of Chomsky’s main concerns when it comes to language is syntax and ‘Colorless green ideas sleep furiously’ holds significance as it supports Chomsky’s argument that a grammatical sentence is one which follows his theory of ‘phrase structure’ (Chomsky, 1957, p. 26). This theory’s aim is to prove, at a basic level, that a grammatical sentence is one that is made of a noun phrase and a verb phrase. By using this formula, Chomsky believes that we are open to infinite amounts of sentences which shows the human capability of creativity within language, rather than seeing language as a stimulus response like other linguists.
Noam Chomsky’s linguistic and syntactic ideas had an extremely heavy influence on 20th and 21st Century linguistics, even if they were not all accepted by everyone. Chomsky, known by some as ‘the father of modern linguistics’, roots himself in biolinguistics which is the study of the evolution of language and particularly its biological nature. When it comes to linguistics, Chomsky considers it to be a branch of cognitive psychology, showing us that he is a believer in innate grammar and language usage – a theory that is still widely debated by many professionals.
As he is heavily invested in biolinguistics, Chomsky’s main focus of study is on how grammatical and syntactic competence is at least somewhat innate and he implies that children learning their first language do not need to learn all features as some of them are biologically rooted in humans. He attributes this to a Language Acquisition Device (LAD) which differentiates human children from other baby animals when it comes to acquiring language. This LAD allows children to produce infinite sentences even when they have not heard these sentences before, showing that, according to Chomsky, humans must have some innate ability to learn language since there is a large gap between the linguistic stimuli that children are exposed to and the eventual vast linguistic knowledge that most humans acquire – this was coined by Chomsky as the ‘argument from the poverty of the stimulus’ (Chomsky, 1980, p. 34)
Using this, Chomsky theorised that if humans are born with an innate ability to use language then there must be a universal understanding of grammar within humans from birth rather than being learned from the environment around them. This links to the idea of competence which is a system of linguistic knowledge that speakers of a native language adhere to. Chomsky coined this concept as an expansion of his research into generative grammar and we use this concept to distinguish between grammatical and ungrammatical sentences. Chomsky’s made-up sentence ‘Colorless green ideas sleep furiously’ is his own way of proving the rules of grammar, since he created it with the intention of it being nonsensical but for it to conform to the rules of English grammar. Most speakers would agree that ‘Colorless green ideas sleep furiously’ makes perfect grammatical sense however, semantically, it holds no meaning.
Ultimately, Chomsky’s point when creating this sentence was to reinforce his theories of innate grammar, human creativity and the LAD feature in humans. ‘Colorless green ideas sleep furiously’ is significant since it was used to underpin Chomsky’s work on phrase structure as well as proving that humans are capable of using a rigid finite framework so that we can create infinite, creative sentences that nobody has heard before, such as ‘Colorless green ideas sleep furiously’.
References:
Chomsky, N. 1980. Rules and Representations. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, p. 34
Chomsky, N. 1957. Syntactic Structures. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, p. 16, p. 26
4.
a. Explain what Lakoff and Johnson mean by ‘conceptual metaphor’.
For Lakoff and Johnson, a conceptual metaphor is simply a metaphor which allows us to understand one idea in terms of another, however, these conceptual metaphors are prevalent in everyday life and influence our actions and thoughts. In their extremely influential book Metaphors We Live By, Lakoff and Johnson make ground-breaking claims that change the way in which many of us think about language and introduces us to ideas that would otherwise go unnoticed. When we see the word metaphor, many of us will see this as merely being a literary or poetic device which will add style to our writing. Lakoff and Johnson contest this and argue that, while metaphors are indeed something that we use to be more descriptive, they are actually a vital characteristic of language (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980). Even though a conceptual metaphor can be simply defined as understanding one idea in terms of another, this simple definition dominates the whole of our language as we live our lives using metaphors, each day, without being aware of it.
Elaborating on this, conceptual metaphors do not just shape our interaction but they inherently shape the way that we act and think which then means that we no longer just talk about concepts using metaphors, the concepts that we talk about become or encapsulate these metaphors. The most classic example of this is that ‘argument is war’ (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980, p. 4) which is a conceptual metaphor that is made up of a source domain – which is the concrete idea – and the target domain – which is the abstract idea. In this instance, ‘argument’ is our source domain and ‘war’ is our target domain. Since we think of an argument as a battle, we use metaphors such as someone’s argument being ‘weak’ or that participants ‘attack’ one another. These conceptual metaphors not only describe arguments in terms of war but, due to our use of them, arguments can actually be won or lost with the other participant being seen as an enemy, even when a verbal argument and a physical battle are two extremely different things. This highlights the systematicity of metaphors since the metaphorical expressions and concepts that we use are systematically linked which helps us to understand the metaphorical nature of what we do.
For example, due to the way in which Western culture has branded time as something very valuable, we have created the conceptual metaphor of ‘time is money’ and therefore ‘time is a limited resource’ which means that ‘time is a valuable commodity’ (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980, p. 9) and this conceptual metaphor dominates our lives. This conceptual metaphor does not necessarily exist in all cultures however it proves that one metaphorical concept can then lead to the creation of a whole system of concepts which relate to it.
Conceptual metaphors also can be divided into different types of metaphors and one of these is an orientational metaphor. Orientational metaphors are metaphors in which the concepts are to do with spatial orientation and can be culturally specific (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980). An example of concepts that are spatially related would be ‘up and down’ or ‘deep and shallow’ which are concepts that are antonyms of each other, showing that we use these to make a metaphor of other antonyms such as ‘happy and sad’ or ideas such as ‘past and future’. An example of this would be that happy is equivalent to being up and sad is the equivalent of down which is a social convention that most English speakers would conform to by using expressions such as “I’m feeling as high as a kite” to mean that they are extremely happy or “I’ve hit rock bottom” to mean that they are not in a positive emotional state. Also, in Metaphors We Live By, Lakoff and Johnson highlight how conceptual metaphors vary from culture to culture. For instance, speakers in other languages will see the future as being behind them while people in the Western culture will see the future as being in front of them and use orientational metaphors such as ‘looking forward to seeing you’ to show this.
Conceptual metaphors, clearly, are omnipresent in our day-to-day life and very interestingly influence how we view the world and also how we perceive certain concepts. Even more interestingly, as we can see through close analysis, metaphors can be found in the most unlikely sentences and utterances which shows just how much of a role they play in the English language and other languages.
References:
Lakoff, N & Johnson, M. 1980. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: The University of Chicago, p. 4, p. 9