A Matter of Context

It was the great linguist and political activist Noam Chomsky who, when discussing the structure of sentences, came up with one of the most talked about linguistic examples in the history of linguistics. It was this:

Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.

I retain the American spelling for the sake of authenticity. Now, as we can see, this sentence is perfectly grammatical. It has a Subject ('colourless green ideas') a Predicate ('sleep') and an adverbial Adjunct ('furiously'). But the point Chomsky was making when he constructed this sentence was that it is possible to create sentences which, despite being grammatically correct, are totally meaningless.

How can an idea be colourless AND green? And how can an idea, which is an abstract concept, be said to sleep, which is an attribute of animate, concrete things like people or dogs? And how can anything sleep furiously? Isn't sleep supposed to be peaceful?!?!?

Now many linguists, myself included, believe that in his theory of language, Chomsky misses the point. Yes, we agree that the above sentence and others like it lacks meaning on one level, but surely, Chomsky ignores the fact that there may be a context or a number of contexts in which such a sentence MIGHT be used appropriately. One of them is in books on linguistics and grammar! If we ignore this linguistic truth, we cannot truly understand how language works in the real world.

So, with these thoughts in mind, I couldn't help noticing the following example of fairly grammatical but "meaningless" language, which I found recently in a shop near my house in Kuching:



In case you can't make out the words, this is a picture of a child's toy rifle, with the somewhat disturbing epithet "Every Styles Fully Wonderful" printed quite cheerfully on the packing.

Now, apart from the obvious agreement error with 'every styles', this sentence is fascinating and demands attention from grammar loonies like myself. Now what, I was asking myself, on Earth has a child's toy rifle, complete with shoulder strap and telescopic eye piece, go to do with "every styles" being "fully wonderful?"

This, I argue, is the source of the ambiguity. Styles, in my own idiolect, are not usually thought of as being wonderful, fully or otherwise. And how can the word 'style' be applied to a toy gun?

Perhaps this is some LSD-crazed post-911 comment on the beauty and wonder of guns and warfare. Or, more likely, this is a poorly translated sentence, probably rendered by an overworked Chinese or Japanese translator with no time to use a good dictionary.

The point of all this is that, even though the sentence appears strange, we can still understand it on one level. This is because, even though we don't have any access to the context in which it was created, we can create the context as we go along. We are forced to make sense of the sentence, even though it doesn't really fit into our normal frameworks of meaning.

Here is another example that came to me recently through the Internet, in a spam email message:

"The now? Then, I've been overcome safely
and his mouth eyes".

This example, which was intended to fool Internet spam filtering software, is grammatical but semantically odd, rather like the colourless green example above. However, it might not be as ambiguous as it seems. I'm sure many of you can think of a science fiction world in which this example makes sense - a world in which "the now" is a real place in which one can be overcome safely by a creature who can see with his mouth!! We could of course go on speculating: maybe the eyes are inside the mouth...whatever!

The moral of this piece, dear readers, is that when we encounter language, it is not enough to merely ask "is it correct?" or "can we say that?" or even "should we say that?". If we do this, we are placing ourselves in a judgmental straitjacket which restrains us from really understanding the nature of language. This is because all writing and speech takes place in a context. Everything we utter or write down, even if it doesn't appear so, has some meaning when seen in its context. And if the context isn't apparent, we create one.

The consequence of this is that if language is meant to communicate, then even when we appear to get it wrong, we are still getting it right! Pedantic language teachers and linguistic purists would do well to heed this.....