He just made up such a sentence to illustrate his syntactic theory. Simply put, not all seemingly grammatical forms are meaningful. For example, green is an adjective and ideas are nouns. Although adjectives can describe nouns, the colorless green idea is meaningless.

Chomsky is a pioneer of transformational generative linguistics. He believes that the research object of linguistics is language ability, not language behavior, and language is the description of language ability. Chomsky's grammar rules were originally a classic theory, including basic part and transformation part. He believes that all sentences in a language can be deduced from a series of rules.

Through these rules, a series of grammatical sentences can be produced. Just like S = colorless green dot Sleep furningly, it is composed of NP (colorless green dot) +VP(Sleep furningly). This sentence is grammatical. But this sentence is unacceptable.

From the perspective of semantic collocation, colorless and green are contradictory, ideas and "color words" cannot be collocated, ideas and sleep cannot be collocated, and so on.

Correlation extension

Avram Noam avram Noam Chomsky (1928 65438+February 7th-) is an American philosopher. He is an honorary professor of linguistics at MIT. Chomsky's syntactic structure is regarded as the greatest contribution to theoretical linguistics in the 20th century.

Dr avram Noam Chomsky (avram Noam Chomsky,1928 65438+February 7th-) is an honorary professor of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Chomsky's generative grammar is regarded as the greatest contribution to theoretical linguistics in the 20th century.

The above contents refer to Baidu Encyclopedia-Noam Chomsky.