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Full Idea
How do people identify subject and verb in the sentences "time flies like an arrow" and "fruit flies like an apple"?
Gist of Idea
How do we parse 'time flies like an arrow' and 'fruit flies like an apple'?
Source
Keith Devlin (Goodbye Descartes [1997], Ch. 1)
Book Ref
Devlin,Keith: 'Goodbye Descartes: the end of logic' [Wiley 1997], p.7
A Reaction
A nice illustration of the fact that even if we have an innate syntax mechanism, it won't work without some semantics, and some experience of the environmental context of utterances.
| 18006 | Chomsky's 'interpretative semantics' says syntax comes first, and is then interpreted [Chomsky, by Magidor] |
| 18007 | Syntax is independent of semantics; sentences can be well formed but meaningless [Chomsky, by Magidor] |
| 3507 | Universal grammar doesn't help us explain anything [Searle] |
| 2581 | Intuition may say that a complex sentence is ungrammatical, but linguistics can show that it is not [Block] |
| 8073 | How do we parse 'time flies like an arrow' and 'fruit flies like an apple'? [Devlin] |
| 21638 | Syntactic form concerns the focus of the sentence, as well as the truth-conditions [Hofweber] |
| 15347 | A theory of syntax can be based on Peano arithmetic, thanks to the translation by Gödel coding [Horsten] |
| 18008 | Generative semantics says structure is determined by semantics as well as syntactic rules [Magidor] |
| 18010 | 'John is easy to please' and 'John is eager to please' have different deep structure [Magidor] |