In that other thread, I said what I thought grammar is and how it does not include orthography. In this thread I'd like to look at some perfectly grammatical sentences and how they mean or don't mean.

It was Chomsky, roughly five decades ago, who wrote the following:

1. Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.

It was an example of a nonsensical, but grammatical, sentence. It has a subject and a predicate. It has adjectives, a noun, a verb, and an adverb. These parts of speech are assembled in the normal manner. The problem with the sentence is one of meaning. Human beings being what they are have tried to create contexts within which the sentence might be said to have meaning, but I think you get the idea. This is why grammar (at least for generativists) does not include semantics, although parts of it are related to that field of study.

Chomsky was not the first to notice this disconnect between grammaticality and sense. Lewis Carroll and Edward Leary both carved out a small niche in literature in the 19th century exploiting this disconnect. Think of some of those poems, like Jabberwocky or Leary's limericks.

The next example comes from Bertrand Russell:

2. The current king of France is bald.

He came up with this to show how a perfectly grammatical sentence can be (logically) untrue. This sentence skirts dangerously close to literature. Entire books have been written where almost none of the sentences are true. We can still understand them, and their truth has nothing to do with grammar, orthography, style, or the author's intentions. Truth has to do with logic, and logic is not a part of grammar.

Now comes a novelist, E.M. Forster:

3a. The king died and then the queen died.
3b. The king died and then the queen died of a broken heart

Forster famously said that (3a) is merely a story, (3b) is a plot, because the latter not only has a causal connection, but also an emotional element. Although (3b) is the world's shortest novel, I have no way of even determining its veracity.

As for spelling and punctuation, I suppose it seems like a no-brainer to me that these two things have nothing to do with grammar that it is hard for me to conjure up a context in which they do. I think it may be because I have been exposed to texts that are older than two centuries. I am currently reading through Henslowe's Diary which was written in the late 16th and early 17th centuries in Early Modern English. It's main claim to fame is that it records some financial dealings with the companies that put on some of Shakespeare's plays. It is not a facsimile of the MS in the sense that the text has been printed in a modern typeface, but the spelling, punctuation, and abbreviations have been left as they are in the MS. There are hardly any sentences in this diary, but if you look at one of Shakespeare's quartos or the First Folio you will see some beautiful poetry, but the spelling and punctuation are nothing like we do them today. The orthography used in the First Folio probably isn't even Shakespeare's, but one or two of the typesetters who worked for the printer who published the book.


Ceci n'est pas un seing.