meaning vs. grammar
Hal and the Cell Phone
Tweet I love my cell phone and would not like to go back to a world without them. But like Hal, the bossy computer in Stanley Kubric’s great film, 2001: a Space Oddysey, these little machines are messing with our heads. I teach first-year university students, and have noticed two new developments this year: 1) […]
An Awkward Sentence
Tweet Linguistic principles come into play most effectively in the space between drafts. The sentence in bold below is part of an essay in which the student discusses school funding. “What else would this money be used for? New textbooks for classes, having new and better school utilities, and making school buildings look better. These […]
Colorless Green Ideas
Tweet Grammatical correctness and meaning are two separate functions, which don’t always coexist. Here is a sentence, devised by Noam Chomsky, which illustrates a perfectly grammatical sentence, but has no meaning: Colorless green ideas sleep furiously. Here is a sentence which has meaning (though the reader has to construct it), but is grammatically incorrect: Another […]