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A Few 'Language Miniatures'

The Orange Juice Seat

Or, the role of context in making sense

Now and then you've probably heard a sentence that seems completely nonsensical, one where you can't think up any context that would give it sense. At least until you hear a few words of context, and then the sentence seems to suddenly jump - sometimes comically - into perfect sense. You may even wonder why that didn't occur to you. Take for example the phrase in the title orange-juice seat. That sounds rather like nonsense, agreed? Now add the information that someone is being asked to sit down at a big table at the one place where they'll find a glass of orange juice. Doesn't it suddenly make sense?

Now let's try whole sentences. Suppose someone says

Powell thinks bananas.

That's a rather puzzling thing to say, because however readily we may refer to someone as 'bananas', we don't normally 'think bananas' but rather we think ideas. But now suppose we take one little step farther, and imagine a question those three words are an answer to -

What did Bush have for breakfast?

Doesn't that same 'impossible' sentence now suddenly become perfectly ordinary?

Now a more complicated one. A linguistics textbook once used this sentence as an example of nonsense:

Syntax is sure a whipped-cream dog.

Do you wonder what contortions might be necessary to make even this weird sentence into an ordinary one? Let's try painting in a situation: A teacher of English grammar has a dog named 'Syntax'. One evening the family is having a party that features strawberry shortcake. After they're done, the bowl of whipped cream still has some in it, so they put it down on the floor for the dog. He laps it up so enthusiastically that one of the kids laughs and says "Syntax is sure a whipped-cream dog!" ”

Then there's what is probably the most famous 'senseless-sentence' of them all:

Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.

This is a sentence Noam Chomsky concocted back in 1957 to make an unambiguous distinction between grammatical correctness and sense correctness. Two adjectives modify a noun, and that phrase is the subject of a verb, which is modified by an adverb. Grammatically, an impeccable sentence. But that doesn't mean it makes sense. Something can't be 'colorless' and 'green' at the same time, an abstraction isn't normally thought of as being able to 'sleep', and usually we don't think of true 'sleep' as able to be 'furious'.

A few years ago someone by the name of C.M. Street made an ingenious attempt to induce even this 'impossible' sentence to make sense.

It can only be the thought of verdure to come that prompts us in the autumn to buy these dormant white lumps of vegetable matter covered by a brown papery skin, and to lovingly plant them and care for them. It is a marvel to me that under this cover they are laboring unseen at such a rate within to give us the sudden awesome beauty of flowering bulbs. While winter reigns the earth reposes, but these colorless green ideas sleep furiously.

colorless	appears as	white
green		verdure
ideas		thought
sleep		dormant, reposes
furiously		laboring

• You're understanding the meanings of individual words, nearly all of which have a variety of senses you need to be familiar with. And in your native language, you normally are.
• You aren't understanding each word in isolation, but in a sentence context. This tells you how to know which ones are nouns, verbs, adjectives, prepositions and so on. The sentence also situates the communication in time, attitude and other meanings. But even this isn't really enough, because the same sentence may have any of a number of different senses.
• It's at this point that we get into what goes by the fancy name of disambiguation. At the same time your mind is doing all this, you're interpreting it all according to whatever real-world context the person you're listening to is communicating to you - or that you're guessing must reasonably be the case. Your instinctual knowledge that language makes sense impels you to construct a context.

All essays Copyright © 1998-2004 by William Z. Shetter
Go to Language Miniatures at http://home.bluemarble.net/~langmin/index.html

Got a question? Send it to me -- kmdavis@erols.com and I'll answer it.