- (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} entangledbank) wrote,@ 2004-05-11 13:00:00 |
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phonologically meaningless
Escher sentences are grammatical (?) but meaningless. There are various other kinds meeting that description: semantic-compositionally meaningless ones like 'Colourless green ideas sleep furiously' and lexically meaningless ones like 'Iggle squiggs trazed wombly in the harlish goop'. So that's syntax, semantics (i.e. at LF), and lexicon (ie. word semantics) covered. Are there grammatical but phonologically meaningless sentences? (Google has no hits for that yet.)
How about this, with contrastive emphasis on something that can't take contrast, not syntactically, semantically, or pragmatically:
Escher sentences are grammatical (?) but meaningless. There are various other kinds meeting that description: semantic-compositionally meaningless ones like 'Colourless green ideas sleep furiously' and lexically meaningless ones like 'Iggle squiggs trazed wombly in the harlish goop'. So that's syntax, semantics (i.e. at LF), and lexicon (ie. word semantics) covered. Are there grammatical but phonologically meaningless sentences? (Google has no hits for that yet.)
How about this, with contrastive emphasis on something that can't take contrast, not syntactically, semantically, or pragmatically:
Jenny is taller THAN Susan.
