Nonsense? In no sense!

[muckefuck]

I recently got into a discussion in vianegativa's LJ about the nature of language. I don't think grande knew I was a linguist by training--I didn't know he had a background in communications until I checked out his profile--but we pretty well gave the game away by the stances we took.

He seemed to be arguing Chomsky's old line that grammar is all syntax. As proof, he pointed out that he could write grammatically correct nonsense sentences. (Some of you--those who don't scare from grues--will already be thinking of Chomsky's "Colourless green ideas sleep furiously" example, as I admit I was.) I responded:

Sure, you can write "nonsense" sentences. But even nonsense has a meaning and an interpretation! Even if there's no intelligible semantic interpretation of such a sentence, there's a pragmatic interpretation of what you were intending to express with such a sentence.

But it seems I ignored an even more fundamental point: How do we know the sentences are nonsense? By attempting to produce a "reasonable interpretation" and failing? Context is everything; even Chomsky's favourite example ended up being the subject of a literary contest, just to prove the point.

Thus Adam's Eden-plot in far-off time:
Colour-rampant fowers, trees a myriad green;
Helped by God-bless'd wind and temp'rate clime.
The path to primate knowledge unforseen,
He sleeps in peace at eve with Eve.
One apple later, he looks curiously
At the gardens of dichromates, in whom
colourless green ideas sleep furiously
then rage for birth each morning, until doom
Brings rainbows they at last perceive.
D. A. H. Byatt

No utterance exists in a void. We've learned to assign conventional interpretations to sentences in isolation, but we shouldn't take this as proof that those sentences have "literal" meanings that are only altered, as opposed to completely determined, by individual situations.

I can see why linguists have worked to demonstrate the independence of syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. It just makes things easier when you can concentrate on the "meaning" of a sentence without worrying about its structure or interpretation or pure structure without considering meaning or interpretation. However, simple answers are often wrong ones and tell us more about the researcher's biases than how things actually work in this messy, complicated world.