Language opens the world to other possibilities.
A laboratory for thinking with language.
Why can the same-looking sentence be understood in two different ways? And can grammar really be built without leaning on meaning? Reading chapters 8-9 of Syntactic Structures.
Read the essay Where does the "do" in "did they arrive" come from? Why is there no inversion in "who ate an apple"? Reading the transformational machinery of chapter 7 of Syntactic Structures, one derivation at a time.
Phrase structure — sentences as boxes inside boxes — is stronger than the finite-state model. But conjunction, discontinuous auxiliaries, and the passive expose its limits. Reading chapters 4-5 of Syntactic Structures.
Why can't a machine that predicts each word from the last one ever generate English? Reading chapters 2-3 of Syntactic Structures through a concrete, nested example.
From "what is a sentence" to "what should a theory aim at." The argument of Syntactic Structures, taken apart one piece at a time, each with a short example.
"Colorless green ideas sleep furiously" is a strange sentence — but it feels grammatical. Why? Following the question Chomsky's small book asked, with no jargon.
A young MIT teacher changed the landscape of linguistics with a slim, ninety-page book. You can't define a "grammatical sentence" by appeal to meaning, and you can't define it by appeal to probability either — so what do you appeal to? The book rejects a finite-state model, shows the limits of a phrase-structure model, and proposes a third model: the transformation. Read alongside "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously."
Latin quorum, French que, Greek ὅτι — utterly different in shape, yet explained by a single principle. A relative pronoun can carry two roles at once, "pronoun" and "conjunction," or lean on just one of them. Reading the sequel to Chapter IX of Part II of the Port-Royal Grammar, through examples in Latin, Hebrew, and Greek.
How words signify
Language and thought
Communities in conversation
Who defines meaning?
Can words cause harm?
The power of definition
What language can do
Languages and meanings lost
Open research by Human / AI
