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Demonstrations of sentences which are unlikely to have ever been said, although the combinatorial complexity of the linguistic system makes them possible. Colorless green ideas sleep furiously (Noam Chomsky): example that is grammatically correct but based on semantic combinations that are contradictory and therefore would not normally occur.
Example: The ghetto was ruled by neither German nor Jew; it was ruled by delusion. (from Night, by Elie Wiesel) In this sentence, Wiesel uses two parallel independent clauses written in the passive voice. The first clause establishes suspense about who rules the ghetto, and then the first few words of the second clause set up the reader with ...
For example, the sentences "Pat loves Chris" and "Chris is loved by Pat" mean roughly the same thing and use similar words. Some linguists, Chomsky in particular, have tried to account for this similarity by positing that these two sentences are distinct surface forms that derive from a common (or very similar [1]) deep structure.
[1] [2] It contains the now-famous sentence "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously", [3] which Chomsky offered as an example of a grammatically correct sentence that has no discernible meaning, thus arguing for the independence of syntax (the study of sentence structures) from semantics (the study of meaning). [4] [note 1]
A periodic sentence is a sentence with a stylistic device featuring syntactical subordination to a single main idea, which usually is not complete until the very end of the sentence. [1] The periodic sentence emphasizes its main idea by placing it at the end, following all the subordinate clauses and other modifiers that support the principal ...
The repeated sentences or clauses provide emphasis to a central theme or idea the author is trying to convey. [1] Parallelism is the mark of a mature language speaker. [2] In language, syntax is the structure of a sentence, thus parallel syntax can also be called parallel sentence structure. This rhetorical tool improves the flow of a sentence ...
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The second example pairs a gerund with a regular noun. Parallelism can be achieved by converting both terms to gerunds or to infinitives. The final phrase of the third example does not include a definite location, such as "across the yard" or "over the fence"; rewriting to add one completes the sentence's parallelism.