List of linguistic example sentences

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The following sentences illustrate various linguistic phenomena:

• Independence of syntax:

  Colorless green ideas sleep furiously. (Noam Chomsky)

• Lexical ambiguity:

  Time flies like an arrow...

  Fruit flies like a banana. (Groucho Marx)

• Syntactic ambiguity:

  The man saw the boy with the telescope.

• Syntactic ambiguity and incrementality (see Garden path sentence):

  The horse raced past the barn fell.

• Semantic scope ambiguity and anaphora resolution:

  Every farmer who owns a donkey beats it.

• Parallel between noun phrases and verb phrases with respect to argument structure:

  the enemy destroyed the city

  the enemy's destruction of the city