List of linguistic example sentences

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This is a list of linguistic example sentences. They illustrate various linguistic phenomena.

Contents 1 Independence 2 Ambiguity 3 Word order 4 Parallels 5 References 6 See also 7 External Links

[edit] Independence

• Independence of syntax:

  Colorless green ideas sleep furiously. (Noam Chomsky)

[edit] Ambiguity

• Lexical ambiguity:

  Time flies like an arrow... Fruit flies like a banana. (Groucho Marx)

  Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.

  James while John had had had had had had had had had had had a better effect on the teacher.^[1]

• Syntactic ambiguity:

  The man saw the boy with the telescope.

  We saw her duck.^[2]

• Syntactic ambiguity and incrementality:

  The horse raced past the barn fell.

• Semantic scope ambiguity and anaphora resolution:

  Every farmer who owns a donkey beats it.^[3]

[edit] Word order

• Order of adjectives:

  The red big balloon.

• Paraprosdokian:

  I haven't slept for ten days, because that would be too long. (Mitch Hedberg)

• Syllepsis:

  He carried a strobe light and the responsibility for the lives of his men. (Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried)

  We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately. (Benjamin Franklin)

• Ending sentence with preposition (avoidance)

  This is the sort of English up with which I will not put. (Attributed by Gowers to Winston Churchill^[4])

• Ending sentence with preposition (extreme non-avoidance)

  The little girl says to her father, "What did you bring that book that I did not want to be read to out of about Down Under up for?"

[edit] Parallels

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

  The enemy destroyed the city.

  The enemy's destruction of the city.

[edit] References

1. ^ 3802 - Operator Jumble
2. ^ Solutions to Semantics Problems
3. ^ archive of CSI 5386 Donkey Sentence Discussion
4. ^ Discussed at Wikiquote

[edit] See also

• Garden path sentence, a sentence that illustrates that humans process language one word at a time
• Paraprosdokian, a figure of speech in which the latter part of a sentence or phrase is surprising or unexpected in a way that causes the reader or listener to reframe the first part

[edit] External Links

• The Trouble with NLP: Some additional demonstrations of why these and similar examples are hard for computers to deal with when attempting natural language processing.