List of linguistic example sentences

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

Independence

*Independence of syntax:
*:Colorless green ideas sleep furiously. (Noam Chomsky)

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. [ [http://acmicpc-live-archive.uva.es/nuevoportal/data/problem.php?p=3802 3802 - Operator Jumble] ]
*:That that is is that that is not is not is that it it is (Although this is not grammatically correct as is.)
*:If it is it, it is it, if it is, it is it, it is!

*Syntactic ambiguity:
*:The man saw the boy with the binoculars.
*:We saw her duck. [ [http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~cs9414/Exercises/semantics.soln.html Solutions to Semantics Problems ] ]
*:They are hunting dogs.
*:The man drove through the restaurant.
*:The criminal experienced a seizure.
*:The constipated mathematician worked it out with a pencil.

*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. [ [http://web.archive.org/web/20070516160803/http://www.csi.uottawa.ca/~kbarker/teach/5386/donkey.html archive of CSI 5386 Donkey Sentence Discussion] ]

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)
*:He ran his company and the marathon.

*Ending sentence with preposition (avoidance)
*:This is the sort of English up with which I will not put. (Attributed by Gowers to Winston Churchill [ [http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Winston_Churchill#Disputed_quotations Discussed at Wikiquote] ] )
*:Throw your father down the stairs his hat.

*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?"

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.

References

ee 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

External links

* [http://specgram.com/CLIII.4/08.phlogiston.cartoon.zhe.html 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.