List of linguistic example sentences
This is a list of linguistic example sentences. They illustrate various linguistic phenomena.
Independence
- Independence of syntax:
Ambiguity
- Lexical ambiguity:
- Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana. (Groucho Marx)
- Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.
- Rose rose to put rose roes on her rows of roses. (Robert J. Baran)
- James while John had had had had had had had had had had had a better effect on the teacher[1]
- 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!
- For my sign, please put more room between the Smith and and and and and Sons. ("The 'Smith' and 'and,' and 'and' and 'Sons'.)
- If the police police police police, who polices the police police?
- How much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?
- Syntactic ambiguity and incrementality:
- Embedding
- The rat the cat the dog bit chased escaped.[5]
- The girl the dog the boy hit bit cried.
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)
- Silence is golden, duct tape is silver
- 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[6])
- Throw your father down the stairs his hat.
- Throw the baby out the window a piece of bread.
- 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
- ^ 3802 - Operator Jumble
- ^ Solutions to Semantics Problems
- ^ Thematic Roles Along the Garden Path Linger
- ^ archive of CSI 5386 Donkey Sentence Discussion
- ^ Kimball, John (1973). "Seven principles of surface structure parsing in natural language". Cognition. 2: 15–47.
- ^ Discussed at Wikiquote
See also
- Garden path sentence, a sentence that illustrates that humans process language one word at a time
- Gradient well-formedness
- Grammaticality
- 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
- 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.