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Is women men girls love meet die a valid sentence?

up Is "women men girls love meet die" a valid sentence? If so, what does it mean?
vote113do
The sentence shows up in academic papers about the "Sausage Machine" for natural
wn vote
language processing. (A google will show up several results referring to this).
favorite

31
The general comment is:

(130) # Women men girls love meet die.

Frazier & Fodor predict that a sentence like (130) should be easy to process since it
can be analyzed entirely by the first stage processor. That is, all six words of the
sentence can be seen at the same time and hence the grammar should assign these
words the appropriate structure. This prediction is clearly wrong, since sentences like
(130) are at least as hard as sentences like (127)
From: this PhD Thesis
It doesn't seem to make sense. But from the context it is being used as a counter
 example of a sentence that is difficult (but not impossible) to understand, which some
systems (The "Sausage Machine") fail to interpret. Which means it must be
interpretable in the first place (unless I am misunderstanding the context).

meaning sentence sentence-structure part-of-speech

shareimprove this question edited Mar 27 '15 at 10:45 asked Mar 23 '15 at 5:02

Greenonline Lyndon White

5791419 1,19721121

Comments are not for extended discussion; this conversation has been moved to chat.
tchrist Jun 12 at 14:25
add a comment
19 Answers
activeoldestvotes

up The particular sentence is a poor attempt at making an example of a sentence that is

vote59do both grammatical but very difficult to process because of the multiple center
wn vote accepted
embedding.
Spelled out the sentence is supposed to mean:

Women (that men (that girls love) meet) die"

or

"Some girls love some men. Those men met some women. Those women died".
To make it more understandable, just look at one embedding at a time ("Women men
meet die." "Men girls love meet women.").

All these are legal (grammatical) transformations. But juggling all the references leads
to the difficulty in processing by a person.

A more intuitive example (makes more intuitive sense once separated all out) is:

"The rat the cat the dog bit chased escaped"

which expands more understandably to

"A dog bit a cat. That cat chased a rat. The rat escaped."
Presumably the sausage machine model allows easy processing of such center
embedded sentences, so the inference is that the sausage machine is not the best model
of processing that actual human brains do.

shareimprove this answer answered Mar 23 '15 at 13:37

 Mitch
41.4k1381174

10 Why do you call this a "poor attempt"? It seems to be pretty clear both how to assign structure to
the sentence and also that it is impossible to comprehend without doing so. It was the goal of the
author to produce such a sentence. "The rat the cat the dog..." is no more understandable withou
similar breakdown. WinnieNicklaus Mar 23 '15 at 18:44
16 @WinnieNicklaus Oh. I didn't make that clear. It is poor because 'loves' and 'meet' and 'dies' don
really say anything meaningful about men women and girls (they could have just as easily used
three other nouns and verbs). Is there something about these men that the girls love? Why did th
women meet them and why did they die? Seems like a strange and empty story. But for the rat,
cat, and dog, it all makes sense. Of course any 3 nouns and verbs should fit the pattern, but with
the rat, cat, and dog the phenomenon is easier to elucidate. Mitch Mar 23 '15 at 21:42
Another thing I didn't make clear is that a multiple center embedded sentence is supposed to be
difficult for a human to process even though it is ostensibly grammatical. My value judgement o
Wanner's sentence (about women men and girls) is just that it is just a little bit too much extra
difficult to understand for pedagogical purposes. Mitch Mar 24 '15 at 17:41
1 ... sense, is nevertheless difficult to understand. Once you introduce elements into the sentence
that don't make sense, you create an entirely different issue: Is the sentence difficult to understan
because we expect sentences to be rational and coherent and so we stumble over the illogic? Or
the sentence difficult to understand because of the "layered" construction? If I said, "Orange Sal
is fast", you'd likely stumble over the meaning for entirely different reasons. It doesn't make
sense, so you struggle to extract meaning, even though the grammar is simple and
straightforward. Jay Mar 25 '15 at 13:40
3 Making the sentence syntactically valid yet semantically absurd does have the effect of throwing
people off even more. "Cheese rats cats chase eat smells" might be marginally easier to parse to
some people because your brain more naturally matches "rats" with "eat", "cheese" with "smells
and so on. At a stretch. Jack M Mar 25 '15 at 22:57
show 2 more comments
up There's a nursery rhyme that starts like this:
vote91do
This is the house that Jack built.
wn vote
This is the cheese that lay in the house that Jack built.

This is the rat that ate the cheese

That lay in the house that Jack built.

This is the cat that chased the rat

That ate the cheese that lay in the house that Jack built.

This is the dog that worried the cat

That chased the rat that ate the cheese
That lay in the house that Jack built.
This is the cow with the crumpled horn
That tossed the dog that worried the cat
That chased the rat that ate the cheese
That lay in the house that Jack built.
and continues in a similar vein. We might imagine the following conversation.

A Oh, that was a nice cheese I sold to Jack the other day!
B Which cheese?
A The cheese the rat ate!
B Oh, OK. Hang on, which rat?
A The rat the cat chased, of course!
B Ah, so you're talking about the cheese the rat the cat chased ate, then?
A Um, what...?
B Well, you said it was the cheese the rat ate, right?
A Yes...
B The rat the cat chased?
A That's what I said.
B So it's the cheese pause the rat the cat chased pause ate!
A Haha, OK, I suppose so, but it doesn't sound right!
B Which cat is this, then?
A sigh...
The conversation continues in a similar way, until eventually...

B So you're talking about

the cheese
the rat
the cat
the dog
the cow tossed
worried
chased
ate
then?

A ???!!?
If we're going to use the full nursery rhyme, then the cheese in question is actually

The cheese the rat the cat the dog the cow the maiden the man the judge
the cock the farmer owned woke married kissed milked tossed worried
chased ate!
If that doesn't make sense to you, then don't worry - it shouldn't, if you're human! But it
really is an interesting fact that this sentence doesn't appear to make sense. In contrast
to what Mr Blow keeps saying, it really is not 'just that simple'. The strange thing is that
while the individual parts

the cheese the rat ate

the rat the cat chased
the cat the dog worried
the dog the cow tossed
 all make sense, we can't paste them together using logical rules and arrive at an
understandable sentence. This is surprising: normally, we could replace the phrase the
cheese in the sentence
The cheese was delicious.
with the cheese the rat ate to arrive at
The cheese the rat ate was delicious.
and we can make as many such substitutions as we like, so

The maiden bought the cheese from the judge.

becomes

The maiden the man kissed bought the cheese the rat ate from the judge
the cock woke.
which, though clumsy, still makes perfect sense. It's only when we start to introduce
defining clauses within defining clauses that our usual substitution rules stop giving us
sentences which we can process.

It is a peculiar limitation of the human brain, not a formal rule of language, that means
that the phrase

the cheese the rat ate

makes perfect sense, the phrase

the cheese the rat the cat chased ate

can be understood, but only with difficulty, and the longer phrases above look like
complete gobbledegook.

shareimprove this answer edited Mar 24 '15 at 10:44 answered Mar 23 '15 at 23:40

John Gowers
90168
add a comment
up The sentence is clearly concocted to show the practical limits in the depth to which our
vote87do natural ability to parse sentences applies recursively. (That one was not quite as bad.)
wn vote Language allows sentences to be modified by adding some auxiliary phrases, or
replacing some part by a more elaborate construct playing the same role in the context,
and it would be hard to state a clear theoretical limit on how far one can go with this;
however, obviously things become incomprehensible in practice at some point.

In the example the possibility to omit clarifying words and punctuation is abused to
obtain a very short but hard to decipher result. Though of course not proper English, I
think the following shows the structure of construction of this sentence most clearly.

Women (, [that] men (,[whom] girls love,) meet,) die.

If I had to restate the sentence for better transparency by just inserting some optional
elements, I would state it as
 Women, that men whom girls love meet, die.
Still not a beautiful sentence, but marginally comprehensible.

shareimprove this answer answered Mar 23 '15 at 10:08

Marc van Leeuwen

1,28548

4 Unfortunately, your transformed sentence now says something completely different because the
relative clause has become an unrestrictive one implying that all women are as described, while
the original did not. user21820 Mar 23 '15 at 14:35
5 @user21820: If it really bugs you, and if you find the result more readable, you may take out the
comma that precedes "that". I indicated the restrictive use of the clause is by using "that" rather
than "which" there, though I am aware that opinions differ on this point. My commas are used ju
to mark a pause and delimit that clause, and I'll do that when I feel it helps reading a sentence,
regardless of any grammatical rules. Marc van Leeuwen Mar 23 '15 at 15:06
20 +1 for getting the whole point of the sentence, which was not to express the thought most clearly
but to demonstrate a fact about our language faculties. WinnieNicklaus Mar 23 '15 at 18:53
1 Interestingly, if the inner-most noun of such a three-level embedding is I, then the sentence can b
quite readable. The cars people I hate drive are loud. Lynn Feb 28 '16 at 17:03
add a comment
up I would have no theoretical (as opposed to practical) problem with this sentence:
vote75do
The woman [that] the man [that] the girl loved had met [last week] died [earlier today].
wn vote
But to me a crucial break in coherence occurs in the sentence

The woman the man the girl loved met died.

because here the author tries to make met stand in for had met, forcing readers to make
sense of past actions that clearly have different moments of occurrence and durations,
without providing cues that the sentence's author could have used to clarify the
sequence of actions described. Notably, the man presumably met the woman before the
woman died, so the author really has no excuse to obfuscate that point by rendering
both the meeting and the dying in simple past.
Switching now to the all-simple-present iteration of the sentence

Women men girls love meet die.

we have to accommodate the oddly definitional sense of the sentence, to grasp its
meaning:

Women [that] men [that] girls love [happen to] meet [must] die.
If you were actually trying to convey the sense of that sentence intelligibly, I think you
would probably frame it in terms less like the original and more like this:

Women who meet men that girls love are sure to die.
(As, of course, is everyone else.)

I hesitated to answer this question because I'm not much interested in it as an exercise
in structural logic. But it seems to me that the only grounds on which one can claim that
"Women men girls love meet die" is "a valid sentence" is by quarantining validity a
considerable distance away from any commonsense approach to sentence construction
and interpretation that would normally guide a speaker seeking to be understood and a
listener trying to understand.

It may be that a heavily armed analyst can justify a bad sentence like the OP's under
some strained or mechanistic parsing of its components; but in my view (and invoking
the traditional wisdom of Flannery O'Connor), a speaker with a good sentence don't
need to be justified.

shareimprove this answer edited Mar 23 '15 at 7:54 answered Mar 23 '15 at 7:26

Sven Yargs
89.4k15160381

6 It looks like a German sentence, with all the verbs stacked at the end. Pulling out 'men girls love
as a noun-phrase X results in 'women X meet die' which is fairly intelligible.
[Link] Mar 23 '15 at 11:44
5 I don't see why the 'shift' from pluperfect to past breaks the sentence for you. The simple past
seems both a simpler and more natural choice to me: getting rid of the second relative clause for
simplicity, The woman (whom) the man met (last week, at the party, whatever), died (later on,
some point) is perfectly natural and fine to me. More so than had met would be in most
contexts I can think of. Janus Bahs Jacquet Mar 23 '15 at 13:28
64 Anyone who objects to the sentence because it is incomprehensible (or "completely silly BS") is
missing the point entirely. What the sentence demonstrates is that the application of simple,
common rules of gramar can result in constructions that we can't parse, which tells us something
about our language faculties. WinnieNicklaus Mar 23 '15 at 18:53
13 Please note that the OP asks two (and only two) specific questions : "Is 'women men girls love
meet die' a valid sentence? If so, what does it mean?" My answer attempts to respond to the
question of validity, first by trying to identify the sentence's meaning and second by addressing
(very briefly) the issue of what "validity" means in the context of human communication. I am n
offended by the sentence, nor do I think it is impossible to parse (with a lot of effort); but I do
think that a sentence's resistance to comprehension has a bearing on its validity as
communication. Sven Yargs Mar 23 '15 at 19:50
7 @SvenYargs The OP also adds parenthetically "Unless I am misunderstanding the context". The
 OP is indeed misunderstanding the context, so the first point of business should be correcting tha
-- the author presents the sentence as a counterexample to a theory which predicts it should be
easy to understand. WinnieNicklaus Mar 23 '15 at 21:52
show 10 more comments
up These are six words that have been carefully selected to match grammatical rules while
vote21do being incomprehensible to a human being. They are a puzzle that can be solved (as
wn vote some of the answers show).

Grammatical rules should reflect the reality of the language. The reality of the English
language is that if the complexity of a sentence is too high, it cannot be understood. A
perfect grammar would include this reality in its rules. With a sentence like this, the
perfect grammar rules would not just say how words can be combined into sentences,
but how each combination increases complexity, and what complexity is unacceptable.
To me, this sentence is beyond acceptable complexity and therefore not valid.

Since we rarely use complex sentences like this, those people who write down
grammatical rules don't care much about this. And if I wanted to communicate the
contents of the sentence, I might write

"Women die, whom men meet, whom girls love"

assuming that correct grammar is less important than writing a sentence that can be
understood. Or better

"When girls love men, and those men meet women, then the women die".

shareimprove this answer answered Mar 23 '15 at 12:01

gnasher729
1,20537

1 I like your characterization of this as a puzzle. Your opinion of a "perfect grammar" seems not
very carefully thought out... or actually, I guess what's bothering me is you don't take the context
of the sentence into account as well as some of the other answers do. Still, I think it's a useful
perspective! sumelic Mar 24 '15 at 7:20
Gah, I accidentally flagged this answer. Mods, please ignore the flag. user867 Mar 24 '15 at
23:38
3 Well, a "perfect grammar" would be operationally defined as one that accepts any valid English
sentence an rejects any invalid one, and we decide what is valid and what is not valid. Since
nobody can understand this sentence, it is not valid. Writing down the rules for the "perfect
grammar" is not easy. gnasher729 Mar 25 '15 at 12:32
add a comment
up Women men meet die
vote17do +
wn vote
Men girls love
=

Women men girls love meet die

So, similar to Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo... and John had had 'had'..., it is a valid
sentence, but how to parse it is completely non-obvious to even native speakers. And
that's the point the paper is trying to make: "Being parsable according to the rules of
grammar" is not the same as "naturally parsable to a human speaker".
shareimprove this answer answered Mar 24 '15 at 1:32

BlueRaja - Danny Pflughoe

8331713
add a comment
up The original source of the sentence is Eric Wanner (1980) The ATN and the Sausage
vote16do Machine: Which One is Baloney? Cognition, volume 8, pages 209-225.
wn vote Wanner also republished as "The Parser's Window" in The Congnitive Representation
of Speech1981, pages 211-223.
Wanner starts from the sentence:

a. [The beautiful young woman][the man the girl loved][met on a criuse ship in
Maine][died of cholera in 1972]. (brackets in original text)

Then he writes:

b. The woman the man the girl loved met died.

and finally

c. Women men girls love meet die.

Sentence "c" is preceeded by the comment "is very difficult to comprehend" in

Wanner's paper.

Wanner is commenting on Frazier and Fodor's 1978 "The sausage machine: A new two-
stage parsing model" Cognition, volume 6, pages 291-325 which discusses sentences a
and b, (excecpt sentence "a" had no brackets and the date was 1962).
Wanner's point is to rebute a hypothesis of Frazier and Fodor that sentence "a" is easier
to understand than sentence "b", because the bracketed blocks are about six words, six
words being the parser's window. Wanner points out that:

it is possible to construct an equivalent sentence which is short enough to fall entirely in

 the PPP's window yet is very difficult to comprehend:

c. Women men girls love meet die.

So in context it is understandable what meaning Wanner intends for "Women men girls
love meet die", but it is difficult to comprehend, which is Wanner's point.

shareimprove this answer edited Mar 27 '15 at 12:17 answered Mar 24 '15 at 16:10

DavePhD
6,7481528

Thank you ! This context clarifies a lot and explains why this example is not "poor" as some
people that did not bother reading the source affirmed... Jedai Mar 29 '15 at 18:52
add a comment
up Women men girls love meet die.
vote14do The sentence is perfectly grammatical. Here it is with the grammatically omisible
wn vote pronouns inserted:

Women whom men that girls love meet die.

It might be easier to parse with a determiner and a comma:

Any women whom men that girls love meet, die.

It can be glossed like this:

If men loved by girls meet women, the women die.

However, as the author of the sentence is exemplifying, it is incredibly difficult to
mentally parse this sentence, even though it is very short.

shareimprove this answer edited Mar 23 '15 at 13:40 answered Mar 23 '15 at 13:30

Araucaria
28.1k542101
add a comment
up Buildings collapse. Architects design buildings. Buildings architects design collapse.
vote13do
Universities train architects. Architects universities train design buildings.
wn vote
Buildings architects universities train design collapse.

Sentences linguists universities train design do, too.

shareimprove this answer answered Mar 24 '15 at 22:34

 H Stephen Straight
1,179612
add a comment
up Yes, it does make sense. Or at least it is in some sense, valid English. It is by no means
vote12do a good sentence though. It is a corner case, devised to be a counter example to that
wn vote particular parsing technique.

Consider (127) from the thesis you linked

(127) # The woman the man the girl loved met died.
It is a past tense, specific case of

(130) # Women men girls love meet die.

We can understand (parse) "The woman the man the girl loved met died." it in parts,
and it helps to assign names to the individuals:
Call Amy the Girl, Bill the Man, and Cathy the Woman.
"The woman (Cathy) the man (Bill) the girl (Amy) loved met died."
Amy loved Bill
Bill met Cathy
Cathy is dead
So: "Women men girls love meet die." says that in general that can happen: Men who
are loved by girls, meet women. These women do (generally) die
Ie, the fact that they are met by a man who is loved by a girl, does not render the
woman immortal.

Using a modern parse such as the Stanford Parser, we can see that it succeeds on #127:
(ROOT
(S
(NP
(NP (DT The) (NN woman))
(SBAR
(S
(NP
(NP (DT the) (NN man))
(SBAR
(S
(NP (DT the) (NN girl))
(VP (VBD loved)))))
(VP (VBD met)))))
(VP (VBD died))
(. .)))
But Not on #130:

(ROOT
(S
 (NP (NNP Women) (NNS men) (NNS girls))
(VP (VBP love)
(S
(VP (VB meet)
(VP (VB die)))))
(. .)))
shareimprove this answer edited Mar 30 '15 at 6:41 answered Mar 23 '15 at 5:02

Lyndon White
1,19721121

Does it really say that this can happen, or that it does happen? I would think it means the latter.
sumelic Mar 23 '15 at 5:05
Your right, it should be does. Editting.\ Lyndon White Mar 23 '15 at 5:06
3 Let's substitute the terms using your names: "Cathy Bill Amy loves meets dies". That is just as
incomprehensible as your original sentence. I put it to you that if either version of a contorted
sentence like this one cannot be understood without being supplemented by a convoluted (and in
this case, completely unconvincing) explanation, it does not, using any reasonable yardstick, mak
sense. Erik Kowal Mar 23 '15 at 6:09
3 And there's no need for a comma? I am dubious about its validity, although "Colorless green idea
sleep furiously" is your standard example of a perfectly grammatical but nonsensical sentence, I
have no trouble understanding its absurdity, whereas the quote "women men girls love meet die"
seems to defy logic. Mari-Lou A Mar 23 '15 at 6:10
1 @ErikKowal: You seem to have misunderstood the purpose of calling the names. I was not
suggesting that they were variables to be substituted in, just that It would help in the explanation.
have edited to clear that up I hope. (It is definitely a poor sentence, but it seems the authors claim
is a valid one)) Lyndon White Mar 23 '15 at 6:16
show 2 more comments
up Women die, eventually. Other things, like rocks, don't die.
vote7do
Men sometimes meet women, sometimes they meet rocks.
wn vote
Women men meet die. Rocks men meet don't die.

Not all men are equal. Some men are especially beloved by girls. Men girls love are
lucky.

Still, men girls love sometimes meet women. And women men girls love meet die.

In short, the meaning I get is: It may seem some of us are lucky some of the time, but
in the end it always turns out to be a sad story. We should abandon love and stick to
rocks.
 Human brains find this hard to understand.

shareimprove this answer answered Mar 23 '15 at 14:58

RemcoGerlich
743311
add a comment
up Yes. It's a tortured sentence, but its structure is clear when analyzed carefully. The
vote5do sentence "women men meet die" is clear enough women, that men meet, die. The full
wn vote example takes the embedding one level deeper; the noun "men" is replaced by the noun
phrase "men girls love" (men that girls love). Syntactically, it's a perfectly valid
replacement. Practically, it's enough to make people throw up their hands, and make
otherwise intelligent people claim that it's meaningless.

shareimprove this answer answered Mar 24 '15 at 1:59

hobbs
88449

1 Right analysis, wrong conclusion. If "syntactically" the sentence is "perfectly valid" but it leads
people to "claim that it's meaningless" then your definition of "syntactic validity" needs work. Thi
is crypto-prescriptivism--an argument that validity of language is dependent on something outside
of whether the hearer finds the speaker intelligible. dodgethesteamroller Mar 24 '15 at 16:21
@dodgethesteamroller some people fail to understand it. Some people also fail to understand me
when I speak in German doesn't mean there's anything wrong with my German. hobbs Jul 21
'15 at 14:47
add a comment
up Meaning of 'valid sentence'
vote5do In this question the main problem lies not within the particular sentence example, but
wn vote with the understanding of what does it mean for a sentence to be 'valid'.

This seems to be an illustration of a very simple point - if you have a formal technical
definition of 'valid sentences', it is still likely that you'll get sentences that match that
definition (and thus are formally 'valid') but still are incomprehensible to most native
speakers and thus actually are not part of their language, and/or the opposite case where
a sentence that is widely used in practice (and thus obviously is a part of the language) is
technically 'invalid'.

shareimprove this answer answered Mar 25 '15 at 8:35

 Peteris
24125
add a comment
up The statement only needs some punctuation.
vote4do
Women, Men, Girls: meet! love! die!
wn vote
Think, "Friends, Romans, Countrymen: Lend me your ears!"

shareimprove this answer answered Mar 24 '15 at 13:54

Placidia
1952

1 I like your lateral-thinking approach, but it's definitely not what the authors intended.
Hellion Mar 24 '15 at 14:59
3 I think the author deserves to be misunderstood here. :-) Sentences that require punctuation,
inflection, or slow analysis to understand, and altering the same, alters the meaning. Presenting it
without punctuation or inflection is an academic argument rather than an attempt to
communicate. Dronz Mar 24 '15 at 17:07
1 @Dronz Well, yes. The sentence was presented without punctuation as part of an academic
argument. Adding punctuation changes the intended meaning. Hellion Mar 24 '15 at 22:08
This can only be an assumption as the intended meaning is obscure. Martin Schwehla Mar 26 '1
at 18:24
add a comment
up Basic sanity checks:
vote-
1. Is it intended to be English? If not the question depends upon which language it is in
2dow (and it could be valid Forth).
n
vote 2. What is the grammatical subject, the grammatical verb and remainder of the main
clause. Else it fails a basic formal English test, and is either not a valid sentence or is in
an English-like language that is different from formal English.
It is an error, given a message, to assume you know the rules of the language the message is
written in. Agreement as to linguistic rules are by convention: formal English gives a means
for a large number of strangers to effectively communicate if we play by the same rules,
though this property of English is fading in preference to ad hoc informal conventions such
as Textspeak which allow the intended meaning to be figured out without the grammatical
complexity.

shareimprove this answer answered Mar 24 '15 at 10:56

 John Allsup
941

Account for sentences with an implicit subject. Samuel Edwin Ward Mar 24 '15 at 21:40
add a comment
up You already have your answer in the added information you provided. It makes sense to
vote- those who intend to use it. To others, they may assign any number of meanings. Many of
those commenting above have chosen to alter the structure and add in the missing
2dow punctuation, or wording, to make it more grammatically correct. This just proves that the
n sentence does function as it's intended. It's a sentence each individual could analyze the
vote instant they've read it due to it's small structure, lack of punctuation, and simplistic wording.
It can be restructured in a seemingly infinite number of possibilities (though you could
calculate the number of possible combinations using all words in the English language that
could be substituted or added to the sentence, and all forms of punctuation, but I don't feel
like working out that mathematical calculation), to make more sense to the reader. This
rapid interpretation can be done unconsciously and instantaneously by a reader. And with
some conscious effort, you can come up with many more interpretations. All are varied
interpretations entirely dependent on the individual.

So, in context:
Question: "...is it a valid sentence?" Answer: Yes Question 2: "What does it mean?"
Answer: Provided above

Out of context:
Question: "...is it a valid sentence?" Answer: No

You wouldn't exactly walk up to some random person and spew a sentence such as that, and
expect them to have a clear understanding of what you just said.

shareimprove this answer answered Mar 24 '15 at 21:02

CellarDoor
1
add a comment
up Yes.
vote-
Women
2dow
n [that]
vote
men [that] girls love

meet,
 die.
shareimprove this answer answered Mar 24 '15 at 21:40

Museful
1497
add a comment
up Women, men, girls, meet, love, die.
vote-
Would make more sense as:
2dow
n Women meet, love and die, as do men and girls.
vote

You could also assign one subject to each noun as:

Women meet, men love, girls die.

As you can see, it doesn't make as much sense as the one above. It does seem to be a valid
sentence however, just not one that has only one interpretation.

shareimprove this answer answered Mar 24 '15 at 23:21

ApocalypticSnail
11
add a comment
up Just for the record then,
vote-
1) "It doesn't [...] make sense" Yes, the first thought of the OP was 100% correct. It is six
19do random words that make no sense. It's that simple.
wn 2) Note that in English (which is infinitely flexible) you can make any collection of six
vote random words make a scan in some sense (try it); you can spell anything any way you like;
and you can use any word in any other grammar form. It's completely vacuous reaching for
a scan of these particular six random words (I already gave the best possible such "oh it
could be used like this..." in a comment.) Simply, for every question about English (ie,
every question on this site), "the" answer (ie, the most generally accepted usage of the
issue in question) can be appended with a rider "of course, you could do such and such..."
3) Almost all academic work on NLP is of little value and poorly thought-out, and
commercial work (ie: "google"), you can evaluate by using google. So I wouldn't waste
brain power on a whacky example from a whacky paper.

shareimprove this answer edited Mar 23 '15 at 12:10 answered Mar 23 '15 at 7:47
 Fattie
1

1 Fodor wasn't doing NLP. He was reasoning about how brains work with Chomsky.
bmargulies Mar 23 '15 at 11:36
3 @bmargulies Fodor in this case is actually a 'she' (Janet Fodor, not Jerry Fodor). Alan Munn Mar
23 '15 at 15:09
6 -1 You don't seem to understand what "NLP" means, and you don't seem to understand the point of
the sentence, which is to demonstrate that there are considerations beyond the application of rules
of grammar that determine whether the brain can process a sentence. WinnieNicklaus Mar 23 '15
at 19:04
7 How many times are you going to use the phrase "It's just that simple" on this page? BlueRaja -
Danny Pflughoeft Mar 23 '15 at 22:04
1 you can use any word in any other grammar form What, you mean like using 'leverage' as a
verb and things like that? You don't need to do anything so spurious as that to understand the OP's
sentence. John Gowers Mar 23 '15 at 23:42
add a comment
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