1087: S-Selection (Grammatical but Nonsensical) Nov 30, 2017

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Neither sentence: "I see he" nor "I run him" can be considered acceptable, but the reason for each is different. In the first one, the problem is that 'he' is only used as a subject, even when it appears in the middle or end of a sentence, but given that 'see' takes an object, it would require 'him' to be used. This issue does not have to relate to what each word means semantically, but how it all fits together syntactically (or not in this case). On the other hand, with "I run him", while it is possible for 'run' to take an object, such as in "I run a race", this sentence does not make sense considering the meaning of each word together. Chomsky's famous sentence—whether you agree with his conclusions—"colorless green ideas sleep furiously" is an example of how people can see that something is grammatical but nonsensical.

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