1163: Sentences without Syntax Feb 14, 2018

A subject will be nominal (specifically, a determiner-phrase), but that doesn't meant that every pronoun, noun etc. will be a subject. Semantics relates a great deal to the way  that people can construct sentences, in part due to things like this. The sentences "the man saw the dog" and "the dog saw the man" are both fine, and no one would argue against the validity of "the woman eats the carrot" but that cannot be reversed to become "the carrot eats the woman" in the same way. Opposite to Chomsky's famous "colorless green ideas sleep furiously" which is syntactically acceptable but semantically meaningless, the existence—but lack of acceptably—of "the carrot eats the woman" means that regardless of word-order, or declension (theoretically, English doesn't use it) there is only one possible meaningful utterance here, so the sentence can exist without needing a syntactic structure. It is therefore possible that a language could allow for speakers to invert this specific word-order (assuming there is no case-system) howsoever they choose in these situations where carrots cannot logically eat people. This already sometimes happens in sentences like "the book reads quickly".

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