2 0C H A P T E R 2 ■ T h e W e b o f L a n g u a g eWilbur Jones. Still, given that his name is not Wilbur, it would be improper
to call him Wilbur. Rules like these, which govern meaning and reference,
can be called semantic rules.
Other conventions concern the ways words can be put together to form
sentences. These are often called syntactic or grammatical rules. Using the
three words “John,” “hit,” and “Harry,” we can formulate sentences with
very different meanings, such as “John hit Harry” and “Harry hit John.”
We recognize that these sentences have different meanings, because we
understand the grammar of our language. This grammatical understanding
also allows us to see that the sentence “Hit John Harry” has no determinate
meaning, even though the individual words do. (Notice that “Hit John,
Harry!” does mean something: It is a way of telling Harry to hit John.)
Grammatical rules are important, for they play a part in giving a meaning to
combinations of words, such as sentences.
Some of our grammatical rules play only a small role in this important
task of giving meaning to combinations of words. It is bad grammar to say,
“If I was you, I wouldn’t do that,” but it is still clear what information the
person is trying to convey. What might be called stylistic rules of grammar
are of relatively little importance for logic, but grammatical rules that af-
fect the meaning or content of what is said are essential to logical analy-
sis. Grammatical rules of this kind can determine whether we have said one
thing rather than another, or perhaps failed to say anything at all and have
merely spoken nonsense.
It is sometimes hard to tell what is nonsense. Consider “The horse raced
past the barn fell.” This sentence usually strikes people as nonsense when
they hear it for the first time. To show them that it actually makes sense,
all we need to do is insert two words: “The horse that was raced past the
barn fell.” Since English allows us to drop “that was,” the original sentence
means the same as the slightly expanded version. Sentences like these are
called “garden path sentences,” because the first few words “lead you down
the garden path” by suggesting that some word plays a grammatical role
that it really does not play. In this example, “The horse raced.. .” suggests
at first that the main verb is “raced.” That makes it hard to see that the main
verb really is “fell.”
Another famous example is “Buffalo buffalo buffalo.” Again, this
seems like nonsense at first, but then someone points out that “buffalo”
can be a verb meaning “to confuse.” The sentence “Buffalo buffalo buf-
falo” then means “North American bison confuse North American bison.”
Indeed, we can even make sense out of “Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo
buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo.” This means
“North American bison from Buffalo, New York, that North American
bison from Buffalo, New York, confuse also confuse North American bi-
son from Buffalo, New York, that North American bison from Buffalo,
New York, confuse.”97364_ch02_ptg01_017-040.indd 20 15/11/13 8:34 AM
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