"Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana" is a humorous saying that is used in linguistics as an example of a garden path sentence or syntactic ambiguity, and in word play as an example of punning, double entendre, and antanaclasis.
The point of the example is that the correct parsing of the second sentence, "fruit flies like a banana", is not the one that the reader starts to build, by assuming that "fruit" is a noun (the subject), "flies" is the main verb, and "like" as a preposition. The reader only discovers that the parsing is incorrect when it gets to the "banana". At that point, in order to make sense of the sentence, the reader is forced to re-parse it, with "flies" as the subject, "fruit" as a qualifier of "flies", and "like" as the main verb. Additionally, the insects known as "fruit flies" do indeed enjoy bananas, adding yet another valid reading of the sentence.
The first sentence predisposes the reader towards the incorrect parsing of the second. After re-parsing the second, it becomes clear that the first sentence could be re-parsed in the same way.
The sentence "time flies like an arrow" is in fact often used to illustrate syntactic ambiguity. [1]
Modern English speakers understand the sentence to unambiguously mean "Time passes fast, as fast as an arrow travels". But the sentence is syntactically ambiguous and alternatively could be interpreted as meaning, for example: [2]
In addition, the sentence contains semantic ambiguity. For instance, the noun phrase "Time flies" could refer to all time flies or particular time flies, and "an arrow" to all arrows, a particular arrow, or different arrows for different flies; compare "Fruit flies like a banana", "Fruit flies ate a banana", "Fruit flies live on a banana". Moreover, "Time flies" could refer to "flies of the Time magazine", or "flies of the Pink Floyd song Time ". Indeed, a copy of the magazine or the song could also be the subject doing the flying. Furthermore, "like" as a verb could either signify general enjoyment, or the usage of a like button.
The expression is based on the proverb: "Time flies", a translation of the Latin Tempus fugit , where "fly" is to be taken in the sense of flee.
An early example of a pun with the expression "Time flies" may be found in a 1930 issue of Boys' Life :
- Flies Around
- Scoutmaster: Time flies.
- Smart Tenderfoot: You can't. They go too fast. [3]
Anthony Oettinger gives "fruit flies like bananas" as contrasted with "time flies like an arrow" as an example of the difficulty of handling ambiguous syntactic structures as early as 1963, [4] although his formal publications with Susumu Kuno do not use that example. [5] This is quoted by later authors. [6]
A fuller exposition with the banana example appeared in a 1966 article by Oettinger. [7]
This article prompted the following response in a letter: [8]
Time Flies Like an Arrow
An Ode to Oettinger
Now, thin fruit flies like thunderstorms,
And thin farm boys like farm girls narrow;
And tax firm men like fat tax forms –
But time flies like an arrow.
When tax forms tax all firm men's souls,
While farm girls slim their boyfriends' flanks;
That's when the murd'rous thunder rolls –
And thins the fruit flies ranks.
Like tossed bananas in the skies,
The thin fruit flies like common yarrow;
Then's the time to time the time flies –
Like the time flies like an arrow.— Edison B. Schroeder (1966)
The verse is popular as a specimen of didactic humor trading on syntactic ambiguity. Like the poem The Chaos , by Gerard Nolst Trenité, [9] its themes are popular among practitioners and students in fields such as natural language processing and linguistics. [10]
The saying is sometimes attributed to Groucho Marx, but according to The Yale Book of Quotations , there is no reason to believe Groucho actually said this. Instead, it traces the Groucho attribution to a post from July 9, 1982 on the Usenet group net.jokes; [11] however, the closest match in the Google Groups archives is really dated to September 8, and does not mention Groucho.[ citation needed ]
The saying is used as a linguistic example of antanaclasis, the stylistic trope of repeating a single word, but with a different meaning each time.[ citation needed ]
It is also used as an example of punning.[ citation needed ] The wordplay is based on the distinct meanings of the two occurrences of the word flies (the verb "travel through the air" and the noun for certain insects), and of the word like (the preposition "similarly to" and the verb "enjoy"). For example, the second clause can be read as "fruit travels through the air similar to a banana" or as "certain insects enjoy a banana".
This is an example of a garden-path sentence, a phrase that the reader or listener normally begins to parse according to one grammatical structure, and is then forced to back up and reparse when the sentence ends in an unexpected way.
Ambiguity is the type of meaning in which a phrase, statement or resolution is not explicitly defined, making several interpretations plausible. A common aspect of ambiguity is uncertainty. It is thus an attribute of any idea or statement whose intended meaning cannot be definitively resolved, according to a rule or process with a finite number of steps.
In language, a clause is a constituent that comprises a semantic predicand and a semantic predicate. A typical clause consists of a subject and a syntactic predicate, the latter typically a verb phrase composed of a verb with any objects and other modifiers. However, the subject is sometimes unvoiced if it is retrievable from context, especially in null-subject language but also in other languages, including English instances of the imperative mood.
A parse tree or parsing tree or derivation tree or concrete syntax tree is an ordered, rooted tree that represents the syntactic structure of a string according to some context-free grammar. The term parse tree itself is used primarily in computational linguistics; in theoretical syntax, the term syntax tree is more common.
Syntactic ambiguity, also called structural ambiguity, amphiboly or amphibology, is a situation where a sentence may be interpreted in more than one way due to ambiguous sentence structure.
A dangling modifier is a type of ambiguous grammatical construct whereby a grammatical modifier could be misinterpreted as being associated with a word other than the one intended. A dangling modifier has no subject and is usually a participle. A writer may use a dangling modifier intending to modify a subject while word order may imply that the modifier describes an object, or vice versa.
Parsing, syntax analysis, or syntactic analysis is the process of analyzing a string of symbols, either in natural language, computer languages or data structures, conforming to the rules of a formal grammar. The term parsing comes from Latin pars (orationis), meaning part.
A garden-path sentence is a grammatically correct sentence that starts in such a way that a reader's most likely interpretation will be incorrect; the reader is lured into a parse that turns out to be a dead end or yields a clearly unintended meaning. "Garden path" refers to the saying "to be led down [or up] the garden path", meaning to be deceived, tricked, or seduced. In A Dictionary of Modern English Usage (1926), Fowler describes such sentences as unwittingly laying a "false scent".
Link grammar (LG) is a theory of syntax by Davy Temperley and Daniel Sleator which builds relations between pairs of words, rather than constructing constituents in a phrase structure hierarchy. Link grammar is similar to dependency grammar, but dependency grammar includes a head-dependent relationship, whereas Link Grammar makes the head-dependent relationship optional. Colored Multiplanar Link Grammar (CMLG) is an extension of LG allowing crossing relations between pairs of words. The relationship between words is indicated with link types, thus making the Link grammar closely related to certain categorial grammars.
In linguistics, a grammatical category or grammatical feature is a property of items within the grammar of a language. Within each category there are two or more possible values, which are normally mutually exclusive. Frequently encountered grammatical categories include:
In linguistics, nominalization or nominalisation is the use of a word that is not a noun as a noun, or as the head of a noun phrase. This change in functional category can occur through morphological transformation, but it does not always. Nominalization can refer, for instance, to the process of producing a noun from another part of speech by adding a derivational affix, but it can also refer to the complex noun that is formed as a result.
An anti-proverb or a perverb is the transformation of a standard proverb for humorous effect. Paremiologist Wolfgang Mieder defines them as "parodied, twisted, or fractured proverbs that reveal humorous or satirical speech play with traditional proverbial wisdom". Anti-proverbs are ancient, Aristophanes having used one in his play Peace, substituting κώẟων "bell" for κύων "bitch, female dog", twisting the standard and familiar "The hasty bitch gives birth to blind" to "The hasty bellfinch gives birth to blind".
A definite clause grammar (DCG) is a way of expressing grammar, either for natural or formal languages, in a logic programming language such as Prolog. It is closely related to the concept of attribute grammars / affix grammars from which Prolog was originally developed. DCGs are usually associated with Prolog, but similar languages such as Mercury also include DCGs. They are called definite clause grammars because they represent a grammar as a set of definite clauses in first-order logic.
Constraint grammar (CG) is a methodological paradigm for natural language processing (NLP). Linguist-written, context-dependent rules are compiled into a grammar that assigns grammatical tags ("readings") to words or other tokens in running text. Typical tags address lemmatisation, inflexion, derivation, syntactic function, dependency, valency, case roles, semantic type etc. Each rule either adds, removes, selects or replaces a tag or a set of grammatical tags in a given sentence context. Context conditions can be linked to any tag or tag set of any word anywhere in the sentence, either locally or globally. Context conditions in the same rule may be linked, i.e. conditioned upon each other, negated, or blocked by interfering words or tags. Typical CGs consist of thousands of rules, that are applied set-wise in progressive steps, covering ever more advanced levels of analysis. Within each level, safe rules are used before heuristic rules, and no rule is allowed to remove the last reading of a given kind, thus providing a high degree of robustness.
"Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo" is a grammatically correct sentence in English that is often presented as an example of how homonyms and homophones can be used to create complicated linguistic constructs through lexical ambiguity. It has been discussed in literature in various forms since 1967, when it appeared in Dmitri Borgmann's Beyond Language: Adventures in Word and Thought.
Araki is a nearly extinct language spoken in the small island of Araki, south of Espiritu Santo Island in Vanuatu. Araki is gradually being replaced by Tangoa, a language from a neighbouring island.
Sentence processing takes place whenever a reader or listener processes a language utterance, either in isolation or in the context of a conversation or a text. Many studies of the human language comprehension process have focused on reading of single utterances (sentences) without context. Extensive research has shown that language comprehension is affected by context preceding a given utterance as well as many other factors.
A reduced relative clause is a relative clause that is not marked by an explicit relative pronoun or complementizer such as who, which or that. An example is the clause I saw in the English sentence "This is the man I saw." Unreduced forms of this relative clause would be "This is the man that I saw." or "...whom I saw."
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This article describes the syntax of clauses in the English language, chiefly in Modern English. A clause is often said to be the smallest grammatical unit that can express a complete proposition. But this semantic idea of a clause leaves out much of English clause syntax. For example, clauses can be questions, but questions are not propositions. A syntactic description of an English clause is that it is a subject and a verb. But this too fails, as a clause need not have a subject, as with the imperative, and, in many theories, an English clause may be verbless. The idea of what qualifies varies between theories and has changed over time.
The official youth magazine for the Boy Scouts of America
