[SomeStupidPoint]

I actually disagree with your assessment.

You contend that the top sentence is valid English; I disagree with that. It subscribes to the "first order" rules (or an overly simplistic model), but isn't a sentence that an English speaker would use. Not being one that an English speaker would use makes it invalid English -- it's just a case where the first order approximation is wrong.

Similarly, if your syntax rules reject the second sentence, they're wrong -- since it's a sentence that English speakers can parse: the conclusion can only be that your syntax rules don't actually match the language you're trying to model.

I get the distinction that you're trying to point out with syntax/semantics, but you're ignoring my point: that divide is artificial and 'semantics' as you mean it is merely higher order syntax.

You haven't shown there's an inherent meaning to the difference (ie, that you haven't just drawn an arbitrary line in the sand), just that you can find examples that (naively) fall on different sides of it.

[gizmo686]

Language is not some inherent property of the Universe; it is an evolved behavior in humans. We can study how humans perform language; and when we do, we find the syntax/semantics distinction to be naturally occurring in humans. For instance, in my example, a native English speaker will find the second sentence "awkward" in a way that they do not for the first sentence. Similarly, a native English speaker will extract a clear meaning from the second sentence in a way that they would not from the first.

It is conceivable that there is some other language (eg. not natural human language) which does not have a syntax/semantics distinction, but that hypothetical language is not what linguistics studies.

[SomeStupidPoint]

.....Which is an effect of the first satisfying first order approximations while failing higher order rules, while the latter is merely an unusual sentence and so requires more effort to parse because it falls off the "fast path". (It also arguably fails to encode embedded cultural messages present in word choice -- a second consideration for why it feels "awkward": it's valid English, but not my tribe's English.)

You haven't pointed out how semantics is anything but higher order syntax -- merely outlined the way in which higher order syntax interacts with our perception.

I agree that there's a difference between the two sentences -- I disagree that it's because they're different fields of study instead of different edge cases of the same underlying notion of parsing syntax. (I especially disagree that the way forward on teaching machines language involves that distinction.)

I would appreciate you referring me to references on the semantic/syntax divide being "natural", though.

[YeGoblynQueenne]

>> It subscribes to the "first order" rules (or an overly simplistic model), but isn't a sentence that an English speaker would use.

Well, an English speaker did use it.

Btw, who do you consider an "English speaker"? Do I count as an English speaker? My native language is Greek but I speak English as a foreign language. I often say things that a native English speaker wouldn't say- but they convey a meaning that I wish to express. Do these utterances count as things that "an English speaker would use", or not?

I say they do. English speakers can say anything they like. In fact, they do, everyday, and as they do their language changes along with that.

Human language seems to be a lot more flexible than what you give it credit for. Semantics being just some sort of higher-order syntax (which btw we just haven't found yet) would make for a much more limited language ability than what we currently have. We'd be restricted to only a finite set of forms and we could only say a finite number of things. Obviously, that's not the case.

[SomeStupidPoint]

There was an implied "in isolation" on that sentence -- what's proper with other clauses and sentences included isn't necessarily alone.

An English speaker used it as an example of a statement that would cause a parse error for most English speakers, and so it did. The speaker said it even caused such a reaction in them. I would argue that they weren't attempting to use English, but quasi-English in an attempt to communicate the boundaries of English to people who can parse English (which inherently has some ability to parse quasi-English).

I don't think it's useful to pretend "English" is a coherent class of parsing rules (either over time or over population) -- there's only a roughly similar set of parsers undergoing continuous memetic evolution, broken up into subsets that are more similar.

At the end of the day, English is as people who can parse some subset of it do -- and it might reach the point where it makes more sense to talk about English languages than an Enish language.

That being said, your last paragraph confuses me:

It's not obvious to me that we aren't restricted to a finite number of forms in language.

It's not clear to me why you think semantics being higher order syntax requires that it only be capable of finitely many forms.

(The rest of it seems dependent on those two conclusions.)