Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo.
A History of the Sentence "Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo."
William J. Rapaport
Department of Computer Science and Engineering,
Department of Philosophy,
Department of Linguistics,
and Center for Cognitive Science
State University of New York at<br>Buffalo,
Buffalo,<br>NY<br>14260-2000
Last Update: Wednesday, 7 January 2015
Note:<br>or<br>material is highlighted
See also:
"Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo",<br>Wikipedia<br>(accessed May 4, 2008).
In 1972, I was a graduate student in the<br>Department of Philosophy<br>at<br>Indiana University.<br>One of my professors,<br>John Tienson<br>(now [2006] at the<br>University of Memphis), in a course on<br>Philosophy of Language, gave the following<br>example of a grammatical sentence:
Dogs dogs dog dog dogs.
The syntax is the same as that of
Mice [that] cats chase eat cheese.
Several of us students found the plural "-s" endings to lack a certain<br>aesthetic simplicity, and we searched for a better word. I came<br>up with
Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo.
I.e., buffalo who are buffaloed by other buffalo themselves<br>buffalo still other buffalo.
However, my fellow graduate students and I were not satisfied.<br>So I concocted:
Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo Buffalo<br>buffalo Buffalo buffalo.
The syntax of the following sentence is close to the previous one:
Boston mice [that] Boston cats "Boston-chase"<br>"Boston-eat" Boston cheese.
I.e., mice who are in Boston, and who are chased (in a way unique<br>to Boston) by cats who are in Boston, eat (in a way unique to Boston)<br>cheese that comes from Boston.
So, buffalo who live in Buffalo (e.g., at the Buffalo Zoo,<br>which does, indeed, have buffalo), and who are buffaloed (in a way<br>unique to Buffalo) by other buffalo from Buffalo, themselves buffalo<br>(in the way unique to Buffalo) still other buffalo from Buffalo.
In 1976, I used both Buffalo sentences in philosophy courses at<br>State University<br>of New York at Fredonia. Both native and non-native speakers<br>of English who heard it, of course, never ceased to be amazed.<br>Indeed, it never ceases to amaze me that a string of 5<br>occurrences of the same word could be a grammatical, even<br>meaningful (though hardly "acceptable"), sentence.
In the early 1980s,<br>several graduate students in the<br>Department of Computer Science<br>at<br>State University of New York at Buffalo (where I now teach)<br>noted that the sentence can be extended indefinitely by continued<br>embeddings and NP-modifications.
I used the following question on AI and computational<br>linguistics exams:
"Write a grammar, in any formalism, that accepts all of the<br>following infinite sequence of sentences. (Ignore all words in<br>parentheses, which I have put in only in order to clarify the<br>syntax of the sentences.)
Mice (that) cats chase eat cheese.<br>Dogs (that) dogs dog dog dogs.\footnote{To dog someone or something is to follow that<br>person or thing.}<br>Buffalo (that) buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo.\footnote{Note: To buffalo someone or something is to<br>bewilder or overawe that person or thing, and<br>one acceptable plural of the noun "buffalo" is<br>"buffalo".}<br>Small mice (that) large cats quickly chase slowly eat green<br>cheese.<br>Buffalo buffalo (that) Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo<br>Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.<br>Mice (that) cats (that) dogs bother chase eat cheese (that)<br>rats refuse.<br>Buffalo (that) buffalo (that) buffalo buffalo buffalo<br>buffalo buffalo (that) buffalo buffalo.
etc.
I.e., each NP can be modified by an NP-V combination."
In the late 1980s/early 1990s,<br>other students noted that the original 5-word sentence is<br>ambiguous! In fact, one of the other people who claims to have<br>heard it from someone other than me (in fact, as I recall, he<br>attributed it to<br>Daniel C. Dennett) thinks that it is parallel<br>to:
Boston cats chase Boston mice.
(though the capitalization is a bit off for that). Another of<br>my students notes that the 10-word version is also ambiguous,<br>along the lines of this:
Boston cats Boston-chase Boston mice [that] Boston rats<br>Boston-eat.
In 1994,<br>Steven Pinker,<br>in his book
The Language Instinct<br>(New York: William Morrow, 1994, pp. 209-210) cited:
"Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo<br>buffalo."
parsed as meaning that "(The) Buffalo buffalo [i.e., the<br>buffalo who live in Buffalo] (that) [other] Buffalo buffalo<br>(often) buffalo (in turn) buffalo other Buffalo buffalo",<br>and attributed it to his student<br>Annie Senghas.
I had an email exchange with Pinker about the above history.<br>Pinker responded as follows:
"Date: Thu, 17 Feb 94 18:36:46 EST
From: Steve Pinker
To: rapaport@cs.buffalo.edu
Subject: Re: Buffalo buffalo ...
Dear William,
That's terrific! Thanks for letting me know that history, and<br>if I use the example again, I will surely give you priority. (I<br>believe it was independently invented by Annie -- I checked<br>specifically with her when someone else had told me that she<br>may have borrowed it.) I might balk a bit at the verb...