  Almost entirely divorced from the philosophical debate, category mistakes were also extensively discussed in the linguistics literature (though almost never under that label—terms used in the linguistic literature for various aspects of the phenomenon include ‘selectional violations’, ‘selectional restrictions’, ‘semantic anomaly’ ‘sortal presuppositions’). Here the driving figure of the debate was Noam Chomsky. In his 1957 monograph Syntactic Structures, Chomsky maintained that the now-famous category mistake ‘Colorless green ideas sleep furiously’ is grammatical but meaningless, using this claim to support his contention that syntax is an autonomous field from semantics. The claim was further developed in Fodor &amp; Katz’s influential paper ‘The structure of semantic theory’ (Fodor &amp; Katz 1963), where they claimed that the ability to recognize which sentences are ‘semantically anomalous’ (their term for category mistakes) was a crucial component of linguistic competence. Moreover, they developed a semantic framework which predicted that category mistakes are (grammatical but) meaningless. However, in his 1965 book Aspects of the Theory of Syntax Chomsky revised his view of category mistakes, now arguing that they are ungrammatical, and offering a syntactic theory which rendered them syntactically ill-formed (cf. §3.1). The theory followed many of the technical details of Fodor and Katz’s theory, but this time treating features they took to be semantic as syntactic.