<i>Here is the undeniable proof that syntactic structure exists.</i><p>There are multiple hypothesis of what a sequence of words can mean, which is not the same thing as &#x27;we form explicit syntax trees in our heads when reading a sentence&#x27;.<p>I could also give you the bag of words<p><i>magician point man hat</i><p>You would derive meaning from this bag of words, probably the same interpretations as in your example. However, the sentence is utterly ungrammatical. Note that I am not contending that we don&#x27;t use some form of syntax at all. E.g., I think that someone whose native language has a freer word order than English will assign more hypotheses to the bag of words above (e.g., my brain also considers the less likely option that the magician is the object).<p>Another problematic aspect of this hypothesis is that a longer sentence will have so many possible parses that it would take a long time to construct and consider all parses. Moreover, I find it unlikely that we have thousands of exact syntax trees in our head that we compare.