Anomaly

Anomaly is the phenomenon that a sentence, though grammatical, is meaningless because there is an incompatibility in the meaning of the words.

Example

Colourless green ideas sleep furiously.

Here at least colourless, green, and ideas have incompatible meanings.

Comment

It is unclear whether anomaly is a linguistic phenomenon. However, grammaticality, as opposed to acceptability, is a linguistic phenomenon, which is directly applicable to many anomalous sentences.

Link

Utrecht Lexicon of Linguistics

References

• Chomsky, Noam A. 1957. Syntactic structures. Mouton, The Hague.
• Chomsky, Noam A. 1965. Aspects of the theory of syntax. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.