Anomaly

Anomaly is the phenomenon that a sentence 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.

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.