Much Ado About Nonsense: Ungrammaticality, Semantic Anomaly, and Logicality

Abstract

In this text, I am going to discuss when things go wrong when using language. In particular, I would like to address a special kind of ungrammaticality: contrary to what is expected within the generativist tradition, there seem to be word-sequences that are syntactically unacceptable for logical reasons. The semantic works exploring this line of research are usually grouped under the rubric “logicality of language hypothesis”. The aim of this paper is to examine the recent literature that attempts to subsume the observed ungrammaticalities under the umbrella of semantic anomaly, and thus to offer alternative (typological) explanations with respect to language logicality. Some critical issues of these alternative explanations will be highlighted and, while also drawing attention to the weaknesses of the logicality of language hypothesis, the latter will be re-proposed as an explanation that can be sensibly supported (for the time being, at least).