nonsense (n.)

In several contexts in LINGUISTICS and PHONETICS, this term is used in a rather more restricted sense than in everyday use. In phonetics, it is applied to the invented phonetic SEQUENCES (nonsense words) used as part of EAR-TRAINING exercises. In linguistics it refers, first, to SENTENCES which may be GENERATED by a GRAMMAR (i.e. they are grammatical), but which are not SEMANTICALLY ACCEPTABLE, e.g. *The stone is sleeping, *He drank the car in a table. Such meaningless sentences are often called anomalous. The term is also used in grammar, as part of a technique for testing PRODUCTIVITY. Often used here is an extract from Lewis Carroll’s Jabberwocky, where phrases such as all mimsy were the borogoves display WORD-CLASS identities clearly, e.g. mimsy (adjective) and borogoves (noun). The technique is also used in language ACQUISITION, e.g. in language production tasks, to see if the child has acquired a grammatical unit (as in the WUGS experiment).