The accepted answer to this question quoted Chomsky's (1955) famous “sentence” Colorless green ideas sleep furiously and an earlier example from Tesnière (1940s), which translates to English as The vertebral silence indisposes the licit sail. I understand that the point of these examples is to illustrate a distinction between grammar and semantics, which seems quite an elementary idea in linguistics. This set me wondering whether earlier authors had considered this topic, and whether there is a settled term for such constructions.
Lewis Carroll's poem Jabberwocky was grammatically well-formed, but the nonsense was in the individual words rather than in the composition of meaningful words. Psychedelic poetry might generate some examples, but (as poetry often does) tends to be careless of the grammatical rules of prose; and the author would presumably claim the poem to have a “poetic” meaning. One might expect Sokal's (1996) hoax article to be a rich source, but this is not the case according to Steven Weinberg's analysis of it. So these are not good examples. Anyway, I am looking for an established term to describe a nonsensical construction that is valid in both the grammar and in the individual words, along with early examples from the linguistic or philosophical literature.
