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This happens a lot when learning a foreign language: You learn some grammar structure, and insert some nouns, verbs, adjectives, etc., in the appropriate places, only to find out that no-one would ever say what you've come up with.

It's not wrong, it's just unused, and as a result sounds unnatural and weird.

Question: Is there a linguistics term meaning "it's grammatically correct, but nobody says that"?

I find myself saying this phrase a lot, and I feel like there should be a technical term with this meaning.

As a concrete example, there's an escalator sticker in China which says:

We've already stepped on this area.

It turns out such stickers were added after an accident, and these stickers are everywhere now, aiming to reassure customers that it is safe to walk there. I believe the above sentence is grammatically correct, and even means exactly what they intended---they have indeed already stepped on that area. But realistically, a native-English speaker would probably write something like:

This area is safe to walk on.

Rebecca J. Stones
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    Can you give a few concrete examples? – Adam Bittlingmayer Jan 27 '20 at 17:36
  • OP, do you mean sentences that are highfalutin, or are you more thinking about sentences that are simply awkward? – John Wu Jan 27 '20 at 18:50
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    Maybe “he had had ten pages to type and has completed all ten in three days.” – Number File Jan 28 '20 at 00:18
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    Japanese people often ask my what’s the “natural” way to say things in English. Speakers of languages very different to English seem to be aware that they’re doing this (as it often happens in this case). – Tom Kelly Jan 28 '20 at 09:09
  • If that's what on the stickers in China, I wanna see your reaction to Chinese characters in an American elevator, ha! Really though, the added example breaks the question. The framing of it slightly biases the opinion to be hypercorrect, though we may suppose objectivity for ourselves. It rather has me wonder whether the translation is apt, which is distracting. The remaining problem is that it's a slippery slope to problems that are independent of language. The top answer is nevertheless correct because idiom can mean cultural idiom, that is shared history or a meme like planking. – vectory Jan 29 '20 at 00:36
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    Reminds me what my teacher once said to me when I asked "If I say it like this, won't they understand?" To which she said, "They will understand. But they will also understand that you don't really speak the language." – Tasos Papastylianou Jan 29 '20 at 20:12
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    That seems like a strange example, I think because it's perfectly natural, but doesn't make sense in context. I was expecting something that makes sense semantically but is unnatural, for example you could translate the French "Nous embauchons" literally as "We hire", but it should be "We are hiring". – wjandrea Jan 30 '20 at 04:18
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    This is why I wasn't keen on giving an example. Without an absolute perfect example [which unequivocally demonstrates the issue with no other complications (which may not even exist)], it'd inevitably end up with answers/comments that address some tangential technicality. – Rebecca J. Stones Jan 30 '20 at 04:32
  • Not a linguist, but the term that came to mind for me was 'not in common usage.' – 4dcndn Nov 25 '21 at 15:30

7 Answers7

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I think the common term would be non-idiomatic, idiomatic here not referring to idioms like "kick the bucket", but to the natural ways a language is spoken.

curiousdannii
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    Personally, I say unidiomatic, not non-idiomatic. Not sure if that's unidiomatic or not. – Omar and Lorraine Jan 27 '20 at 14:20
  • I'm no linguist, but I was thinking that, in English, I might say a certain type of carefully structured sentence, meant to express a thought in a way that native speakers don't do in this day and age, was "stilted" or "archaic" or "sounded quaintly old-fashioned." – Lorendiac Jan 27 '20 at 15:31
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    I agree that "idiomatic" (with your choice of negative indicator) is what you're looking for. In highly technical contexts, you might see "unattested" or "not observed" to mean that an observer or researcher has not seen something in real-world use. – CCTO Jan 27 '20 at 15:42
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    @Lorendiac True in the case you've given, but not every non-idiomatic expression is old-fashioned. Some of them may have never been idiomatic. – Daniel Jan 27 '20 at 19:02
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    "non-idiomatic" is the term I always hear. Another common one is "unnatural" – BlueRaja - Danny Pflughoeft Jan 27 '20 at 19:57
  • I sometimes say "not", "not quite" or "less than" idiomatic :) I think "unnatural" comes from HiNative ... – Will Crawford Jan 28 '20 at 01:29
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    Interesting, I've never hear of "non-idiomatic." I wonder what the distribution is ... – Azor Ahai -him- Jan 28 '20 at 03:59
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    @Wilson https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/idiomatic - Antonyms: nonidiomatic, unidiomatic. – CJ Dennis Jan 28 '20 at 22:55
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In pragmatics, if an utterance is syntactically well-formed and makes sense but cannot occur then it is called infelicitous. Unacceptability judgments are broader as it may include semantic incoherence:

  1. The true circle with four sides in my backyard creeps me out.
  2. Colorless green dreams sleep furiously.

Unacceptability judgments may also include infelicitous or ungrammatical statements (this can be problematic in poorly designed elicited response tasks). So I do not think it is exactly the phenomena the OP is targeting. Non-idiomatic may also capture some cases of "nobody says that" but if the utterance never occurs for pragmatic reasons I would suggest infelicitously is the linguistic property you are trying to identify.

g4vagai
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    There is nothing wrong with "I squared the circle". It is mathematically impossible to do with just a straight edge and a compass (turn a circle into a square with the same area), but it is not a weird sentence in itself. – CJ Dennis Jan 28 '20 at 22:52
  • You could also draw a square grid inside a circle, according to Merriam-Webster's 6th verb definition. Note that "I circled the square" is just fine - you drew a circle around a square. Maybe you also want to test that the surface of a wooden circle is perpendicular to the side (verb definition 1b). – user253751 Jan 29 '20 at 13:16
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    It does seem really odd to use "I squared the circle" as an example here, as this phrase is sufficiently idiomatic to have its own Wikipedia page, and an extensive history, reaching back to the ancient Greeks: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Squaring_the_circle – Michael MacAskill Jan 29 '20 at 22:37
  • Maybe in g4vagai's native language, "squaring the circle" is nonsensical :) – user253751 Jan 30 '20 at 18:07
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    In some contexts, "I squared the circle" could be felicitous. Suppose someone thinks that some task can't be done, and terms it "squaring the circle", then someone does it. The latter might then say "I squared the circle". The phrase is used metaphorically in this way. – Rosie F Feb 03 '20 at 16:16
  • Why does infelicitous remind me of the Blackadder episode "Ink and Incapability"? – 0xC0000022L Jun 04 '20 at 07:22
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You might also be looking for unacceptable, if you're thinking of sentences like Chomsky's famous "colorless green ideas sleep furiously".

Specifically (at least according to a long-ago undergraduate semantics class), an utterance is unacceptable if it's perfectly grammatical, and yet no native speaker would ever say that as part of a conversation: it's correct from the syntactic level downward, but something's wrong with it semantically or pragmatically. These utterances are often marked with a hash sign (#), while ungrammatical ones are marked with a star (*).

Draconis
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    Is 'unacceptable' here used as a linguistical buzzword or as in its general sense? If the later, I don't quite see it fitting OP's desired use. –  Jan 27 '20 at 08:13
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    I think phrases such as this one are probably more usefully called "nonsense" or "meaningless". – Dancrumb Jan 27 '20 at 13:37
  • @William I learned it as a specific term, but I don't know how widespread that usage is outside of semantics classes. – Draconis Jan 27 '20 at 15:18
  • I would simply refer to something like this simply as a tautologically false statement. That is, something that simply cannot be true given the definitions of the word. Like a square circle. – Cruncher Jan 27 '20 at 18:34
  • @Cruncher I think tautological statements would be a subset - there's nothing contradictory about "colorless green ideas", it's just nonsensical. – IMSoP Jan 27 '20 at 18:43
  • @IMSoP Nothing green is colorless – Cruncher Jan 27 '20 at 18:56
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    I don't think the question is about semantically invalid sentences. Chomsky's example doesn't make sense in any language, despite being syntactically correct. I think the question is about syntactically correct sentences that do make sense, but are just not expressed in a way a native speaker would express them. – Daniel Jan 27 '20 at 19:04
  • @Cruncher Ah, you're right, it does contain a tautology; however, it's an "unacceptable" utterance even without that: ideas cannot be green, and cannot sleep, but those aren't tautologous, just ... wrong. – IMSoP Jan 27 '20 at 19:25
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    @IMSoP I'm not convinced there's much wrong with calling an idea green. I think certain ideas for dealing with climate change could certainly be green ideas. Also how your mood can be blue. This may not be able to done with all the examples.. or at least not today. But it seems like totally valid language once we attribute some meaning to that combination of words – Cruncher Jan 27 '20 at 19:28
  • @Cruncher a very inexperienced cowboy in an old black and white movie? – Kevin Jan 27 '20 at 21:08
  • all good and memorable metaphors are born from unacceptable utterances, but clearly not all unacceptable utterances result in meaningful metaphors – lurscher Jan 28 '20 at 14:53
  • I think Chomsky was, given his background in Computer Science theory and work in definition of the complexity hierarchy of grammars upto NP-completenesd, influenced by the idiomatic meaning as in if the Turing machine accepts the input it will eventually halt; alas there are programs for which on cannot proof whether they ever halt (the halting problem) in which halting is an equivocatiin with accepting (I hope I got that correct, I'm too lazy to search a suitable quote). Of course a TM is theoretically unlimited in memory, whereas a human is optimized for efficiacy. – vectory Jan 28 '20 at 23:18
  • @Cruncher Using "green" = "environmentally-friendly", solar panels could be both green and colorless (in reality they are dark blue, but I'm sure there are some experimental semi-transparent ones somewhere). They couldn't sleep furiously though. Someone who is "tossing and turning" could be said to "sleep furiously", but of course they aren't colourless green ideas. – user253751 Jan 29 '20 at 13:21
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If I understand your question correctly, it's about the use of lexemes that co-occur with other lexemes (cf. "'make a decision", which would be "take a decision" in French, for example). This phenomenon is called "collocation". So in this case you might say that the literal translation of "make a decision" is an unavailable collocation in French. Native speakers would obviously consider it "wrong".

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    We can "take" a decision in English, too ... – Will Crawford Jan 28 '20 at 01:30
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    And welcome, by the way. – Will Crawford Jan 28 '20 at 01:31
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    Thanks @WillCrawford. Not being a native speaker, I was not aware of the use of "take" in this collocation (which according to the answers to another post here seems to be less frequent and slightly restricted). –  Jan 28 '20 at 13:31
  • It's most often used in the past tense, and particularly (it seems to me) when explaining / justifying things, e.g. In the circumstances, I took the decision to ... or That decision was taken when I ... [insert justification here]. I would more commonly use make in the present tense e.g. You have to make a decision. Neither is ever wrong, but to some people's ears a different choice will sound "more right" due to what they grew up reading or hearing, etc. – Will Crawford Jan 28 '20 at 15:04
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    According to another thread here that I can't retrieve right now, "take a decision" sounds more formal or specialized to some users (political and economic contexts). –  Jan 28 '20 at 15:14
  • Yes, especially the "political" contexts. But that's because those contexts are so typically explaining or justifying something. I'd expect the same thing from managers, teachers in the staff room, for example. That's my mental image of it anyway. I think it's because it "sounds stronger" than "I made the decision ...". – Will Crawford Jan 28 '20 at 15:33
  • @Nico cp Ger vornehmen (also said with decisions, I guess). Good answer by the way. – vectory Jan 28 '20 at 23:24
  • @vectory. Yes, somehow 'sich vornehmen' is related to decisions, but in conjunction with the word 'decision', as you know, German requires "treffen" ('meet'), which may actually sound quite funny to non-native speakers :-) –  Jan 29 '20 at 07:00
  • "Take a decision" strikes me (raised in the US) as British. I never heard it before I moved to Europe, and now that I've moved back to the US, I encounter if fairly rarely. I also suspect that it arose in the late 20th century. – phoog Jan 29 '20 at 09:37
  • I (US-raised) associate "take a decision" with Indian speakers, which I suppose might reflect British influence. – Michael Lugo Jan 29 '20 at 16:24
  • Is that still relevant to the question? a) cp to tackle, attack; also accept, Ger zur Entscheidung annehmen, to take on; vornehmen has an archaic sense to put on [an apron] (see dwds.de), cp to tie, Ger anziehen then heranziehen; further I would expect a crossover from teach, Ger zeigen (to direct), or ziehen (to draw consequences); still further cp Lat capo. b) to fell a decision is just weird, cp cadere. c) the ety of Ger treffen is uncertain; synonym to meet a decision; cp Ger Messer "knife", incision, lol. blows my mind; does not translate. – vectory Jan 31 '20 at 08:20
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This article gives several examples, but it is not otherwise helpful in answering your question. First, calling these examples "Indianisms" can be considered ethnically offensive, even though Indian people I have met are well aware of these locutions and have a great sense of humor about them. Second, more broadly, to categorize such sayings according to who says them does not fulfill your request for a single linguistic term.

Perhaps there is no such term. Note that this article says there are three factors in a verbal communication:

  1. Locution--the semantic or literal significance of the utterance
  2. Illocution--the intention of the speaker; and
  3. Perlocution--how it was received by the listener.

What you describe is a disconnect between those three parts. The listener may understand the communication in a general way, or he may be baffled.

Call it a "locutionary breakdown" if you will.

"What we have here is ... failure to communicate."

Wastrel
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This revised version of your question with a concrete example helps me understand it better. This phenomenon is not related to semantics, as I initially thought, but rather to pragmatics. In this specific case, the difference lies in information packaging, which to some extent might be language-specific due to different cultures. The instance you quote shows that the Chinese sentence requires an inferential effort due to the ellipsis of a conclusion along the lines of "so you can do it too and feel safe", whereas the English version is more straightforward and, interestingly, less focused on empathy (Chinese implies: "I have done it before, I can understand your fear, but don't worry"). Focusing on your initial question, this difference cannot be captured by the labels that have been proposed so far in my opinion.

  • For the title I kept thinking archaic. But what we have here was lost in translation. – Mazura Jan 29 '20 at 19:27
  • I suspect that the missing part is not a conclusion, but rather the implied question “Is it safe to walk on this? Are you sure? I heard there was an accident…”. Your I think you're absolutely right about the cultural difference, though - much more empathy comes across. [+1] – Will Crawford Jan 30 '20 at 09:48
  • I agree that there must have been a previous hesitation on the part of the addressee (be it verbalized or suggested by non-verbal signals). However, this is also thoroughly compatible with the omitted conclusion that I was positing on the part of the utterer. –  Jan 30 '20 at 11:47
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Just as further evidence of the multiplicity of linguistic terms... I've always heard/used “stylistically marked.”

adam.baker
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