Ungrammaticality

Ungrammaticality denotes when an utterance violates the grammatical rules of a language. In linguistics, a sentence is typically labeled ungrammatical if it cannot be parsed according to the syntactic, morphological, and phonological constraints of the language. The concept sits between descriptive analysis of actual usage and prescriptive norms about ideal forms. Because languages vary across dialects and sociolects, what is ungrammatical in one community may be acceptable in another. Grammaticality judgments are thus often relative to the speaker’s dialect, register, and the task provided to the listener.

Common sources of ungrammaticality include subject-verb disagreement, incorrect case marking, or prohibited word orders. For example, in Standard English, “Me and him went to the store” is judged ungrammatical as a subject; the correct form is “He and I went to the store.” Nonstandard forms may also be encountered in informal speech for pragmatic reasons or sociolinguistic effect. Some theories distinguish completely ungrammatical strings from sentences that are grammatical but ambiguous or garden-pathing, where the initial interpretation leads to processing difficulty rather than a violation of syntax.

Researchers study grammaticality through acceptability judgments, corpus data, and psycholinguistic experiments to illuminate rules, constraints, and processing. Ungrammaticality helps reveal underlying syntactic structures, agreement and subcategorization constraints, and cross-linguistic variation. It is not a universal property of language in the sense of a single standard; rather, it is a diagnostic tool for theories of grammar and for describing variation across dialects and registers.