Markedness and Lexical Typicality in Mandarin Acceptability Judgments

Markedness and Lexical Typicality in Mandarin Acceptability Judgments

It has long been known that native speakers judge nonlexical forms as more acceptable the more lexically typical they are (i.e., similar to real words). It has also been shown that speakers judge less marked (i.e., universally more natural) structures as more acceptable than more marked structures. In this study, we investigate for the first time how markedness and lexical typicality interact, ...

Mandarin hen and Universal Markedness in Gradable Adjectives

Under some conditions, gradable adjectives in Mandarin must co-occur with overt degree morphology (most neutrally, hen ‘very’) for positive interpretation; otherwise, a comparative interpretation results. This paper argues that this phenomenon is the consequence of two interacting factors: (1) Universally, whereas comparative semantics is provided by a (possibly covert) morpheme in syntax, posi...

Experience-driven acceptability judgments

Linguistic acceptability judgments are a critical part of the toolkit for linguistic investigation. An implicit assumption of much work using these judgments is that the data are stable, presumably reflecting the underlying nature of grammatical representation. Here, I demonstrate that for a range of constructions — including so-called island-violating sentences, those with resumptive pronouns,...

Markedness and the grammar in lexical diffusion of fricatives.

This paper examines the contributions of markedness and a child's grammar to the process of lexical diffusion in phonological acquisition. Archival data from 19 preschoolers with functional phonological delays were submitted to descriptive analyses of productive sound change in fricatives. Children's presenting fricative inventory, the fricatives newly learned, and their position of occurrence ...

SNAP judgments: A small N acceptability paradigm (SNAP) for linguistic acceptability judgments: Online Appendices