Acceptability Prediction by Means of Grammaticality Quantification

A Quantification Model of Grammaticality

The traditional binary notion of grammaticality is more and more often replaced by intermediate levels of acceptability, also called gradience. This paper aims to provide a numerical account of syntactic gradience. It introduces and investigates a numerical model with which acceptability can be predicted by factors derivable from the output of a parser. Its performance is compared to other expe...

Grammaticality, Acceptability, and Probability: A Probabilistic View of Linguistic Knowledge

The question of whether humans represent grammatical knowledge as a binary condition on membership in a set of well-formed sentences, or as a probabilistic property has been the subject of debate among linguists, psychologists, and cognitive scientists for many decades. Acceptability judgments present a serious problem for both classical binary and probabilistic theories of grammaticality. Thes...

Continuous Acceptability, Categorical Grammaticality, and Experimental Syntax

Degrees of Grammaticality as Evidence for Suboptimal Linguistic Structures

Intuitive judgments of the acceptability of linguistic utterances constitute the primary source of evidence in linguistic theory. However, our understanding of what speakers actually do when they make such judgments is far from complete. Recently, two psycholinguistic studies bearing on this question have become available: Schütze (1996) provides a broad review of the relevant psychological fin...

Extraction, Gradedness, and Optimality * Studentship and of a Daad Doctoral Grant (program Hsp Iii)

Recently, a number of researchers have proposed the use of experimental methods to elicit acceptability judgments, thus addressing the shortcomings of the conventional intuitive way of gathering linguistic data (cf. Bard et al. 1996; Cowart 1997; Schütze 1996). The use of experimental methods allows to handle interand intraspeaker variation and to control for known biases on judgment behavior (...