Three types of exceptions – and all of them rule - based

A basic premise of this paper is that a simpler grammar is a more adequate one, and that thus exceptions are undesirable. We present studies concerning three different grammatical structures which contain phenomena standardly regarded as exceptions , and show how, in all three cases, the attribution of the status as an exception was unnecessary. In each case, the collection of better data and the explanatory advantages of firstly, a model of gradient grammaticality, and secondly the distinction between the effects of the grammar and the effects of production processing, reveal the phenomenon to be rule-governed.