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 (cf. Schütze 1996). An experimental approach seems particularly important for the study of linguistic phenomena that involve degrees of grammaticality, and recently, several experimental investigation of gradedness have become available (cf. Cowart 1994; Keller 1996a,b; Neville et al. 1991). The assumption that degrees of grammaticality are relevant to linguistic theory dates back to Chomsky (1964), and on an informal level, graded data are regularly used to support linguistic hypotheses (cf. Schütze 1996 for an extensive discussion). A standard case is the claim that subjacency violations result in only mild deviance, while ECP violations cause strong ungrammaticality. Belletti and Rizzi’s (1988) influential study of psych-verbs builds on this assumption, making use of no less than seven levels of acceptability. However, Belletti and Rizzi’s treatment of graded data is very casual and provides “no general theory of which principles should cause worse violations. The theory makes no prediction about the relative badness of, say, θ-Criterion versus Case Filter violations, let alone about how bad each one is in some absolute sense. The notion of relative and absolute badness of particular violations is ad hoc, and is used in just those cases where it is convenient” (Schütze 1996: 43). This seems to be a typical case: even though the existence of graded data and their potential relevance for linguistic research seems to be generally acknowledged, hardly any effort has gone into the theoretical investigation of graded grammaticality, and none of the established grammatical frameworks offers a systematic account of graded data. The present paper tries to address this problem by proposing a framework for graded grammaticality based on Optimality Theory, relying on the concept of ranked grammatical