Is syntactic knowledge probabilistic? Experiments with the English dative alternation

Theoretical linguistics traditionally relies on linguistic intuitions such as grammaticality judgments for data. But the massive growth of language technologies has made the spontaneous use of language in natural settings a rich and easily accessible alternative source of data. Moreover, studies of usage as well as intuitive judgments have shown that linguistic intuitions of grammaticality are deeply flawed, because (1) they seriously underestimate the space of grammatical possibility by ignoring the effects of multiple conflicting formal, semantic, and contextual constraints, and (2) they may reflect probability instead of grammaticality. Both of these points are richly exemplified by studies of the English dative alternation (Green 1971; Gries 2003, 2005; Fellbaum 2005; Bresnan and Nikitina 2003; Bresnan, Cueni, Nikitina and Baayen in press; Lapata 1999; Bresnan and Hay 2006; Hay and Bresnan 2006), which is the linguistic domain of the present study.