Degraded Acceptability and Markedness in Syntax, and the Stochastic Interpretation of Optimality Theory∗
نویسنده
چکیده
Conceiving grammaticality as gradient poses problems for those traditional conceptions of grammar which assume that linguistic expressions can only be either grammatical or ungrammatical. That a sentence is, for instance, “grammatical to 75%” is a nonsensical statement from this point of view. In this tradition, generative grammar assumes the native speaker’s linguistic competence to be the system of rules with which, among other things, she classifies sentences as either grammatical or ungrammatical. A linguistic theory is explanatorily adequate to the extent that it successfully models this underlying knowledge. As a consequence of the categorical view on grammaticality, generative models rarely reflect gradience. The minimalist program (Chomsky, 1995) for generative syntax knows “converging” and “crashing” derivations, which conform to grammatical and ungrammatical structures. But
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