Grammaticality and Ungrammaticality in Phonology

In this paper, I make two theoretical claims: (i) For some form to be grammatical in language L, it is not necessary that the form satisfy all constraints that are active in L, i.e. even grammatical forms can violate constraints. (ii) There are degrees of ungrammaticality, i.e. not all ungrammatical forms are equally ungrammatical. I first show that these claims follow straightforwardly from the basic architecture of an Optimality Theoretic grammar. I then show that the surface sound patterns used most widely in formal phonology cannot be used to test the truth of these two claims, but argue that results from speech processing experiments can. Finally, I discuss three experiments on the processing of non-words of the form [stVt], [skVk] and [spVp] in English that were designed to test these claims, and show that both claims are confirmed by the results of the experiments. * This paper benefited greatly from discussion with and feedback from many people, and I express my appreciation to all of them: John McCarthy, John Kingston, Joe Pater, Pam Beddor, Sally Thomason, Jaye Padgett, the audiences at GLOW 27, LabPhon 9, the University of Maryland, Cornell University, Stanford University, Indiana University, Harvard University, the University of Massachusetts, and the University of Michigan. I also need to express my thanks to the anonymous reviewers, the associate editor in charge of this paper, and the editor of the journal. Their insistence on high standards, and their suggestions for improvements, resulted in this paper becoming much better. I, of course, accept all responsibility for the views expressed in the paper.