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5 - Acceptability, Grammar, and Processing

from Part I - General Issues in Acceptability Experiments

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 December 2021

By
Gisbert Fanselow
Edited by
Grant Goodall
Grant Goodall
Affiliation:
University of California, San Diego
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Summary

Acceptability and grammaticality are clearly closely related, but the relationship is not always straightforward. Sometimes, sentences that are thought to be ungrammatical are perceived as acceptable, leading to an illusion of grammaticality, or grammatical sentences are perceived as unacceptable, leading to an illusion of ungrammaticality. Such cases occur with morphological ambiguity, attachment ambiguity, agreement attraction, and negative polarity items, among others. Processing difficulty is one of the factors that can lower the acceptability of a grammatical sentence, as may be seen in the effects of constituent length and dependency length on acceptability. In some cases, such as superiority violations and island violations, it has been argued that these may actually be grammatical, but unacceptable, though this is the topic of much ongoing research involving cross-linguistic work and studies on repeated exposure (satiation) and memory capacity. Having better models of acceptability and better ways of directly measuring grammaticality would be desirable.

Keywords

acceptabilitygrammaticalityattachment ambiguitycenter embeddingagreement attractiongradiencesuperiorityislandssatiation
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Handbook of Experimental Syntax , pp. 118 - 153
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2021

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