Jim Read the Book *(for) Two Hours Ungrammatical Sentences

Introduction

Introspective linguistic judgments about the well-formedness of linguistic stimuli have long been regarded as one of the most important sources of evidence in linguistics, substantially forming its empirical base of operations (Wexler et al., 1975; Carr, 1990; Schütze, 1996/2016; Baggio et al., 2012). Both the techniques used to elicit such judgments (eastward.g., controlled experiments, cocky-introspection, or targeted questioning about whether a specific sentence sounds fine in a specific language) as well every bit the type of sample that is necessary for the results to have ecological validity (e.m., a pool of participants that is randomly selected from the targeted linguistic community, a non-random sample, or self-introspection) are a matter of debate (run into Phillips, 2009; Gibson and Fedorenko, 2010; Sprouse and Almeida, 2013; Branigan and Pickering, 2016). On the other hand, no controversy exists over the fact that judgments about what forms role of a person'south linguistic repertoire constitute a rich source of information in theoretical and experimental linguistics.

Since these judgments take such a fundamental part in the study of linguistic communication, one would expect that the question of what they tap into would be ane of the beginning questions in linguistics to provide an indisputable reply to. Just that does not seem to be the case. If 1 searches PubMed or whatever other database for the terms "acceptability judgment tasks" and "language" on the i hand, and "grammaticality judgment tasks" and "language" on the other, 1 will quickly discover that the relevant experiments that will bear witness up are the same. They all report findings that are based on the exact aforementioned elicitation technique. Perhaps the greatest illustration of how the terms "acceptability" and "grammaticality" are used, often without a clear distinction in place, comes from Schütze's (1996/2016) seminal book on linguistic judgments. While the championship of the book talks about "grammaticality judgments and linguistic methodology," the very kickoff quote given in the 2016 edition of the book is past Bever (1970), who claims that it is simultaneously the greatest virtue and failing of linguistic theory that acceptability judgments are used as the basic data (Schütze, 1996/2016: five). In the preface of the get-go edition, it is argued that "[t]hroughout much of the history of linguistics, judgments of the grammaticality/acceptability of sentences (and other linguistic intuitions) take been the major source of show in constructing grammars" (p. xi, emphasis added).

Just equally linguists and other cognitive scientists accept at times used the terms "ungrammatical" and "unacceptable" roughly synonymously, plurality and overlapping may characterize the employ of symbols like ?, *, or ??, that are employed to indicate some deviant holding of the linguistic stimulus (Bard et al., 1996). To define the relevant terms, the grammaticality of a sentence refers to whether the sentence conforms to the syntactic rules of a given language (Fromkin and Rodman, 1998: 106), or put another way, "information technology is a characteristic of the stimulus itself" (Bard et al., 1996: 33). With respect to acceptability, the focus moves from the stimulus to a speaker'southward perception; in Bard et al.'due south (1996) words, it "is a characteristic of the stimulus equally perceived by a speaker" (p. 33). Linguistics, nevertheless, is not a science that works exclusively with visible primitives; we cannot zoom in on a linguistic stimulus until we detect and tease apart an independent, cocky-contained grammatical core. This means that grammaticality, equally 1 of the possible elements that decide acceptability, "is non directly accessible to observation or measurement" (Lau et al., 2016: 3). The question thus becomes: How do we know anything about grammaticality aside of the information provided by acceptability? Put differently, if grammaticality is divers every bit "conforming to the rules of the grammar of language 10" and if the grammar of language X has the shape that its speakers' judgments and actual performance give it, what way do we have to capture grammaticality other than the 1 that goes through speakers' perception of well-formedness (i.eastward., acceptability)?ⁱ

Answering this question is the principal goal of the present work. The starting point of the discussion is Chomsky'due south (1965) stardom between the terms "acceptability" and "grammaticalness," according to which these two notions and their scales might not coincide, hence his reference to "unacceptable grammatical sentences": sentences that do non grade part of grammar for reasons that accept nothing to practice with grammar. The second aim of the nowadays work is to chart the variation space that is created when one disentangles the two notions: unacceptable grammatical sentences, acceptable ungrammatical sentences, their corresponding parsability, and the process of assigning them pregnant. Terminal, the scales of grammaticality and acceptability will be discussed and it will exist shown that they do not coincide: in that location are n ways of unacceptability, only only two ways of ungrammaticality, in the absolute and the relative sense.

Acceptable Ungrammatical Sentences and Unacceptable Grammatical Sentences

Humans are surprisingly good at providing accurate and consistent judgments about what forms office of their linguistic repertoire.² Although informants' opinions about their linguistic behavior are non always concordant with the way they really speak (Labov, 1996; Cornips and Poletto, 2005), acceptability judgment tasks are reliable as a tool, and the majority of linguistic stimuli can receive unambiguous, consistent judgments. For example, little argue would occur amidst native speakers of English about the acceptability of (1) or the unacceptability of (two). The former is a grammatically well-formed sentence of English, while the latter is a discussion-salad that would probably be read and parsed in a rhythm that pertains more to lists of objects than to continued spoken language.

(i) John said to Mary that he likes doing linguistics.

(ii) *To he likes that linguistics John Mary doing said.

Nevertheless, even though such judgments are largely coherent with the actual shape of speakers' internalized grammar, there are some stimuli that have the ability to trick the cerebral parser into unlawfully accepting or rejecting them. Chomsky's (1965) discussion of "unacceptable grammatical sentences" mentions several functioning-associated factors that explain why a linguistic stimulus that does not violate any rule of grammar would be rejected by speakers as unacceptable. Factors such equally memory limitations, processing constraints, equally well equally discourse, intonational and stylistic factors may all induce such an outcome. For example, overloading memory and processing resources through nested hierarchies (3) may lead the cognitive parser to not fully register or retain all the relevant information (Gibson and Thomas, 1999), something that is necessary in lodge to provide an acceptability judgment that faithfully represents whether the stimuli fall within or outside the domain of predictions of the underlying, internalized grammer. In other words, precisely because of the high complexity of some stimuli, and due to the fact that the cognitive parser works on the basis of processing heuristics (Kahneman, 2011), some deviations may get unnoticed. Ane such example is (4), which looks very similar to (3) but–unlike (3)–violates a rule of grammar.

(3) The patient the nurse the clinic had hired admitted met Jack. Frazier (1985).

(4) *The doctor the nurse the infirmary had hired met John. Frazier (1985).

In linguistic terms, the fact that (iv) is missing a verb and has an argument (i.e., "the doc") that is non assigned any thematic function entails a violation of Chomsky'southward (1981)θ-benchmark, according to which each argument bears i and but one θ-role, and each θ-role is assigned to ane and only one argument. Despite the seriousness of this deviation, the "missing verb effect" showed in (4) has been linked to high acceptability rates, fifty-fifty though the sentence is well-nigh definitely ill-formed from a syntactic point of view (Gibson and Thomas, 1999). Moreover, this consequence is neither restricted to one linguistic communication nor is it a laboratory miracle that arises just in acceptability judgment tasks (Häussler and Bader, 2015). Sentence (4) shows that ease of parsability may influence judgments, and in this specific case, low parsability leads to not spotting a violation of a core syntactic principle. At the aforementioned time, high parsability does not guarantee acceptability or grammaticality. For example, speakers of English recognize that (five) expresses a thought that their cognitive parser tin hands process, but their linguistic communication does non produce information technology in this way.

(v) *What did Peter swallow ravioli and?

It seems that a dissociation is in identify, because existence grammatical (i.eastward., not violating a rule of grammar) does not guarantee acceptability either. Example (vi) is in fact an unacceptable grammatical sentence.^three Speakers would not guess it as acceptable as (ane), but it is a grammatically well-formed sentence of English, in the sense that no rule of grammar is violated. Its construction is coordinating to that of (7).

(6) Dogs dogs dog dog dogs. Barton et al. (1987).

(vii) Cats (that) dogs chase love fish.

The difficulty of (half dozen) suggests that the types of structures that are really attested in language are influenced by biases of general cognition. Ane such bias seems to underlie the unacceptability of (half dozen): Identity Avoidance holds that elements of the same phonological and/or syntactic blazon are unlikely to occur in immediately side by side positions (van Riemsdijk, 2008). Although this has long been treated as a linguistic ban, recent work has suggested that it has deeper cognitive roots, and more specifically, that information technology derives from the parser's preference to avoid tokenizing multiple, side by side occurrences of the same type considering of a general bias to provide more than attentional resources to novel information ("Novel Data Bias"; Leivada, 2017). Acceptability is thus affected by a variety of processing factors and cerebral biases, so is grammaticality. For example, although data that flout Identity Avoidance exist [(half dozen); meet Leivada, 2017 for examples of syntactic violations], there are no grammatically licit structures that feature v identical, adjacent complementizers, and the prediction is that such structures will never be in use, because a grammar would never consistently deploy them. Even if grammars were able to generate a sentence like *"John said that that that that that Mary kissed him," cognitive biases would arbitrate and break this sequence of complementizers, for this degree of repetition would not be informative, and by means of looking like dissonance to the parser, it would make communication infelicitous. A similar situation arises with sentence (iv): information technology is extremely unlikely that a linguistic communication will consistently deploy sentences with missing verbs that have licensed arguments. In other words, although the rules of the grammar of a language are subject to change in a way that may legitimize the use/acceptability of a previously ill-formed judgement and/or diminish the use/acceptability of a previously attested one, certain changes are not expected to occur, because they violate either a core principle of linguistic knowledge or a full general cerebral bias.

Talking about a dissociation of acceptability and grammaticality, unacceptable grammatical sentences are one logical possibility. One may wonder whether the other possibility is also attested, i.due east., acceptable ungrammatical sentences. Example (eight) in Table 1 provides the missing slice of this dissociation (see as well Ross, 2018 for the interaction of grammaticality and acceptability).

Tabular array 1. A dissociation of grammaticality and acceptability.

Judgement (8) instantiates a linguistic illusion called "comparative illusion" (Montalbetti, 1984). These sentences are called illusions because they trick the parser in a way that renders high acceptability ratings in experiments, even though the stimuli are ill-formed (Wellwood et al., 2018). In linguistic terms, (8) is ill-formed because the main clause bailiwick calls for a comparison of cardinalities of sets, but in the absence of a blank plural in the embedded clause bailiwick, no comparing prepare is fabricated available (Phillips et al., 2011; O'Connor et al., 2012; Wellwood et al., 2018). Linguistic illusions are the outcome of a partial-match strategy that is operative during processing (Reder and Kusbit, 1991; Kamas et al., 1996; Park and Reder, 2004). When the parser receives a linguistic stimulus, its components, concepts, and structure are matched to stored knowledge, so that an output is produced. Even so, the parser matches the stimulus to stored information only up to a point. In other words, a processing threshold is fix and the stimulus is checked upwardly to this threshold, hence the notion of partial matching. Given that (8) makes use of locally coherent templates (Townsend and Bever, 2001) that provide a "practiced-plenty fit" (Ferreira and Patson, 2007) for the parser, its sick-formedness may become unnoticed, and this results in loftier acceptability. Evidently, the mode the parser works–via the use of processing heuristics–mediates one's admission to the internalized noesis of grammar. Yet, the ease with which a judgement is unambiguously parsed is not a guarantee for either grammaticality or acceptability. Table two adds loftier/low parsability to the previous dissociation between grammaticality and acceptability. Once again, all logical possibilities are attested.

Table 2. A dissociation of grammaticality, acceptability, and parsability.

Example (9) does non violate any rule of grammar, however, its acceptability is non comparable to that of (ane) for semantico-pragmatic reasons that boil downwards to difficulties that arise "in assigning a coherent meaning to the whole" (Adger, 2018: 161). Unlike (2) or even (10), (nine) can be easily parsed in a way that pertains to continued speech. Moreover, a coherent estimation of it tin be provided, and over the years in that location have been various proposals that construe meanings for it.^iv Perhaps green ideas refer to environmental considerations. Ane could build a metaphorical narrative where these ideas are colorless and sleeping because at nowadays in that location is non enough attempt to gainsay climate change, however, their sleep is furious, something that may suggest that some promising initiatives for alter are under way. Creating the right context can improve the acceptability of (ix) precisely because of its grammatical well-formedness and high parsability.

Possibly the most interesting judgement of Tabular array 2 is (4): a judgement that is both ungrammatical and difficult to parse, notwithstanding even so acceptable. Its depression parsability hides the grammatical violation, something that leads to high acceptability. Of form, one could merits that such a sentence, despite beingness labeled "acceptable," would never be attested in ane's linguistic performance. However, ungrammatical sentences that are harder to parse are in fact attested in naturalistic speech communication (12a), and the relevant information as well include missing verbs in cases of heart-embedding (12b).

(12a) "And since I was non informed–every bit a matter of fact, since I did not know that there were excess funds until we, ourselves, in that checkup after the whole affair blew up, and that was, if you'll recollect, that was the incident in which the attorney general came to me and told me that he had seen a memo that indicated that there were no more funds."⁵ President Ronald Reagan, Apr 28, 1987.

(12b) That we scrutinize is a simple effect of the fact that none of the predictions that you Δ during the months that you have been in office has turned out to be true. Häussler and Bader (2015: 14).

Going back to the rest of the information in Table two, we see that (5) and (11) suggest that certain ungrammatical sentences can be easily parsed too. Recent research has suggested that not all ungrammatical sentences receive unclear and unreliable interpretations across speakers (due east.g., Etxeberria et al., 2018 on negation). Talking nearly ungrammatical sentences that are acceptable and parsable, Otero (1972) reached the conclusion that broad acceptability is non a guarantee for grammaticality. Fifty-fifty sentences that take been described as blatantly ungrammatical may actually be adequate to some caste, and this degree varies across speakers of the aforementioned language that have different developmental trajectories (e.g., late bilinguals, heritage speakers, L1 attriters). For example, (5) is ungrammatical because extraction out of coordinated structures is prohibited. A like island consequence has been described for extraction out of relative clauses (thirteen).

(13) *Who do you lot like the poem that____wrote?

Although much literature portrays such sentences as universally ungrammatical (encounter Phillips, 2013 and references therein), non all speakers find such violations fully unacceptable. For example, Lowry et al. (2019) found surprising rates of acceptability for 5 different types of island violations–including relative clause islands that received a mean score of 3.vi in an 1–5 scale, where i stood for the sentence sounding perfectly natural–among late bilingual and heritage speakers of Spanish. Importantly, the two groups differed both in terms of their judgments and in terms of their involuntary physiological reactions that can be proxies for processing effort. In Lowry et al. (2019) these were measured through a pupillometry study: pupil dilation in the ungrammatical stimuli was observed but in the group of belatedly bilinguals, while at that place was no effect of ungrammaticality in the heritage group. These results propose that regardless of what a theory/grammar presents as ungrammatical, speakers may successfully parse ungrammatical stimuli in a way coordinating to their grammatical counterparts. Yet, it is an important question whether the parsing is complete, in the sense that these speakers assign meaning to these ungrammatical stimuli.

Agreement the process of assigning meaning is important in the context of disentangling the role of the parser in acceptable ungrammatical sentences. To illustrate this, let's consider the comparative illusions in Tables i, 2 [examples (8) and (11), respectively], which are ungrammatical but trick the parser into acceptability (Wellwood et al., 2018; Leivada et al., 2019b). Although various experiments accept shown that these sentences are assigned a high acceptability rating, one could say that this does non entail that these sentences are really parsed, in the sense that speakers actually assign them a meaning g. A articulate exposition of this point is given by Tim Hunter as a reply to Hornstein (2013), who suggests that such sentences may sound good to speakers, only when you lot ask the people that gave them a high rating what the uttered sentence means, they are unable to provide a meaning:

I don't think at that place is whatever meaning thousand such that ("More people take been to Russian federation than I have," yard) is judged acceptable. What is true about these examples is that if you ask whether the string is acceptable without providing any intended estimation–roughly, if you lot ask a question of the form "Is there a meaning g such that (south, m) is acceptable?"–and so people tend to say "yes." This despite the fact that, as everyone points out, if you lot ask which meaning this is, people are stumped. […] Why they should brand this kind of mistake (i.due east., take the judgement), I have no thought: presumably the answer might be something like, they outset searching for a meaning for the string, and they get close enough to feel confident that a meaning tin exist found without getting all the way there, so they stop and reply "yes" (since no i is request for the particular significant).

In contrast, we suggest that illusions similar (viii) and (11) are parsed in a way that does get through assigning one thousand to s. In our work on comparative illusions (Leivada et al., 2019b) we obtained aplenty evidence that virtually speakers that judged (viii) as acceptable, truly construed an interpretation for it. Among the ones more frequently given by the speakers we tested are: (i) more than people than just me take been to Russia, (ii) people have been to Russia more than times than I have, and (iii) many people have been to Russia more than times than I accept (encounter also Wellwood et al., 2018). Naturally, this is non what the sentence says, merely however, a meaning is assigned to the judgement. Also nosotros advise that one should not ignore the possibility that those speakers that seem stumped upon being asked to provide an interpretation practise not do and so because they never actually established an association (southward, m), but because in their attempt to articulate the latter, they spot the illusion. Crucially, this does not entail that at no point were they actually able to put their finger on a possible meaning.

The second interesting result with Hunter'south point has to do with the juxtaposition of two very different ways of eliciting judgments through asking "Is s acceptable?" or "Is in that location a meaning m such that (south, m) is acceptable?" These 2 questions do not tap into the same thing. Previous research on the pragmatics of cognitive illusions has proposed that when processing such sentences, the hearer searches for significant within a manipulative communication, that is, inside a tricky context that features a "manipulation (that) can be best defined in terms of the constraints it imposes on mental processing" (Maillat and Oswald, 2009: 361). In this context, the hearer stops searching for meaning after finding one that sufficiently meets her expectations of relevance in accordance with the previous soapbox. The illusion thus arises in the process of selecting meaning within a manipulative context that takes reward of (i) the parser's limitations and (2) the parser'southward way of operating through employing sure processing heuristics such as partial matching or shallow processing.

If relevance and previous context tin can bias an acceptability judgment through creating the necessary weather condition for an illusion to arise, the bias will be even greater if a specific thousand is given to a participant indicate-bare in an experiment that asks "Is there a significant yard such that (s, m) is acceptable?" As shown in Tversky and Kahneman's (1974) work, options in a task are evaluated relative to some reference betoken. Theoretically speaking, the reference point in standard acceptability judgment tasks is the linguistic repertoire of the tested speaker: We often instruct speakers to disregard the formal prescriptive rules of grammer and focus on evaluating the stimuli on the basis of how they apply the language. If we add together a given grand to this moving-picture show, nosotros modify the reference indicate. This does non mean that such a task cannot provide useful and informative findings, but that perhaps the obtained findings will not be borer directly into a speaker'due south perception of her idiolect. Instead, it will be mediated by an anchoring result that may crusade an adjustment to the speaker'due south judgment on the ground of m. To sympathize this effect, consider the following instance by Kahneman (2011).

(14a) Was Gandhi more or less than 144 years sometime when he died?

(14b) How old was Gandhi when he died? Kahneman (2011: 122).

Of course nobody claimed that Gandhi was 144 years old when he died, but it has been establish that when (14b) is presented after (14a), the provided high number functions as an anchor that affects people's estimate (Kahneman, 2011). To draw the analogy with judgment tasks, allow's compare (15a) to (15b), and it volition become articulate why "Is chiliad acceptable?" does non enquire the same affair as "Is in that location a meaning g such that (s, m) is adequate?."

(15a) Assuming a scale from 1 to five, how acceptable is southward on the basis of an intended pregnant grand ?

(15b) Bold a scale from i to five, how practice you charge per unit south on the ground of your idiolect?

In (15a), the possibility of s getting a meaning is explicit and a possible meaning m is already given to the speaker every bit part of the question that introduces the stimuli s. This can bias the rating of due south on the ground of the "anchor-and-adjust" heuristic.

To sum upwards, illusions do not necessarily entail that parsing fails to produce a meaning, but that the parser tin can exist tricked into providing both a meaning and an acceptability rating that may non correspond to the bodily status of the stimulus in terms of what the speaker'southward internalized grammar looks like. Importantly, a number of factors contribute to this procedure of tricking the parser: context, task and stimuli presentation, as well as structural complexity are merely a few.

The relation betwixt grammatical well-formedness and acceptability is a complex one. As mentioned in the Introduction, the main goal of the present work is to hash out whether acceptability is an indispensable gateway to grammaticality or whether there is a way of capturing grammaticality other than the one that goes through speakers' perception of what is well-formed in their native linguistic repertoire (i.due east., acceptability). Having presented the dissociation between acceptability, grammaticality and the way the parser works, the adjacent section deals with how grammaticality is established and where it comes from.

Where Does Grammaticality Come up From?

Asking about the origin of the rules of grammar, Adger (2019) suggests that we learn them: They come up from the way people speak. Although this is true, the effect is more than complex, because different people speak in unlike means fifty-fifty within linguistic communities that feature only one language. When one says that (5) and (eight) are ungrammatical in English, this use of the term "ungrammatical" is non meant to be interpreted as a faithful representation of every English speaker's idiolect in an individual way, precisely because fifty-fifty monolingual speakers in a monolingual community evidence variation.^{half dozen} Rather it refers to some established consensus about what is the norm in a specific diverseness of English language; a norm that the grammar books draw in detail. Put differently, if some speakers of English, Castilian, or German accept to some degree or even produce to some caste island violations (Lowry et al., 2019 for Spanish), missing verbs in nested hierarchies (Häussler and Bader, 2015 for English language and German), or comparative illusions^seven, do we desire to say that these structures are grammatical in English, Spanish, and German language? While it certainly appears to be the case that some speakers' grammars may occasionally requite rise to such structures, we should have into account that, in relation to naturalistic data, product factors may endow the linguistic message with noise (i.e., fake starts, infelicitous lemma retrievals, missing elements due to memory constraints, etc.), which can account for how some of these ungrammatical sentences come up to be produced in spontaneous spoken communication. In relation to the possible acceptability of these structures in experimental settings, the previous section has shown that there is a dissociation between acceptability and grammaticality, such that we should wait some degree of discrepancy betwixt the style speakers judge sentences in an experiment (where even the way the stimuli are presented may influence judgments; see examples 14–fifteen), the way they really speak, and the way that prescriptive grammar says they (should) speak.

The question withal holds: Where does grammaticality come from? The tentative answer we offer is that grammaticality is often a formal, standardized snapshot of the way the official language looks like at a given point in time. Grammaticality is constantly redefined through ever-changing acceptability, but information technology also reflects stable properties of full general cognition. In this context, nosotros do not know much nearly grammaticality outside acceptability (recall that ascertainment of naturalistic data cannot reveal what is ungrammatical in a language) in the sense that in that location is no listing of grammatical backdrop that are grammatical in and of themselves. They are all grammatical inside a context that is called linguistic communication X. Language X is constantly changing and what is (un)grammatical today may not be (united nations)grammatical tomorrow, depending on whether the new speakers of X find information technology acceptable or not and whether this acceptability is generalized and established as the norm or non. For example, Ancient Greek featured a syntactic phenomenon called Attic syntax which permitted a number mismatch between the plural, neuter subject field and the verb (16a). This construction is not a grammatically licit choice in Modern Greek (16b), merely not because there is something intrinsically united nationsgrammatical about information technology; it just does non form part of the grammar anymore. Phrased differently, there is no notion of self-contained grammaticality that (16a) has and (16b) lacks; they just form part of two different snapshots of a grammar's domain of predictions at different points in time.

(16a) Ta padia pezi. [Ancient Greek]

the child.PL play.3SG

"The children are playing."

(16b) *Ta koritsia gela. [Modern Greek]

the girl.PL laugh.3SG

Intended meaning: "The girls are laughing."

This claim is partially concordant with Chomsky et al.'s (2019); see also Chomsky (1993) view that in tongue there exists no independently given notion of grammatical well-formedness. Indeed, the grammatical well-formedness of a linguistic stimulus does not eddy down to an independently definable grammatical core, simply is a mere historical "accident" that (i) refers to whether the stimulus forms part of the standardized snapshot or non and (two) is subject to change such as the one shown in (16a-b). Withal, this view is true only for one reading of the term "grammatical": grammatical as really forming function of the grammar of a specific language.

However, we propose in that location is also another reading of the term "grammatical." To understand this other reading, one needs to factor in that change is not without limits. Non all changes are possible and not all linguistic stimuli are candidates for forming part of grammar. For instance, every bit mentioned in the section "Acceptable ungrammatical sentences and unacceptable grammatical sentences" in that location are no grammatically licit structures that feature five identical, next complementizers, and the prediction is that such structures will never be grammatical. Similarly, a sentence such equally (iv), which violates the θ-criterion, is unlikely to always course office of grammar.⁸ As discussed in the next section, certain changes are not expected to occur, because they violate either a core principle of language (e.1000., the θ-criterion in iv) or a general cerebral bias (east.g., the Novel Information Bias in six). In this sense, Chomsky et al. (2019) are right in arguing that there exists no independently given notion of grammatical well-formedness, but we would like to add to their claim that there practise exist independently given constraints to the ready of entities that this notion can encompass. This is the other reading of the term: grammatical as having the potential to be a office of grammar, by means of not going against whatever of the relevant biases and communication/processing principles that underlie language and noesis.

N Types of Unacceptability and Two Types of Ungrammaticality

It is an uncontroversial claim that acceptability judgments are not categorical, but form a continuous spectrum (Sprouse, 2007 and references therein). The usual meaning of the discussion "continuous" is unbroken or undivided, hence it is the nature of a continuum to be undivided, or better, to permit repeated division without limit (Bell, 2017). If one subscribes to the view that acceptability should exist viewed as a continuum, i likewise subscribes to the view that the acceptability continuum is infinitely divisible. Although acceptability judgment tasks that involve Likert scales feature a finite number of options mostly, there are experiments that ask speakers to estimate a linguistic stimulus by adjusting a slider on a continuum without whatsoever clearly delineated categories such as "acceptable," "somewhat acceptable" etc.

While the calibration of unacceptability involves n positions, the scale of ungrammaticality involves only 2: Something can be ungrammatical in the relative or in the absolute sense. The relative sense pertains to the first reading of the term "grammatical" that was mentioned higher up: forming office of grammer. Nosotros call it "relative" because it is defined in the context of a given linguistic communication. For example, (16b) is ungrammatical in relation to Mod Greek, but it is not ungrammatical per se. Information technology is a potential candidate for forming part of grammar, it was grammatical in the past (16a), and it may exist again in the future. Similarly, (17) is ungrammatical in relation to Standard English language, just this is an accident, as it could potentially be grammatical (and in fact it is grammatical in many varieties of English language, including e.thou., Belfast English language; Henry, 2005).

(17) The children is hither.

Relative ungrammaticality (i) is subject to modify, (2) is divers in the context of a specific language, and (iii) refers to those sentences that could be grammatical, only for some reason are non in the language in question, nevertheless they probably are in some other language. Absolute ungrammaticality (i) is not subject to change, (ii) is non defined in relation to one given linguistic communication, and (3) concerns violations of some core principle of language and/or cognition, that is, structures that grammar would never consistently deploy. Therefore, absolute ungrammaticality has to do with structures that cannot class function of grammar.

Comparison the scales of the two notions, acceptability and grammaticality, it is meaningful to talk about fractional acceptability (Sprouse, 2007), but not near fractional or strong-weak ungrammaticality. A rule of grammer (or more than one rule of grammar) tin can be either violated or not, but it cannot be violated just a bit. Ungrammaticality cannot be a matter of caste, merely acceptability tin. Put differently, a native speaker can judge a structure in her language as more acceptable than another structure, but a structure forming part of a grammar cannot be more grammatical than another structure that forms function of the same grammar.

Although some scholars have talked most "fractional ungrammaticality," nosotros would contend that this refers either to partial unacceptability or to variation in a linguistic community. Consider, for instance, the discussion of partial ungrammaticality in Attinasi (1974): "A subconscious assumption of homogeneity, that the language competence of every speaker consists of the same structures, falters when the question of partial ungrammaticality is raised. How can some speakers totally reject, others partially accept and still others totally have certain sentences as grammatical if each presumably speaks 'English language,' or any other language?" (p. 280). In our view, this question has to practice with slope acceptability: that is what speakers have judgments about.⁹ As we have seen, grammaticality can be dissociated from acceptability. Likewise, the observed variation does not entail or legitimize the notion of partial grammaticality, because, as mentioned in the section "Where does grammaticality come from?," different people speak in dissimilar means, simply grammaticality evokes an established norm that is part of a formal snapshot. Speakers may deviate from this norm, either because linguistic communication alter has occurred and the norm does non reflect this nevertheless, or because their idiolect merely differs from the norm. But this should be referred to as "interspeaker variation," not "partial grammaticality."

Outlook

The present work has discussed the complex relation between grammaticality, acceptability, and parsability. A number of unacceptable grammatical sentences and adequate ungrammatical sentences have been presented, including grammatical illusions, violations of Identity Avoidance, and sentences that involve a high level of processing complexity that overloads the cognitive parser. Focusing on adequate ungrammatical sentences, we have argued that in many cases their acceptability entails that a meaning has been assigned to them. Also, 2 notions of ungrammaticality have been introduced: (Un)grammaticality in the relative sense refers to the whether the stimulus falls within the domain of predictions of a given grammar or non. (Un)grammaticality in the accented sense refers to whether the stimulus has the potential to be a function of grammar or not. Relative (un)grammaticality is an e'er-changing property of the stimulus, whereas accented (un)grammaticality is stable. In both readings of the term, grammaticality is defined by something that is external to the stimulus (be it the grammer of a specific language or principles of full general/linguistic knowledge), and it is not an inextricable property of the stimulus itself. Put differently, there is no list of properties that are (relatively/absolutely) grammatical in and of themselves, or as Chomsky et al. (2019) phrase it, there is no independently given notion of grammatical well-formedness in tongue.

Through disentangling the various uses of the terms "adequate" and "grammatical," the overarching aim of this work has been to aid the field in reaching a more adequate level of terminological clarity for notions that pertain to the evidential base of operations of linguistics. Many details of the distinction between relative and absolute (un)grammaticality are left to be worked out, and this will likely be the topic of future work. To give simply ane example, when nosotros bargain with isle furnishings of the sort discussed above, exercise we deal with accented ungrammaticality that is universal and derives from processing or other principles of language/cognition, or with relative ungrammaticality that is manifested in different ways across different languages, precisely because information technology is defined on the ground of language-specific factors? Or as Ott (2014): 290) asks is "*What does John similar and oranges?" ungrammatical (in the absolute sense that it cannot be generated by the grammer), given that speakers tin can hands assign it a transparent interpretation (e.g., which x: John likes x and oranges)? The answer is currently unclear to us, and it probably needs novel experimental work to be properly discussed. Recognizing this dubiety does not mean undermining the proposed distinction betwixt absolute and relative ungrammaticality. It rather suggests that progress is underway, or every bit (Feynman, 1998: 27) puts it, "[b]ecause we have the doubt, we so propose looking in new directions for new ideas. The rate of the development of science is not the rate at which yous brand observations alone merely, much more than important, the rate at which you create new things to examination."

Writer Contributions

EL and MW conducted the research behind this work. EL drafted a first manuscript, which MW revised. Both authors contributed equally to the final editing of this work.

Funding

This work was supported by the European Wedlock'due south Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Plan under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Grant Understanding No. 746652. The publication charges for this manuscript have been funded past a grant from the publication fund of UiT The Arctic Academy of Norway. The funders had no office in written report design, data drove and analysis, decision to publish, or training of the manuscript.

Conflict of Interest

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or fiscal relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Footnotes

1. ^ An obvious respond could be that rules of grammar could be extrapolated through corpora of naturalistic speech. Although such corpora are useful, they cannot substitute judgments, for two reasons. First, they are informative only nearly what is role of a linguistic communication, but cannot testify the actual limits of variation. Information technology is impossible to institute what is not licit in a language simply by analyzing them (Henry, 2005). Second, big corpora with rich data that include a variety of genres are the just ones that can provide a true-blue approximation of the actual variation space of a language, and these are available just for large, standard languages. This is one of the about important challenges that linguists working with small or non-standard languages face (Leivada et al., 2019a). For these reasons, native judgments are an indispensable tool for virtually linguists.
2. ^ This is important considering accuracy and stability of judgments are non present in all types of judgments that are related to some aspect of human being perception. For example, in the famous "The Dress" photo, non only did judgments of color perception differ across people, with some seeing the dress every bit blue/black and others as blue/chocolate-brown or white/gold, just also exam-retest reliability revealed switches in perception across testing sessions (Lafer-Sousa et al., 2015).
3. ^ "Dog" tin exist both a verb and a noun in English. The sentence ways the post-obit: dogs that are followed past dogs follow themselves other dogs.
4. ^ https://www.physicstomato.com/colorless-green-ideas-sleep-furiously/
5. ^ http://world wide web.reagan.utexas.edu/archives/speeches/1987/042887e.htm
6. ^ For example, Smith and Cormack (2002) talk over sequences of tense possibilities in English. With some speakers accepting "Did you know that Emily is ill?" and with others considering it unacceptable (i.e., accepting only "Did you know that Emily was sick?"), these authors capture the observed variation past suggesting that this is "a situation in which intuitions are completely clear-cut, so the relevant parameter has been fixed, simply it has been fixed patently at random, presumably because of the paucity of distinguishing data" (p. 286). Another example is given in Levelt (1972), who showed that opinions about what is grammatical in a linguistic communication are not uniform even among trained linguists who are native speakers of the language in question. When he asked 24 linguists to judge whether the sentence "The talking about the problem saved her" (Fraser, 1970, p. 91, with the example marked as ungrammatical) was marked as grammatical or ungrammatical in a specific linguistics article, he found that judgments varied, and only 1/iii of the consulted linguists gave the judgment "ungrammatical," in agreement with the original source.
7. ^ One instance of a comparative illusion in naturalistic speech, exterior of an experimental setting, is the post-obit tweet by Dan Rather: "I think there are more than candidates on stage who speak Spanish more fluently than our president speaks English." [Available at https://twitter.com/danrather/status/1144076809182408704]
8. ^ Although the missing-verb effect tin be occasionally attested in naturalistic voice communication (12b), nosotros argue that this has to do with product factors that introduce noise to the linguistic bulletin.
9. ^ Boeckx (2010) rightly calls the term "grammaticality judgment tasks" a misnomer, because speakers lack intuitions about whether something is grammatical. In the absolute pregnant of the term "grammatical," having judgments virtually grammaticality would entail having intuitions about the workings of all linguistic and cerebral factors that make up one's mind the limits of grammar, and no speaker (or linguist for that matter) has that.

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