<OT> New Posting: ROA-676

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ROA 676-0804

Gradient Grammaticality

Frank Keller <keller at inf.ed.ac.uk>
Antonella Sorace <antonella at ling.ed.a.cuk>

Direct link: http://roa.rutgers.edu/view.php3?roa=676


Abstract:
 This paper provides a survey of the theoretical and experimental
findings on degrees of grammaticality, with a special focus
on gradience in syntax. We first discuss the theoretical
relevance of gradient data, and argue that such data should
be elicited experimentally in order to be reliable. We then
review a set of experimental findings on gradience, which
lead to the hypothesis that linguistic constraints come
in two types: hard constraints whose violations trigger
strong unacceptability, and soft constraints that lead to
only mild unacceptability. There is experimental evidence
that both types of constraints are subject to constraint
ranking and show cumulativity and ganging up effects. However,
soft and hard constraints differ with respect to context
effects, crosslinguistic variation, and developmental optionality
. This set of properties forms the basis for an evaluation
of existing proposals for models of gradience in grammar,
with a particular focus on models that extend Optimality Theory.

Comments: To appear in Lingua, 2005.
Keywords: gradience, modeling, experiments
Areas: Syntax,Computation,Learnability,Psycholinguistics
Type: Journal Article

Direct link: http://roa.rutgers.edu/view.php3?roa=676