[R-lang] Re: Grammaticality judgments

[Daniel Ezra Johnson]

I'm glad that this discussion is continuing and becoming more fundamental.
You say your results are consistent with theoretical predictions,
but that the theory doesn't provide an account of what you've measured?
Perhaps a brief example of a result-theory pair would be helpful.
I'm coming from a naive perspective between those who think the idea of
gradient grammaticality is self-evident and those who think it's quite silly.

Dan

> Whilst I accept all the previously-raised shortcomings of this method in
> principle, in practice, if a graded judgment task produces a pattern of
> judgments that is (a) entirely consistent with the predictions of relevant
> linguistic theories and (b) corroborated by findings from other paradigms
> (e.g., elicited production, spontaneous speech), I feel that we can be
> confident that the task is measuring something useful, even if we don’t know
> precisely what that is. All my papers analyse the graded-judgment data using
> ANOVA or regression (lmer) and yielded a pattern of results that made sense
> in terms of the theories under investigation and the data obtained using
> other paradigms (and – from a pragmatic perspective – no reviewer or editor
> has ever objected to this analysis). Of course, a magnitude estimation task
> is preferable where this is possible, but my studies mainly focus on
> children, for whom a simpler task is required.
>
>
>
> I’ve also written a book chapter on the paradigm that I hope some may find
> interesting and/or useful. It – and the papers mentioned above – can be
> downloaded from
> http://pcwww.liv.ac.uk/~ambridge/Downloadable%20Publications.htm
>
>
>
> Ben Ambridge
>
> University of Liverpool