[R-lang] Re: Grammaticality judgments

[Daniel Ezra Johnson]

Ben Ambridge wrote:

> I know many linguists think that grammaticality is a binary phenomenon, but it seems wrong to me to start out from that assumption. It's an empirical question - Give participants the opportunity to provide graded judgments and see whether they take it, or just use the ends of the scale. Data from studies that take this approach suggest that grammaticality is a graded phenomenon. To maintain the binary-phenomenon view, one would have to argue that all these findings are spurious and caused by subjects rating something other than grammaticality.

That makes sense, thanks.

There are certainly things about the stimuli in an experiment, unless
it's a very carefully designed one, that might interact with the
measurement of "true grammaticality" - I mean try asking Americans how
good the sentence "My Jesus is a Nazi Jesus" is compared to "Flowers
bloom in the spring" and see which gets a higher rating - but such
things are controlled for, ideally, although I doubt they are always
controlled for well enough (though random Item effects help!).

I've recently been talking to a colleague who explained that various
levels of ungrammaticality do not constitute "gradient grammaticality"
- but I didn't get that. Can you hew to the binary tree, while
acknowledging that e.g. "*John Mary often sees" is worse than many
violation types talked about by syntacticians, which themselves are
ordered, with e.g. subjacency violations being less bad than some
other types?

DEJ