Grammaticality

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In theoretical linguistics, grammaticality is the quality of a linguistic utterance of being grammatically well-formed. A judgement on whether a sentence or constituent is grammatically well-formed is based on whether the sentence is produced and interpreted in accordance with the rules and constraints of the relevant grammar. If the rules and constraints of the particular language are followed then the sentence is considered to be grammatical. In contrast, an ungrammatical sentence is one that violates the rules of the given language.

The judgement of grammaticality is based primarily on two main factors. The first factor, which is the factor upon which many linguists base their hypotheses is competence of the language. Native speakers will be able to correctly judge a sentence grammatical or ungrammatical with ease based on their intuition. The second factor is the context in which the sentence was uttered.

The grammaticality of a sentence is often reported in a variety of terms including acceptable, marginally acceptable, unacceptable, terrible, good etc. Sentences are often coded with symbols such as ?, *, ** etc., usually on a scale of 0-?-*-** (grammatical to ungrammatical). Lyons 1968 defines the concept as "that part of the acceptability of utterances which can be accounted for in terms of the rules", a criterion that complements acceptability for semantic soundness.^[1]

Noam Chomsky, in his study of grammaticality in the 1960s, discovered that there are three criteria which cannot be used to determine whether or not a sentence is grammatical. The first being its inclusion in a corpus, the second being whether or not the sentence is meaningful, and the third being whether or not the sentence is statistically probable. In order to illustrate this point, Chomsky created the following nonsensical sentence:

Colorless green ideas sleep furiously
 Chomsky: 1957, p. 17

This sentence is deemed grammatical by many native speakers of English, however it is not included in any corpus, nor is it statistically probable, nor is it meaningful. We can therefore conclude that much of grammar relies on context and individual meaning.

Since many linguists use a native speaker's intuition as primary evidence for the grammaticality of sentences, it is evident that the idea grammaticality has been around for centuries.

Generative linguists think that for native speakers of natural languages, grammaticality is a matter of linguistic intuition, a competence learned by language acquisition in childhood. Therefore, generative linguistics strives to predict grammaticality exhaustively. On the other hand, there is a gradual abandonment of grammaticality in favour of acceptability by linguists that stress the social acquisition of language in contrast to innate factors (and who will seldom rely on phrase structure grammar) in the tradition of Hopper 1987. Prescriptive grammars of controlled natural languages define grammaticality as a matter of explicit consensus.

Sprouse claims that the prevailing models on grammaticality since Chomsky (1965) admit that “[w]hile many sentences are either clearly acceptable or clearly unacceptable, a significant number of sentences fall somewhere in between in a gray area of partial acceptability”^[2] and that linguists since then assume that “these intermediate levels of acceptability are caused by properties other than grammatical knowledge” such as “plausibility, working memory limitations, etc.,” and therefore that grammaticality is “categorical” in a binary way, such that “sentences are either grammatical or Ungrammatical.”^[2] Sprouse then goes on to claim that a few exceptions to this trend are those who claim that “strength of violation” plays a role in grammaticality judgements. Examples include “Huang’s (1982) proposal that ECP violations are stronger than Subjacency violations[, …] Chomsky’s (1986) proposal that each barrier crossed leads to lower acceptability” and “Optimality Theory (see especially Keller 2000, 2003).”^[2]

However, Sprouse then claims that “[t]he past ten years or so have seen a major shift in attitudes toward intermediate levels of acceptability.”^[2] He states that this is due to the increasingly popular use of “experimental syntax” which is extremely effective at “measuring acceptability,” making it possible to easily “detect subtle differences along a continuous spectrum of acceptability.”^[2] Sprouse cites Keller (2000) and Fanselow et al. (2004) as two proponents of this new way to construe grammaticality. But Sprouse himself rejects this view. Siding with the more traditional categorical interpretation of grammaticality, Sprouse provides “two pieces of experimental evidence for a categorical distinction between grammatical and ungrammatical sentences” in his paper.^[2]

There have been experiments conducted in order to test how early people gain the ability to judge grammaticality in their native language. In an experiment by Cairns et al., preschool children aged 4–6 were orally given sentences such as 'the monkey is eating the banana' versus 'the koala bear is eat the orange', enacting these scenarios with toys in order to make sure that the meaning of the sentences were clear to the children. The results of this study showed that the earliest age at which children can discriminate well-formed from ill-formed sentences, as well as correct these, is at 6 years of age.^[3] Over this two-year period, which shows an enormous increase in grammaticality judgment, metalinguistic skill is in critical development; "[the judgment] relies on the [psycholinguistic] ability of the child to access [their] internalized grammar and apply processing operations that either succeed or fail in generating the target sentence" (Cairns et al., 2006). This ability to judge the grammaticality of sentences seems to develop in children well after basic grammar skills have been established, and is related to early reading acquisition; acquisitionists generally believe that the ability to make grammaticality judgments is a measure of syntactic awareness.^[3]

Genieis the pseudonym of a feral child who was the victim of extraordinarily severe abuse, neglect and social isolation. Genie was first hospitalized in November 1970, at the age of 13 years and 7 months. Observations of Genie's linguistic development began to be made from about this time up until the beginning of 1978. This gives a maximum time period of approximately 7 years and 2 months during which Genie was accessible to linguists and psychologists for research purposes. The vast majority of linguistic data were collected by Susan Curtiss who had continuous contact with Genie over a period of approximately 6 years and 6 months, from June 1971 until January 1978. ^[4]

From the data collected, Fromkin et. al concluded that Genie showed a gradual grammar acquisition by combining and forming new linguistic elements; she was also able to conjoin sentences that predicted the generation of infinite sentences. Her speech was rule-governed and there was a fixed word-order. She included basic elements and constituents in her speech that showed her systematic ways of expressing syntactic and semantic relationship.^[5]

• Constituent (linguistics)
• Gradient well-formedness
• Grammar checker
• List of linguistic example sentences
• Movement paradox
• Poverty of the stimulus

• Fetzer, A. (2004). Recontextualizing context: Grammaticality meets appropriateness. Philadelphia; Amsterdam: John Benjamins Pub.
• Schutze, C. T. (1996). The empirical base of linguistics: Grammaticality judgments and linguistic methodology. University of Chicago Press.
• Hopper, Paul (1987): Emergent grammar. In: Aske, Jon et al. (ed.) (1987): General session and parasession on grammar and cognition. Proceedings of the thirteenth annual meeting. Berkeley: BLS: 139–155.
• Lyons, John (1968): Introduction to Theoretical Linguistics. London: Cambridge University Press, ISBN 9780521095105 .
• Chomsky, (1957): "Syntactic Structures", The Hague/Paris:Mouton
• Johnes, Peter (1995). Contradictions and unanswered questions in the Genie case: A fresh look at the linguistic evidence. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)

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