tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post4891049112692060958..comments2024-03-28T04:04:55.806-07:00Comments on Faculty of Language: The deep difference between acceptable and grammaticalNorberthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15701059232144474269noreply@blogger.comBlogger9125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post-55755503982111568262016-03-24T17:26:46.131-07:002016-03-24T17:26:46.131-07:00Trying to generalize/bloviate on about Charles'...Trying to generalize/bloviate on about Charles' & Dennis' comments, if either Chomsky (or Everett!!) is right, language-as-we-encounter it on the street is a sort of cognitive contraption made out of bits and pieces with various origins (some of which may be truly specific to language in some interesting way, but I don't think that this has been demonstrated adequately).<br /><br />My intuitive notion of "ungrammatical = bad for reasons that you can't easily explain for your relatives" is I think OK to get started, but proper work ought to deliver<br /><br />1. a more refined classification of reasons why a form+interpretation pair can be wrong (which might be based on core grammar vs periphery, or something completely differnet).<br />2. an account of how people choose the interpretation they impose on an 'intelligible but unacceptable sentence'<br />3. an account of what 'intelligibility' really is, given that the linguistic world includes jabberwocky and surrealistic utterances (and other strange things).<br /><br />I suggest that 3 is the easiest ... for young children and L2 learners, many utterances contain unknown words, or previously encountered words used in ways currently novel to the learner, so there need to be facilities for dealing with them (recall also that in many societies, multilingualism is very common, for a variety of reasons, and they're not all learned in childhood). I think that 2 is really more psychology than linguistics, and that linguists can get by with the ideas that (a) people try to minimalize the number of errors in the structure (b) maximize the plausibility of the interpretation.<br /><br />Leaving 1 as the job for us.AveryAndrewshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17701162517596420514noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post-17648862397636154292016-03-24T04:58:40.436-07:002016-03-24T04:58:40.436-07:00I share some of Avery's thinking on this.
Th...I share some of Avery's thinking on this. <br /><br />There are examples routinely marked as * (e.g., *he donated the library some books, "*wang" as opposed to 'winged", "*clinged" as opposed to "clung"), but they seem different from those such as "*car the" (for English speakers), and presumably universally, "*whom did you see John and __", "*Is the man who tall is happy?. <br /><br />For me, the former has a great deal with learning lexical idiosyncrasies: somehow we/children know they are idiosyncratic and that variation is to a great extent arbitrary. This is presumably the reaction of the Icelandic shopkeeper at Avery's grammatical gender gaffe. Speakers often say that although they themselves may not produce those strings, they can see other people doing it. But the latter concerns hard UG principles or language-specific properties of functional categories that are presumably established very early and uniformly across speakers. They seem to elicit a "harder" sense of violation: No one could conceivably talk that way.<br />Charles Yanghttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06041398285400095406noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post-52210816876413486812016-03-23T16:13:53.663-07:002016-03-23T16:13:53.663-07:00Thanks for your very interesting replies, Avery. A...Thanks for your very interesting replies, Avery. As for point 2 of your first response, this is precisely the problem: notions like "(un)acceptable" or "no interpretation" are intuitive, and presumably reflect some underlying causes, but I don't see how this is any real reason (rather than a bet we're placing) to assume any meaningful connections to/correlations with technical notions like (un)grammaticality. Perhaps something interesting can be said in this contexts about your "easily correctible" errors like inflectional mistakes as opposed to unintelligible (?) sentences like "what did John disprove Mary", but even for the latter I see no justification to draw any conclusions about grammaticality.<br /><br />This relates to the second point you're raising, which outlines a view that (I suspect) many people would subscribe to: control for the plausibly 'nongrammatical' factors and you're left with the (more or less) direct expression of grammaticality. But that doesn't change the fact that the objects people 'judge' (sentences/strings/stimuli) are not equivalent to objects that could be (un)grammatical.<br /><br />And we cannot know in advance what the 'nongrammatical' factors are; perhaps your "semi-flippant proposal" is entirely correct, but it's certainly not obvious. To recycle my example from above: the ban against vacuous operators that we presumably see at work in cases like "what did John disprove Mary" (or the identity condition governing ellipsis, or Fox's Scope Economy condition, or...) are surely not "highly accessible to common sense", but if Chomsky is right and these are constraints imposed by external systems then they're not grammatical factors at all. (I'm not saying that Chomsky *is* right, I'm just using his claims as an example of how what we consider 'grammatical factors' is crucially dependent on the general architecture of grammar and interacting systems we assume.)Dennis O.https://www.blogger.com/profile/07200488340449742505noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post-44797745461720028642016-03-22T16:32:08.460-07:002016-03-22T16:32:08.460-07:00I think I can push this a bit farther, and at leas...I think I can push this a bit farther, and at least partially salvage 'grammaticality judgement'. On the basis that, when you concoct a sentence and submit it to your native speaker friends for a 'grammaticality judgement', you've hopefully done your best to make sure that it isn't unacceptable for 'nongrammatical' reasons, such as being contradictory, surrealistic, jabberwocky language, obscene or otherwise taboo or socially objectionable, containing stylistic clashes that that you don't have enough literary skills in the language to get away with, etc. etc.<br /><br />So what are the grammatical reasons? My semi-flippant proposal is that they are the things that you can't easily explain to your intelligent relatives who haven't taken a syntax course. Everything on the list of 'non-grammatical' reasons is highly accessible to 'common sense' by anybody clever enough to get a BA, regardless of whether they have actually done this or not, whereas the 'grammatical' reasons why something might be bad are not.AveryAndrewshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17701162517596420514noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post-88177301517460825742016-03-20T16:52:11.246-07:002016-03-20T16:52:11.246-07:00On point 1, we (or, more precisely, Chomsky in the...On point 1, we (or, more precisely, Chomsky in the early-mid 1950s) started with a fairly traditional idea of what 'grammar' was, & pushed things along from there on the basis of what seemed to make sense. But not necessarily in ways that can't be questioned to some extent. For example, we traditionally think of Island Constraints as part of 'grammar' aka 'competence', and the constraints on center embedding as something else, aka 'performance', but, (drawing on a convo I had with Howard Lasnik a rather long time ago), to the extent that the Island Constraints are universal, this division can be questioned.<br /><br />Because if the Island Constraints aren't learned, then they can be regarded as part of the computational infrastructure that grammars run on, similarly to the evidently limited and somewhat flaky pushdown store needed to run recursion, and both seem to have some points in common:<br />a) they are plausibly explained in terms of processing limitations<br />b) arguably, both can be somewhat overcome by practice, Swedes getting practice in ignoring Island Constraints, the authors of Ancient Greek literature and Early Modern German laws getting practice in violating the center embedding constraints.<br /><br />But nothing terrible is going to happen if the borders between grammar/competence and performance get pushed around in various ways, as long as people are trying to produce sensible accounts of the phenomena, rather than relegating them to wastebaskets or boxes in the garage to be ignored.<br /><br />As for 2, I take 'no interpretation' as an intuitive rather than a theoretical concept. For example, if a student wrote 'what did John disprove Mary' in a term paper (changing the verb to suit the context), you probably wouldn't know how to correct it, due to being unable to find any interpretation. Whereas papers by good non-native English-speaking students tend to have a certain number of easy to fix 'grammatical' errors, but nothing that is uninterpretable (at least not more than the native English speaking students produce). An interesting case wrt having/lacking interpretations is nonsense & surrealistic poetry, which I think can be characterized as having syntactic structures that control semantic interpretation in a normal way, but where the lexical items either lack meanings, or they don't fit together properly ('inflammable white ideas', very likely a steal from Chomsky by a Nobelista poet (Elytis, Greek)). So the notion of what an 'interpretation' is could clearly use some refinement.<br /><br />So, I think theory can elaborate the boundaries and shift them around, but I don't see it as necessary to get started. That might be part of the problem here ... presumably anybody can cook up something over the weekend that can be told to an introductory class, and you can in fact go a very long way with what can be cooked up in this way, to the extent that hardly anybody can be bothered to spend the time to work things out more carefully and extensively. Since we all have to be productive enough ... even retired people, in order to retain their institutional affiliations.AveryAndrewshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17701162517596420514noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post-86709750112090395522016-03-20T12:22:43.109-07:002016-03-20T12:22:43.109-07:00Avery: on your first point, I agree, but only once...Avery: on your first point, I agree, but only once we are more precise about the "some kind of problem" part do we generate actual data for our theory.<br /><br />Not sure I understand the second point. "Ungrammatical sentence" is as much an oxymoron as "grammaticality judgment", unless we understand sentence to mean something very technical and theory-dependent (say, structured object with sound and meaning properties, or whatever kinds of objects your grammar generates). Why would "no interpretation" necessarily imply ungrammaticality? I know this is often assumed, but I've never seen it justified. Take "Who did John kiss Mary?". Does it have an interpretation (a natural one rather than one we arrive at by treating it as a puzzle)? Is it grammatical? That depends on the theory (e.g., if the grammar constructs it but Full Interpretation is a C-I principle, then the answer is yes). So I don't see how the inference from "no interpretation" (whatever that means!) to "ungrammatical" could be an a priori assumption.Dennis O.https://www.blogger.com/profile/07200488340449742505noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post-54149263487517420472016-03-20T12:22:29.696-07:002016-03-20T12:22:29.696-07:00This comment has been removed by the author.Dennis O.https://www.blogger.com/profile/07200488340449742505noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post-18401451207564918302016-03-20T00:28:28.280-07:002016-03-20T00:28:28.280-07:00I find the suggested OK usage of 'acceptable&#...I find the suggested OK usage of 'acceptable' problematic because there are so many intepretable sentences that nonetheless have some kind of problem that can traditionally be described as 'grammatical', and which generative grammar has quite a lot to say about. Like when I asked the shop girl in Reykjavík for 'tveir kókar' and she looked at my archly and said 'tvær' (I had successfully guessed the plural of 'coke', but not the gender).<br /><br />Indeed I think you can rescue the concept of 'ungrammatical sentence' by reserving it for cases where either (a) there is no interpretation what so ever (b) there is an accessible interpretation, but has an observable acceptability problem of some kind, and your theory of that is that it violates a rule or principle of grammar, but not in such a severe way that no interpretation at all is available. But 'grammaticality judgement' is indeed a mistake.AveryAndrewshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17701162517596420514noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post-18067698197823349082016-03-18T14:37:25.032-07:002016-03-18T14:37:25.032-07:00»my unrelenting obsession with forever banishing f...»my unrelenting obsession with forever banishing from the linguistics lexicon the phrase “grammaticality judgment.”«<br /><br />Thanks, Norbert, for saying this -- I share your obsession. It's amazing (and embarassing) how often you see that oxymoron used in the professional literature; it's even in the subtitle of Schütze's recently re-released book on the matter (http://langsci-press.org/catalog/book/89). I think this sloppiness says a lot about how much linguists tend to care about the conceptual foundations of what they're doing, namely very little, in many cases.<br /><br />I also think the problem is deeper than you suggest here. Grammaticality is defined theory-internally, as a property of grammatical representations. Acceptability, on the other hand, is a purely intuitive notion that to my knowledge has no reasonably sharp, theoretically relevant definition, and that applies to vaguely defined stimuli ("sentences"). It's an entirely informal notion, but we're customarily ignoring this fact (vide all the fancy experiments designed to "measure acceptability"), while at the same time everybody, I think, concedes that all kinds of intractable cognitive factors enter into such judgments, so the default assumption should be that they tell you next to nothing of any interest. I don't know of any reason to suppose that there is any interesting correlation whatsoever between grammaticality and acceptability, whatever the latter may be, and it's hard to see how there could be given that they apply to very different things (representations vs. "inputs" or something like that).<br /><br />The obsession of our field with this undefined notion of "acceptability" goes back, I would speculate, to the early days of GG, when some sort of idealization was (tacitly?) accepted that essentially equated the speaker with an automaton that either accepts of rejects a given string. But back then, grammaticality was actually defined over strings (grammars defined sets of "well-formed" strings), so perhaps there was some foundation for making this leap of faith from competence to performance. But nowadays we don't understand natural-language grammars to generate strings ("well-formed sentences"), but rather hierarchical structures and derivative form-meaning pairs, which then feed other cognitive systems. So what justification do we have to assume that the "acceptability" (whatever that is) of stimuli bears any significant relation to the logically distinct notion of grammaticality?<br /><br />I should add that I don't think the notion of "acceptability" doesn't have a justified usage, namely when we use it to describe the fact that some externalized form does or doesn't permit a particular interpretation. Often, saying that something is "unacceptable" is just a shorthand for that (e.g., we say "What does John like and apples?" is unacceptable, but we really mean that it doesn't have the expected interpretation "which x : John likes x and apples"), and this seems to me to be closer to the kind of data that we want our theory to model (form-meaning correspondence). But it's not supposed to be a model of "acceptability" per se, and couldn't possibly be given that a grammar is by definition a competence system.<br /><br />I think all of this raises non-trivial questions for our field and the kinds of data it relies on, which hardly anybody cares to address, it seems.Dennis O.https://www.blogger.com/profile/07200488340449742505noreply@blogger.com