Linguistic intuitions and the puzzle of gradience

Abstract

This chapter addresses the question of whether gradience in acceptability should be considered evidence for gradience in grammar. Most current syntactic theories are based on a categorical division of grammatical versus ungrammatical sentences. In contrast, acceptability intuitions, that is, the data used to build those theories, have long been recognized to be gradient. The chapter presents two experiments collecting acceptability ratings for 100 sentences extracted from papers published in Linguistic Inquiry. The results show a gradient pattern. It is argued that this gradience in acceptability is highly unlikely to be due to methodological and other known extra-grammatical factors. Unless another factor can be identified, it seems reasonable to assume that the observed gradience comes (also) from the grammar. Furthermore, the chapter presents a proposal concerning diacritics, according to which the traditional asterisk is reserved for ungrammaticality only, and a new diacritic (“^”) indicates reduced acceptability.