Relating (Un)acceptability to Interpretation. Experimental Investigations on Negation

Urtzi Etxeberria,M Teresa Espinal,Joan Borràs-Comes,Susagna Tubau,Viviane Deprez

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2017.02370

Urtzi Etxeberria, M Teresa Espinal + Show 3 more

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https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.02370

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Abstract

Although contemporary linguistic studies routinely use unacceptable sentences to determine the boundary of what falls outside the scope of grammar, investigations far more rarely take into consideration the possible interpretations of such sentences, perhaps because these interpretations are commonly prejudged as irrelevant or unreliable across speakers. In this paper we provide the results of two experiments in which participants had to make parallel acceptability and interpretation judgments of sentences presenting various types of negative dependencies in Basque and in two varieties of Spanish (Castilian Spanish and Basque Country Spanish). Our results show that acceptable sentences are uniformly assigned a single negation reading in the two languages. However, while unacceptable sentences consistently convey single negation in Basque, they are interpreted at chance in both varieties of Spanish. These results confirm that judgment data that distinguish between acceptable and unacceptable negative utterances can inform us not only about an adult’s grammar of his/her particular language but also about interesting cross-linguistic differences. We conclude that the acceptability and interpretation of (un)grammatical negative sentences can serve linguistic theory construction by helping to disentangle basic assumptions about the nature of various negative dependencies.

Highlights

The notion that grammatical sentences have clear and reliable interpretations across speakers is generally considered a truism that underlies all linguistic inquiry quite independently of the particular theories that given practitioners may favor
In accord with Shanon’s (1973) early experimental work, we argue that the acceptability and interpretation ofgrammatical negative sentences can inform about the grammar of particular languages and serve linguistic theory construction by helping to disentangle basic assumptions about the nature of various negative dependencies
We present the results from Experiment 1 (Basque) and from Experiment 2 (Castilian Spanish and BC-Spanish), first addressing the research questions related to acceptability, the questions related to interpretation, and the issue of possible correlations between interpretation and acceptability

Summary

Introduction

The notion that grammatical sentences have clear and reliable interpretations across speakers is generally considered a truism that underlies all linguistic inquiry quite independently of the particular theories that given practitioners may favor. Relevant are the series of studies that focus on the perception and comprehension of sequences containing grammatical illusions (such as illusory NPI licensing, Phillips et al, 2011; and comparative illusions, Wellwood et al, 2017) Some of these studies even focus on the ability of adults to learn to comprehend a novel syntactic construction that in strict syntactic terms is ungrammatical (such as the so-called ‘needs’ construction, Kaschak and Glenberg, 2004), a task in which structural and, syntactic priming has been claimed to play an important role (Ivanova et al, 2012). In contrast to the interest aroused by this question in psycholinguistic approaches, in linguistic theory construction the study of the interpretation of ungrammatical and unacceptable sentences is not routinely taken into account

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