Abstract
<p>In the present paper a distinction is drawn between <strong>acceptability</strong> and <strong>grammaticality</strong>. These two concepts have often been confounded in the literature. Thus linguists have been prone to say that 'the native speaker makes grammaticality judgments'. Nothing could be more mistaken. He makes acceptability judgments, and that is something entirely different. In this article, I shall make use of the sentence-schema which has been current since Chomsky (1986a) - a logical extension of X-bar syntax. Readers who are not familiar with the basic modules of modern TG-theory are referred to my articles in <em>Hermes</em>, 1 and <em>Hermes</em>, 2 (see references). In these two articles I adhered to the S-bar/S-schema of sentence structure. This is now obsolete. I shall adopt a relatively conservative view of bounding nodes (subjacency); i.e. I make no attempt to introduce the sophisticated theory of barrierhood developed in Chomsky (1986a). This is immaterial to the argument conducted in this paper.</p>
Highlights
In the present paper a distinction is drawn between acceptability and grammaticality
In (1) there are three heads: V is the head of VP (NP/PP/CP are possible complements of V); I (for inflection) is the head of I’ and, of IP – the sentencenucleus; C is the head of CP – the full clause
A far more technical example is discussed by Langendoen and Bever in an article from 1973 entitled “Can a not unhappy person be called a not sad one?” Through a long series of syntactic arguments they reach the conclusion that the NP a not unhappy person is unsyntactic, but it is acceptable by virtue of a specific extragrammatical processing principle, analogous to (19). (The reader is invited to consult Langendoen and Bever’s article – it is a perfect example of succinct syntactic argumentation)
Summary
In the present paper a distinction is drawn between acceptability and grammaticality. (4) has the following I-language representation – at all levels of structure: (4a) [CP [IP It is unlikely [CP that [IP John will come]]]] It is the linguist who constructed the grammar that can make grammaticality judgments, inasmuch as it is he who has explicit knowledge of the structure of the I-language.
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