Grammaticality

In linguistics, grammaticality is determined by the conformity to language usage as derived by the grammar of a particular speech variety.

Such grammaticality judgements reflect the fact that the structure of sentence (1) obeys the rules of English grammar.

Sentence (1) is grammatical yet infelicitous, because the pragmatics of the verb 'sleep' cannot be expressed as an action carried out in a furious manner.

Hence, a native speaker would rate this sentence as odd, or unacceptable, because the meaning does not make sense according to the English lexicon.

'"[3] For linguists such as Hopper,[8] who stress the role of social learning in contrast to innate knowledge of language, there has been a gradual abandonment of talk about grammaticality in favour of acceptability.

[11] Note that examples (3)-(8) are open to interpretation as judgement is based entirely on intuition, and determination of grammaticality is dependent on one's theory of what the grammar is.

[6] Although (10c) is acceptable due to a frequency affect, sentences with preposition copying are judged to be ungrammatical, as shown in (11c).

However, there are a few exceptions to this trend, including those who claim that "strength of violation" plays a role in grammaticality judgements.

Within the past twenty years however, there has been a major shift in linguists' understanding of intermediate levels of acceptability.

[19] Prescriptive grammar of controlled natural languages defines grammaticality as a matter of explicit consensus.

These norms are usually based on conventional rules that form a part of a higher or literary register for a given language.

[7] There are several methods that successfully investigate sentence processing, some of which include eye tracking, self-paced listening and reading, or cross-modal priming.

The program worked primarily by utilizing a parser which consisted of constraints which, if a first parsing attempt failed, could be selectively relaxed.

[14] There have been experiments conducted in order to test how early speakers gain the ability to judge grammaticality in their native language.

The results of this study show that the earliest age at which children can discriminate well-formed from ill-formed sentences, as well as correct these, is at 6 years.

[24] During the critical period between 4 and 6 years old, there is a significant increase in the accuracy of grammaticality judgments, since metalinguistic skill is in critical development; the judgment relies on the psycholinguistic ability of the child to access their internalized grammar and to compute whether it can or cannot generate the target sentence.

However, the idea that there is a critical period for the acquisition of syntactic competence, which is reflected by the ability to assess the well-formedness of a sentence, is controversial.

However, these issues are not necessarily independent of each other, as low decoding ability of structure could affect processing speed.

Overall, individual differences in L2 working memory and decoding ability are correlated to grammaticality judgment accuracy and latencies.

[26][27] Age for decrease of L2 grammaticality performance varies from early childhood to late adolescence, depending on the combinations of the speaker's first and second language.

The age of acquisition at which L2 learners are worse than native speakers depends on how dissimilar the L1 and L2 are on phonological and grammatical level.

[26] There is data supporting high-performing late learners well beyond the critical period: in an experiment testing grammaticality by J. L. McDonald, 7 out of 50 L2 English late-learner subjects had scores within range of native speakers.

The matter of reliability of L2 grammaticality judgments is an ongoing issue in the research field of second language acquisition.

[31][32] They suggest that those with familial sinistrality are less sensitive to violations of sentence structure likely due to a correlation between this group and a less localized language module in the brain.

[32] Cowart [31] conducted a study specifically testing for the effects of familial sinistrality in grammatical judgement tasks.

[4][33][34] Repetition experiments are conducted by asking participants to give scaled ratings of sentences on their level of grammaticality.

Gibson and Thomas[39] concludes from their offline acceptability ratings that working-memory overload causes native speakers to prefer the ungrammatical sentence.

As a result, German or Dutch participants are well able to correctly rule out the ungrammatical sentences with the missing verb phrase.