The question of whether humans represent grammatical knowledge as a binary condition on membership in a set of well-formed sentences, or as a probabilistic property has been the subject of debate among linguists, psychologists, and cognitive scientists for many decades. Acceptability judgments present a serious problem for both classical binary and probabilistic theories of grammaticality. These judgements are gradient in nature, and so cannot be directly accommodated in a binary formal grammar. However, it is also not possible to simply reduce acceptability to probability. The acceptability of a sentence is not the same as the likelihood of its occurrence, which is, in part, determined by factors like sentence length and lexical frequency. In this paper, we present the results of a set of large-scale experiments using crowd-sourced acceptability judgments that demonstrate gradience to be a pervasive feature in acceptability judgments. We then show how one can predict acceptability judgments on the basis of probability by augmenting probabilistic language models with an acceptability measure. This is a function that normalizes probability values to eliminate the confounding factors of length and lexical frequency. We describe a sequence of modeling experiments with unsupervised language models drawn from state-of-the-art machine learning methods in natural language processing. Several of these models achieve very encouraging levels of accuracy in the acceptability prediction task, as measured by the correlation between the acceptability measure scores and mean human acceptability values. We consider the relevance of these results to the debate on the nature of grammatical competence, and we argue that they support the view that linguistic knowledge can be intrinsically probabilistic.

This highly readable but game-changing book shows to what extent the "poverty of the stimulus" argument stems from nothing more than poverty of the imagination. A must read for generative linguists.Ivan Sag, Stanford UniversityFor fifty years, the "poverty of the stimulus" has driven "nativist" linguistics. Clark and Lappin challenge the POS and develop a formal foundation for language learning. This brilliant book should be mandatory reading for anyone who wants to understand the most fundamental question in linguistics. Richard Sproat, Oregon Health and Science UniversityClark and Lappin provide a brilliant and wide-ranging re-examination of one of the most important questions in cognitive science: how much innate structure is required to support language acquisition. A remarkable achievement. Nick Chater, Professor of Behavioural Science, University of WarwickThis comprehensive cutting-edge treatise on linguistic nativism skillfully untangles the human capacity to effortlessly learn languages, from claims that this capacity is specific to language.

In this paper, we argue that syntactic islands, first characterized by Ross (1967), can best be described and explained in functional rather than purely structural terms. We define here first a pragmatic (discourse-based) property -dominance -and we offer operational criteria to discern its presence in a sentence. We then state our hypothesis concerning extraction which we formulate in terms of dominance. In part 2 we attempt to show that our hypothesis allows us to account for all of Ross' constraints and that we are also able to capture certain distinctions in acceptability, which elude his and other syntactic approaches. In the third section we argue that Postal's claim concerning a correlation between islands and certain ambiguities is incorrect. A partial correlation of a different sort can be predicted and explained in terms of dominance. 0.A considerable amount of attention has been devoted by linguists to the problem of characterizing and explaining syntactic islands. Ross (1967) provides an extensive discussion of islands and represents them in terms of constraints on extraction rules whose operation is blocked by these environments. A number of proposals have been put forward since then, notably by Chomsky (1973). More recently, Postal (1974) tries to show that there is a correlation between syntactic islands and a certain class of ambiguities. He explains this correlation by arguing that the ambiguous sentences in question are derived from alternative logical forms by syntactic operations which are sensitive to island constraints. What is common to the theories suggested by Ross, Chomsky, Postal, and others is that they seek to treat islands as essentially structural phenomena which are, in effect, defined by the syntactic constraints upon movement transformations, which limit the domain of these transformations to a specific class of environments.We wish to claim that it is both possible, and more fruitful to characterize islands in functional terms. In the first part of this paper we define a pragmatic (discourse-based) property which we refer to as dominance, and we offer operational criteria for discerning its presence in a sentence. We then state a hypotheseis concerning extraction which we formulate in terms of dominance. In part 2 we attempt to show that our hypothesis allows us to