Gradience in linguistic data

Abstract

This paper provides a survey of the theoretical and experimental findings on degrees of grammaticality, with a special focus on gradience in syntax. We first discuss the theoretical relevance of gradient data, and argue that such data should be elicited experimentally in order to be reliable. We then review a set of experimental findings on gradience, which lead to the hypothesis that linguistic constraints come in two types: hard constraints whose violations trigger strong unacceptability, and soft constraints that lead to only mild unacceptability. There is experimental evidence that both types of constraints are subject to constraint ranking and show cumulativity and ganging up effects. However, soft and hard constraints differ with respect to context effects, crosslinguistic variation, and developmental optionality. This set of properties forms the basis for an evaluation of existing proposals for models of gradience in grammar, with a particular focus on models that extend Optimality Theory.

A comparison of informal and formal acceptability judgments using a random sample from Linguistic Inquiry 2001–2010

“…This development means that there are two methods for collecting acceptability judgments currently in widespread use in the field of syntax: the relatively informal traditional methods that have largely established the foundation of the field for the past 60 years (henceforth informal methods), and the more formal experimental methods that have been gaining popularity over the past 15 years (henceforth formal methods). This methodological dichotomy has led a number of researchers to ask which method is empirically superior (e.g., Bard et al, 1996;Keller, 2000;Edelman and Christiansen, 2003;Phillips and Lasnik, 2003;Featherston, 2005aFeatherston, , 2005bFeatherston, , 2007Featherston, , 2008Featherston, , 2009Ferreira, 2005;Sorace and Keller, 2005;Wasow and Arnold, 2005;den Dikken et al, 2007;Alexopoulou and Keller, 2007;Bornkessel-Schlesewsky and Schlesewsky, 2007;Fanselow, 2007;Grewendorf, 2007;Haider, 2007;Newmeyer, 2007;Sprouse, 2007;Culbertson and Gross, 2009;Myers, 2009aMyers, , 2009bPhillips, 2010;Bader and Häussler, 2010;Dąbrowska, 2010;Gibson and Fedorenko, 2010;Culicover and Jackendoff, 2010;Gross and Culberton, 2011;Sprouse, 2011b;Weskott and Fanselow, 2011;Gibson et al, 2011;Almeida, 2012, 2013;Gibson and Fedorenko, 2013). Our goal in this paper is to substantially increase the empirical basis of this line of research by comparing the results of informal and formal methods for a very large and random s...…”

Detecting Human Features in Summaries – Symbol Sequence Statistical Regularity

“…There have been distinctions between soft and hard constraints, related to how important a constraint is to the acceptability of a clause [13,22]. Much of the existing work has been based on Optimality Theory (see [21]), which declares that output language is based on a procedure that uses a "candidate analysis" generation function, called GEN and a harmonic evaluation function, called H-eval, which evaluates candidates according to a harmony criterion.…”

“…Highly grammatical text chunks will have a low number of violations for a given set of evaluated properties. The method also applies constraint weighting, which has been used in other works as well [22]. The output is a grammaticality index that is shown to correlate to human acceptability evaluations.…”

Automatic Summarization from Multiple Documents

“…There have been distinctions between soft and hard constraints, referring to how important a constraint is to the acceptability of a clause [Kel00,SK05].…”

“…The method applies constraint weighting, which has been used in other works as well [SK05]. Highly grammatical text chunks have a low number of violations for a given set of evaluated properties.…”