The Role of Lexical Frequency in the Acceptability of Syntactic Variants: Evidence Fromthat‐Clauses in Polish

Abstract

A number of studies report that frequency is a poor predictor of acceptability, in particular at the lower end of the frequency spectrum. Because acceptability judgments provide a substantial part of the empirical foundation of dominant linguistic traditions, understanding how acceptability relates to frequency, one of the most robust predictors of human performance, is crucial. The relation between low frequency and acceptability is investigated using corpus- and behavioral data on the distribution of infinitival and finite that-complements in Polish. Polish verbs exhibit substantial subordination variation and for the majority of verbs taking an infinitival complement, the that-complement occurs with low frequency (<0.66 ipm). These low-frequency that-clauses, in turn, exhibit large differences in how acceptable they are to native speakers. It is argued that acceptability judgments are based on configurations of internally structured exemplars, the acceptability of which cannot reliably be assessed until sufficient evidence about the core component has accumulated.

Frequency data from corpora partially explain native-speaker ratings and choices in overabundant paradigm cells

“…Divjak (2016) considers, among other meanings, the traditional relative frequency (incidence per million), construction frequency (which itself covers various ways of relating the frequencies between related items), family frequency (incorporating various ways of looking at the size and composition of a class of words) and measures of probability and association. These will largely be beyond the scope of this study, which is focused on how we understand and manipulate the numbers that arise from simple counts of individual forms.…”

Are corpus-based predictions mirrored in the preferential choices and ratings of native speakers? Predicting the alternation between the Estonian adessive case and the adposition <i>peal</i> ‘on’

“…The "quantitative turn" (Janda 2013) has brought about an impressive growth in the number of published studies that combine corpus-based data with behavioral data. One prolific area pertains to the discussion of how corpus-based frequency estimates relate to experimental findings, especially acceptability judgements (see Divjak 2016 for a recent overview). There has also been an exponential growth in published studies that use probabilistic statistical classification models to analyse linguistic data; see Klavan and Divjak (2016) for an overview.…”

Acceptability Rating of Ungrammatical Colloquial Latvian: How Native Speakers Judge Different Error Types

“…Schütze and Sprouse, 2013, 29; for an argument against overgeneralization of web-search results and the necessary and complimentary role of acceptability judgement test see also Schütze, 2009). Moreover, low frequency lexical and syntactic items seem to be more plausible for acceptability rating than corpus-based frequency analysis (Divjak, 2017).…”

“…Although usually in acceptability rating tasks a bit more than 20 participants are used (but see Divjak, 2017, who used 285 subjects), in our study we had 83 subjects; all native speakers. Our sample was constructed to include all regions of Latvia (Riga, Vidzeme, Kurzeme, Latgale, Zemgale), all age groups, and an equal gender distribution.…”

“…Finally, the demographic information was asked: age, gender, geographic / regional affiliation, native language, second best known language, Latvian language courses in the past, education, education field, occupation and handedness (Divjak, 2017, Cowart, 1997.…”