Acceptability or grammaticality

Another much debated disagreement between Devitt and his critics is over whether the linguistic intuitive judgements used as evidence for theories of gram- mar by linguists should be grammaticality or acceptability judgements. In the following, I first lay out how these terms are used before proceeding to outline the different views.

In the generative linguistic literature, the linguistic intuitive judgements in question here are sometimes referred to as acceptability judgements and some- times asgrammaticality judgements. The distinction between the two terms in this context goes back to Chomsky (1965), who defines a sentence as acceptable to a speaker if that speaker finds the sentence “natural and immediately com- prehensible [...] in no way bizarre or outlandish” (Chomsky, 1965, 10). Note that this specific use of the term “acceptable” differs from more everyday uses of the term as well as from the use of the term in other areas of linguistics like pragmatics, where it might mean socially acceptable, felicitous, or appropriate to a speaker in a certain context. For a sentence to be grammatical, in this tradi- tion, means that the structure of the sentence is in accordance with the (mental) generative rules of the language (Chomsky, 1965). It is frequently noted that the term “grammaticality judgement” is widely used in the generative literature to refer to what should, by Chomsky’s definition above, be called “acceptability judgements”, perhaps adding to the confusion over what the actual practice of generative linguists is (Schütze, 2006/1996; Den Dikken et al., 2007; Culbertson and Gross, 2009).

On the traditional generative view, an acceptability judgement is a speaker’s report of how acceptable, natural or good a sentence strikes them to be. This is seen as a pre-theoretical or quasi atheoretical judgement (Maynes, 2012b).

Acceptability, on this view, is related to grammaticality in that a sentence’s status as actually being grammatical or not with respect to the mental grammar of a speaker is a crucial part of the reason why a sentence will be experienced as being (un)acceptable by that speaker. But other things might influence this experience as well, such as whether the sentence is highly taxing for the working memory. This, in the traditional generative view, is the reason that the sentence “the dog that the woman that the girl knew saw ran” will be judged as unacceptable by most speakers. On this view, the sentence is hypothesised to actually be grammatical, i.e., to be in accordance with speakers’ mental grammars, but the sentence will still be judged to be unacceptable because it overworks the speakers’ working memory.

In the generative literature, you find two different uses of the term “gram- maticality judgement”. On the one hand, “grammaticality” gets interpreted as meaning something like actually “generated by the speaker’s [mental] grammar”

(Schütze, 2006/1996, 20). In those contexts, generative linguists will usually remark that speakers do not have such intuitive judgements, that is, speakers do not have intuitive judgements about whether a sentence is actually permit- ted by their mental grammar or not (see, e.g., Schütze 2006/1996, 26). On the generative view, the closest thing that speakers have is acceptability judgements.

In other cases, “grammaticality” means something like “explanatory hypothe-

ses based on whatever relevant data and theory linguists might possess” about

“what sentences are permitted, or generated, by a grammar” (Culbertson and Gross, 2009, 722). On this view, if a sentence is judged by some speaker to be grammatical, this means that the speaker has compared the sentence to their specific concept of what it means for something to be grammatical and found that the sentence is in accordance with that concept (here, “grammar” and

“grammatical” refers to a specific hypothesis about the mental system, not the mental system itself). On this interpretation, whether the sentence is deemed to be grammatical or not depends on the person’s theory of grammar. Saying that a sentence is grammatical in this sense is thus, for generative linguists, a hypothesis about how the actual mental grammar of a speaker is organised, i.e., it is a hypothesis that this sentence is permitted by the speaker’s actual men- tal grammar. Likewise, saying that a sentence is ungrammatical would be to hypothesise that this sentence is not permitted by the speaker’s actual mental grammar. In this sense, grammaticality judgements are not usually considered evidence in the generative literature. Myers (2009b, 412) writes: “a grammati- cality judgment, strictly speaking, is a theoretical claim, not evidence at all”.

Now, let us look at each of the three main views from the etiology debate on the acceptability/grammaticality issue.

The Modest Explanation: On the Modest Explanation, the relevant sort of linguistic intuitive judgements for linguists to build their theories on isgram- maticality judgements⁸ (when Devitt talks about grammaticality judgements, he is talking about the second sense discussed above, where “grammaticality”

means according to a theory of grammar). He thinks that lay subjects will often interpret “acceptability” to mean grammatical in their folk sense of that term which might be the closest applicable concept they have (see, e.g., the response of Devitt 2010a to Culbertson and Gross 2009). According to Devitt, it is only interesting or relevant for grammatical theories to collect speakers’ acceptability judgements to the extent that the speakers interpret the term “acceptability”

to mean their concept of “grammaticality”. This, Devitt (2010a, 843) writes, is because that while acceptability in the generative sense of the word might explain why or when speakers choose to judge a sentence to be acceptable or not, the content of the term “acceptability” for lay speakers will not be ac- ceptability in the generative sense. If it were indeed possible to collect actual acceptability judgements that were not about grammaticality, these would not be the kind of evidence linguists should rely on for their theories of grammar

8Although Devitt notes that grammaticality judgements should only be a complement to other types of data like corpus data, elicited data, or acquisition data (Devitt, 2006c, 486).

More on this in section 2.3.5.

since they would not beabout the concept of interest, grammaticality (Devitt, 2010a, 843).⁹ “In sum, the only thing of interest that a speaker could convey to a linguist in [a folk-]acceptability judgment is an opinion about grammaticality”

(Devitt, 2010a, 844). This is in line with Devitt’s view that the concept one applies in a linguistic intuitive judgement is highly important.

VoC: In his characterisation of VoC, Devitt notes that generative linguists (at least in the more recent literature) often discuss acceptability judgements rather than grammaticality judgements (Devitt, 2006c, 488-490). Based on this, he notes that generative linguists aim to collect acceptability judgements when they elicit linguistic intuitive judgements.

However, Devitt thinks that, since lay speakers are not familiar with the technical notion of acceptability used by linguists, lay speakers are most likely to be giving grammaticality judgements even when asked for acceptability judge- ments. So while he does recognise generative linguists’ intention to collect ac- ceptability judgements, he thinks they do not succeed but are rather collecting grammaticality judgements.

The Critics’ Views: On the Critics’ Views, the most commonly expressed opinion is that acceptability judgements are the kind of intuitive judgements that are relevant as evidence for linguistic theories. On this view, although grammaticality judgements informed by good theories of grammar might make for interesting and helpful hypotheses about language, they are not the kind of data that linguists should aim to account for with their theories, whether those of experts or naive speakers (Culbertson and Gross, 2009; Fitzgerald, 2010;

Collins, 2008; Textor, 2009). Not because experts and naive speakers use differ- ent concepts of grammaticality, but because we should not use the theoretical

“hunches” (Fiengo, 2003) of anyone as evidence. They also deny that speakers (expert or naive) have true grammaticality judgements (in the non-theoretical, mental-grammar sense) in the first place, save in the form of acceptability judge- ments. This, in their view, leaves us with acceptability judgements, which they take to be pre-theoretical and obtainable from experts and naive speakers alike.

Note also that on this view, it does not matter whether lay speakers know the technical meaning of the term “acceptability” as used by linguists or not, since they are not asked to apply that concept to a sentence. On the Critics’ Views, speakers are asked to report their reaction of how natural a sentence sounded, whether they would say it themselves etc., without applying a specific folk or technical concept to that experience.

9He also emphasises that in this debate, he is only interested in intuitive judgements of this specific type and not, e.g., intuitive judgements about the ease of processing of a sentence (Devitt 2010a, 843; 2013).

Devitt argues that even though generative linguists are aiming for a pre- theoretical or quasi-atheoretical concept which informants can be instructed to use on the spot (such as “sounds natural”), informants are likely to interpret this to coincide with their (folk) concept of grammaticality. And if they do so, they are not delivering what linguists are aiming to elicit. Generative linguists might counter that this is a practical problem that they can (more or less successfully) attempt to solve, for instance by phrasing instructions carefully or by developing better test materials. Devitt, on the other hand, thinks that what we should be after, in any case, is speakers’ intuitive judgements of grammaticality.