Linguistic judgments in 3D: the aesthetic quality, linguistic acceptability, and surface probability of stigmatized and non-stigmatized variation

Abstract

AbstractLinguistic judgment experiments typically elicit judgments in terms of the acceptability or surface probability of a sentence. There is evidence that the dimension of the scale on which sentences are judged influences the outcome of the experiment, but to date this evidence is only limited. This is not a trivial matter, as the elicited judgment data are increasingly considered the basis for inferences about linguistic representation. The present study investigates whether the dimension of the scale influences judgments. Sentences are judged in one of three dimensions:acceptability,probability, oraesthetics. Two distinct sets of experimental items are tested; one with cases of stigmatized variation (violations of the prescriptive norm) and another with cases of non-stigmatized variation (middle-field scrambling) in Dutch. The results show that participants take into account the scale dimension, both in stigmatized and in non-stigmatized variation. The results for stigmatized variation reflect a certain degree of conscious reflection based on the judgment scale; the effects in non-stigmatized variation, by contrast, are only main effects of instruction without changes in the relative pattern of judgments between conditions. These findings corroborate the idea that linguistic judgments of non-stigmatized variation are not the result of introspection in the technical sense, but automatic, multi-dimensional responses to a stimulus.