Acceptability Judgments

Abstract

Abstract This chapter explores four ways in which formal acceptability judgment experiments can contribute to syntactic theory: (i) by exploring the validity and reliability of judgments to better establish the empirical base of the theory, (ii) by exploring differences among acceptability judgment tasks to better optimize syntactic investigations, (iii) by exploring the sources of acceptability judgment effects to better identify candidate theories of specific phenomena, and (iv) by exploring the continuous nature of acceptability and what that may, or may not, reveal about the architecture of the grammar. For each topic, this chapter reviews both the logic underlying the use of formal acceptability judgment experiments and a number of recent empirical findings.