Linguistic evidence and grammatical theory

Schütze, Carson T.

doi:10.1002/wcs.102

Cited by 41 publications

(26 citation statements)

References 61 publications

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“…It is important to recognize that gradience in acceptability does not establish that grammaticality is also gradient. As Schütze () observes, “gradient acceptability judgments are perfectly compatible with a categorical model of grammar. ” The work of Armstrong et al.…”

Section: Experimental Evidence For Gradience In Acceptability Judgementsmentioning

confidence: 93%

“…There is a substantial literature on gradience in syntactic acceptability judgments (Aarts, 2007;Denison, Keizer, & Popova, 2004;Fanselow et al, 2006;Keller, 2000;Sch€ utze, 1996;Sorace & Keller, 2005;Sprouse, 2007). We will not attempt to review this literature here.…”

Section: Experimental Evidence For Gradience In Acceptability Judgementsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…As a result, syntacticians of a Chomskyan orientation have traditionally relied on artificially constructed example data, which they test through informal speaker judgement queries. Important questions can and have been raised concerning the rigor and reliability of these methods Gibson, Piantadosi, & Fedorenko, 2013;Sch€ utze, 1996;Sprouse & Almeida, 2013), but we will pass over this debate here.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Grammaticality, Acceptability, and Probability: A Probabilistic View of Linguistic Knowledge

2016

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The question of whether humans represent grammatical knowledge as a binary condition on membership in a set of well-formed sentences, or as a probabilistic property has been the subject of debate among linguists, psychologists, and cognitive scientists for many decades. Acceptability judgments present a serious problem for both classical binary and probabilistic theories of grammaticality. These judgements are gradient in nature, and so cannot be directly accommodated in a binary formal grammar. However, it is also not possible to simply reduce acceptability to probability. The acceptability of a sentence is not the same as the likelihood of its occurrence, which is, in part, determined by factors like sentence length and lexical frequency. In this paper, we present the results of a set of large-scale experiments using crowd-sourced acceptability judgments that demonstrate gradience to be a pervasive feature in acceptability judgments. We then show how one can predict acceptability judgments on the basis of probability by augmenting probabilistic language models with an acceptability measure. This is a function that normalizes probability values to eliminate the confounding factors of length and lexical frequency. We describe a sequence of modeling experiments with unsupervised language models drawn from state-of-the-art machine learning methods in natural language processing. Several of these models achieve very encouraging levels of accuracy in the acceptability prediction task, as measured by the correlation between the acceptability measure scores and mean human acceptability values. We consider the relevance of these results to the debate on the nature of grammatical competence, and we argue that they support the view that linguistic knowledge can be intrinsically probabilistic.

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Section: Experimental Evidence For Gradience In Acceptability Judgementsmentioning

confidence: 93%

Section: Experimental Evidence For Gradience In Acceptability Judgementsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Grammaticality, Acceptability, and Probability: A Probabilistic View of Linguistic Knowledge

2016

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“…that it is not a task effect (c.f. Gorman (forthcoming) and Schütze (2011)). In this sense, experimentation can reveal subtle aspects of our linguistic knowledge which can be missed by an approach that is exclusively based on intuition.…”

Section: Beyond the Intuition-based Datamentioning

confidence: 96%

“…The primary aim of this experiment is to address whether the gradient effect we observed in the previous three studies (Kawahara 2011a(Kawahara , 2011b(Kawahara , 2012b can be replicated using a binary yes/no format. In these studies, given a 5-point scale, the participants may have felt obliged to use intermediate points (Schütze 2011). To avoid this task effect, the current experiment used a binary yes/no format.…”

Section: Experiments I: Orthography-based Yes/no Experimentsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Testing Japanese loanword devoicing: Addressing task effects

Kawahara

2013

Linguistics

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In the loanword phonology of Japanese, voiced obstruent geminates ([bb, dd, gg]) have been claimed to devoice when they co-occur with another voiced obstruent within the same morpheme (e.g. /beddo/ → [betto] 'bed'). This devoicing pattern has contributed much to address a number of theoretical issues in the recent phonological literature. However, the relevant data have been primarily based on intuition-based data provided by Nishimura (2003) and Kawahara (2006). Kawahara (2011aKawahara ( , 2011b addressed this issue by conducting rating studies using naive native speakers of Japanese. The results generally supported the intuition-based data by Nishimura (2003) and Kawahara (2006). However, the rating studies also revealed several aspects of the devoicing pattern that go beyond the intuition-based data as well.The current study further investigates the devoicing pattern by varying several task variables. In particular, this paper builds on Kawahara (2011a, 2011b) by adding (i) nonce word stimuli, (ii) a binary yes/no experiment, and (iii) auditory stimuli. The results show that (i) nonce words and real words behave similarly, but nonce words nevertheless show less variability across different grammatical conditions than real words; (ii) the binary yes/no experiment shows results similar to those of the scale-based experiment; and (iii) while auditory stimuli yield results comparable with those of orthographic stimuli, they also show an exaggerated effect of a phonetic implementation pattern. Overall, this paper uses Japanese as a case study, and finds some task effects in phonological judgment experiments. It is hoped that this paper stimulates further experimental research on phonological judgments of other phenomena in Japanese as well as in other languages. 1 The experiments reported in this paper were first reported in a longer manuscript circulated in Introduction The phenomenon

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Making the Unseen Seen: The Role of Signaling and Novelty in Rating Metaphors

Ahrens,

Burgers,

Zhong

2024

J Psycholinguist Res

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Comprehension of metaphorical expressions differs with their degree of novelty. Conventional metaphors are typically comprehended as easily as literal sentences, while novel metaphors are responded to less quickly than their conventional counterparts. However, the influence of metaphor signals on the interpretability and acceptability of sentences with metaphors, especially their potential interaction with novelty, remains an open question. We conducted six online experiments among 1,694 native speakers of American English to examine how interpretability and acceptability ratings of individually presented sentences were affected by metaphor novelty and different types of metaphor signals. Across all six experiments, we consistently found that novel metaphors decreased the interpretability and acceptability of sentences compared to both conventional metaphors and literal controls. Signals, on the contrary, did not impact the interpretability or acceptability of the sentences. Moreover, only in experiment 3b did we find an interaction between metaphor type and signals. Specifically, when a metaphor was marked by double signals (i.e., both lexical signals and a typographical signal were added around the metaphorical keywords) vs. no signals, acceptability of novel metaphors increased, but acceptability of conventional metaphors decreased. We hypothesize that the double signaling of novel metaphors marks their novelty, making them more acceptable. By contrast, the double signaling of conventional metaphors may have been perceived as redundant, leading to a lower acceptability.

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Linguistic evidence and grammatical theory

Cited by 41 publications

References 61 publications

Grammaticality, Acceptability, and Probability: A Probabilistic View of Linguistic Knowledge

Grammaticality, Acceptability, and Probability: A Probabilistic View of Linguistic Knowledge

Testing Japanese loanword devoicing: Addressing task effects

Making the Unseen Seen: The Role of Signaling and Novelty in Rating Metaphors

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