The Anatomy of a Comparative Illusion

Wellwood, Alexis; Pancheva, Roumyana; Hacquard, Valentine; Phillips, Colin

doi:10.1093/jos/ffy014

Cited by 40 publications

(65 citation statements)

References 26 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…In contrast, we suggest that illusions like (8) and (11) are parsed in a way that does go through assigning m to s. In our work on comparative illusions (Leivada et al, 2019b) we obtained ample evidence that most speakers that judged (8) as acceptable, truly construed an interpretation for it. Among the ones more frequently given by the speakers we tested are: (i) more people than just me have been to Russia, (ii) people have been to Russia more times than I have, and (iii) many people have been to Russia more times than I have (see also Wellwood et al, 2018). Naturally, this is not what the sentence says, but nevertheless, a meaning is assigned to the sentence.…”

Section: Grammatical/ Acceptablementioning

confidence: 95%

“…Sentence (8) instantiates a linguistic illusion called "comparative illusion" (Montalbetti, 1984). These sentences are called illusions because they trick the parser in a way that renders high acceptability ratings in experiments, even though the stimuli are ill-formed (Wellwood et al, 2018). In linguistic terms, (8) is ill-formed because the main clause subject calls for a comparison of cardinalities of sets, but in the absence of a bare plural in the embedded clause subject, no comparison set is made available (Phillips et al, 2011;O'Connor et al, 2012;Wellwood et al, 2018).…”

Section: Acceptable Ungrammatical Sentences and Unacceptable Grammatimentioning

confidence: 99%

“…These sentences are called illusions because they trick the parser in a way that renders high acceptability ratings in experiments, even though the stimuli are ill-formed (Wellwood et al, 2018). In linguistic terms, (8) is ill-formed because the main clause subject calls for a comparison of cardinalities of sets, but in the absence of a bare plural in the embedded clause subject, no comparison set is made available (Phillips et al, 2011;O'Connor et al, 2012;Wellwood et al, 2018). Linguistic illusions are the outcome of a partial-match strategy that is operative during processing (Reder and Kusbit, 1991;Kamas et al, 1996;Park and Reder, 2004).…”

Section: Acceptable Ungrammatical Sentences and Unacceptable Grammatimentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Understanding the process of assigning meaning is important in the context of disentangling the role of the parser in acceptable ungrammatical sentences. To illustrate this, let's consider the comparative illusions in Tables 1, 2 [ examples (8) and 11, respectively], which are ungrammatical but trick the parser into acceptability (Wellwood et al, 2018;Leivada et al, 2019b). Although various experiments have shown that these sentences are assigned a high acceptability rating, one could say that this does not entail that these sentences are actually parsed, in the sense that speakers actually assign them a meaning m. A clear exposition of this point is given by Tim Hunter as a reply to Hornstein (2013), who suggests that such sentences may sound good to speakers, but when you ask the people that gave them a high rating what the uttered sentence means, they are unable to provide a meaning: I don't think there is any meaning m such that ("More people have been to Russia than I have, " m) is judged acceptable.…”

Section: Grammatical/ Acceptablementioning

confidence: 99%

See 3 more Smart Citations

Acceptable Ungrammatical Sentences, Unacceptable Grammatical Sentences, and the Role of the Cognitive Parser

Leivada

Westergaard

2020

Front. Psychol.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

A search for the terms "acceptability judgment tasks" and "language" and "grammaticality judgment tasks" and "language" produces results which report findings that are based on the exact same elicitation technique. Although certain scholars have argued that acceptability and grammaticality are two separable notions that refer to different concepts, there are contexts in which the two terms are used interchangeably. The present work reaffirms that these two notions and their scales do not coincide: there are sentences that are acceptable, even though they are ungrammatical, and sentences that are unacceptable, despite being grammatical. First, we adduce a number of examples for both cases, including grammatical illusions, violations of Identity Avoidance, and sentences that involve a level of processing complexity that overloads the cognitive parser and tricks it into (un)acceptability. We then discuss whether the acceptability of grammatically ill-formed sentences entails that we assign a meaning to them. Last, it is shown that there are n ways of unacceptability, and two ways of ungrammaticality, in the absolute and the relative sense. Since the use of the terms "acceptable" and "grammatical" is often found in experiments that constitute the core of the evidential base of linguistics, disentangling their various uses is likely to aid the field reach a better level of terminological clarity.

show abstract

Section: Grammatical/ Acceptablementioning

confidence: 95%

Section: Acceptable Ungrammatical Sentences and Unacceptable Grammatimentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Acceptable Ungrammatical Sentences and Unacceptable Grammatimentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Grammatical/ Acceptablementioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

Acceptable Ungrammatical Sentences, Unacceptable Grammatical Sentences, and the Role of the Cognitive Parser

Leivada

Westergaard

2020

Front. Psychol.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Other studies have concentrated on how comprehenders can achieve an interpretation of ungrammatical or ill-formed sentences by covertly correcting the sentence into a well-formed input according to certain principles of repair (Frazier and Clifton, 2011). Also relevant are the series of studies that focus on the perception and comprehension of sequences containing grammatical illusions (such as illusory NPI licensing, Phillips et al, 2011; and comparative illusions, Wellwood et al, 2017). Some of these studies even focus on the ability of adults to learn to comprehend a novel syntactic construction that in strict syntactic terms is ungrammatical (such as the so-called ‘needs’ construction, Kaschak and Glenberg, 2004), a task in which structural and, more specifically, syntactic priming has been claimed to play an important role (Ivanova et al, 2012).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Relating (Un)acceptability to Interpretation. Experimental Investigations on Negation

Etxeberria¹,

Tubau

Déprez

et al. 2018

Front. Psychol.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Although contemporary linguistic studies routinely use unacceptable sentences to determine the boundary of what falls outside the scope of grammar, investigations far more rarely take into consideration the possible interpretations of such sentences, perhaps because these interpretations are commonly prejudged as irrelevant or unreliable across speakers. In this paper we provide the results of two experiments in which participants had to make parallel acceptability and interpretation judgments of sentences presenting various types of negative dependencies in Basque and in two varieties of Spanish (Castilian Spanish and Basque Country Spanish). Our results show that acceptable sentences are uniformly assigned a single negation reading in the two languages. However, while unacceptable sentences consistently convey single negation in Basque, they are interpreted at chance in both varieties of Spanish. These results confirm that judgment data that distinguish between acceptable and unacceptable negative utterances can inform us not only about an adult’s grammar of his/her particular language but also about interesting cross-linguistic differences. We conclude that the acceptability and interpretation of (un)grammatical negative sentences can serve linguistic theory construction by helping to disentangle basic assumptions about the nature of various negative dependencies.

show abstract

Linguistic Judgments as Evidence

Groß

2021

A Companion to Chomsky

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

IntroductionLinguistics research is filled with observations such as the following: 'There are three green books on the table' is an acceptable sentence, but 'There are green three books on the table' is not. Such judgments-as well as judgments about co-reference, ambiguity, pronounceability, and more-form a significant part of the evidence base for linguistics. This is in large measure due to Chomsky, whose work has exemplified the fruitfulness of such evidence and whose Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (Chomsky 1965, chapter 1) is a locus classicus for theorizing about their status. The prominence of judgment data in contemporary linguistics is crucially tied to Chomsky's mentalist reconception of the field.Judgment data were not completely absent prior to Chomsky's work. For example, field linguists did not always prescind from asking informants whether such-and-such was something they would say, and Chomsky's teacher Zelig Harris emphasized the importance for phonology of speakers' judgments concerning sound differences (Harris 1951). But the positivist, behaviorist, and structuralist positions that dominated American linguistics in the first half of the 20 th century tended to view the use of judgment data with suspicion and focused rather on produced sentences.The methodological strictures in part arose in reaction to problems encountered in earlier introspectionist psychology (discussed in section 3). But the focus on produced utterances reflected as well a particular conception of what languages are and thus what linguistics is about. Though linguists of this period differed in many ways, they shared a tendency to view languages as consisting in the totality of utterances speakers of that language can produce (an E-language in Chomsky's (1986) terminology); and much work focused on describing, analyzing, and taxonomizing languages so conceived-for example, the many Native American languages so apparently different from the Indo-European languages which were then more familiar to linguists. While such a conception does not of itself preclude the use of speakers' judgments (cf. the remarks on Devitt's (2006) views in section 2), it is more naturally combined with an emphasis on corpus data, especially given the methodological scruples already mentioned.Conversely, judgment data find a natural home in Chomsky's mentalist reconception of linguistics-a reconception, according to Chomsky (1966), that is in fact a recovery and development of earlier ideas about language. On this approach, linguistics aims, not just to describe linguistic products, but to provide a cognitive explanation of various of their distinctive features. One of Chomsky's core hypotheses is that there is an innately constrained computational procedure realized in the mind-brain-so-called I-language-that is implicated specifically in linguistic phenomena and whose character explains some of their distinctive features. As with aspects of our cognition more generally, we cannot directly observe I-language but must infer it from the effects to w...

show abstract

The Anatomy of a Comparative Illusion

Cited by 40 publications

References 26 publications

Acceptable Ungrammatical Sentences, Unacceptable Grammatical Sentences, and the Role of the Cognitive Parser

Acceptable Ungrammatical Sentences, Unacceptable Grammatical Sentences, and the Role of the Cognitive Parser

Relating (Un)acceptability to Interpretation. Experimental Investigations on Negation

Linguistic Judgments as Evidence

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About