The empirical base of linguistics: Grammaticality judgments and linguistic methodology

The Bottleneck Hypothesis in L2 acquisition: L1 Norwegian learners’ knowledge of syntax and morphology in L2 English

“…This expectation was confirmed, since most participants rejected all fillers. The choice to use only ungrammatical fillers was based on the response bias known as acquiescence (also known as 'yea-saying' or 'agreement tendency'), i.e., that sentences are more often endorsed than rejected in acceptability judgement tasks, regardless of their grammaticality (Mohan, 1977; see also Schütze, 2016). All test sentences were of equal length (10-12 syllables), and the lexical items were selected from COCA's (Corpus of Contemporary American English) top 5000-word frequency list (Corpus.bya.edu, 2018b).…”

Grammaticality, Meaningfulness, and Acceptability: A Historical Perspective

“…Grammaticality judgments do not have a systematic methodology as they are often intuitive in nature (cf. Schütze 2016). Different schools of linguistics have forged and framed their acceptability criteria to fit their prescribed models.…”

Subject gaps in German coordinative structures — Empirical evidence for a gradient phenomenon

“…Although there are many possible methods to collect data about linguistic structures such as corpus data, reaction time measurements, eye tracking, etc., we employed an opinion survey via Magnitude Estimation (ME) (Cowart 1997, McGee 2003 because of the advantages of this method for clarifying our specific problem. The supposed gradience and regional distinctiveness of SLF-coordination can be well detected with ME since this method is able to provide a hierarchical graduation of the acceptability of clause structures (see among others Bard et al 1996, Schütze 1996. The merit of ME lies in the fact that one does not need a pre-defined scale, like a 5-or 7-point scale, which is limited by its very nature.…”