Grammaticality

Standard criticisms of unjustified grammaticality assignments in generative syntax are easily countered by reminders
that grammaticality is a different notion from acceptability. In response, the criticisms are reformulated here in a way that
interprets unjustified assignments as possible evidence of the predictive failure of current generative syntactic models, and
not, as is standard, as evidence of an overly narrow evidentiary base. This is argued to invalidate appeals to the grammaticality/
acceptability contrast, showing that the persistent anxieties about intuitive grammaticality assignments in generative
methodology withstand the stock Chomskian defence. It is argued that if grammaticality assignments are as unreliable as
critics of generativism often claim, their use conflicts with both the obvious theoretical goal of Minimalist syntax, and with
its orientation as ‘Galilean’ science

Texto de divulgação para um público não especializado sobre princípios gerais de construção de textos. A redação de textos - sejam jurídicos ou de outra índole - implica da parte do enunciador a obediência a princípios gramaticais que são de hierarquia diversa: do plano do léxico, do plano da frase e do plano da combinação de frases. O desrespeito por estes princípios resulta em produções linguísticas com um grau de estranheza variável, mas que - no extremo - podem comprometer a clareza da mensagem, e o próprio sentido do texto. Um trabalho aturado de revisão, por um lado, e um conhecimento técnico das zonas de maior dificuldade (léxico problemático, coordenação, uso de pronomes, uso de elementos de ligação entre frases, etc.), por outro lado, podem contribuir para uma melhoria do resultado final com vantagens óbvias para todas as partes envolvidas.

A “last resort” is argued to be nothing more than a winning, i.e. grammatical form, once it is understood in terms of competition between alternative candidates. It is a theorem of OT that we find last resort effects, since it follows from the nature of competition and constraint interaction. Economy, Optimality Theory, Competition

EGO LOQUENS: Language and Communicational Space
Human communication is basically the exchange of information. How
can this be realized? Each communicant proceeds from a subjective
perception of an objective reality; however in order to exchange information
relating to this reality communicants are obliged to coor dinate
their perceptions. Each of us entertains personal expe riences based on
individual impressions and associations. But com munication presupposes
the presence of a common experience and the possibility of the
coordination of subjective perceptions. It is pre sumed that com municants
share common experiences: this seems to be the natural premise
of communication.
How is this possible? How can I be certain, for example, that my
interlocutor understands the words in the same way I do? How can we
correlate our understanding? It seems obvious that the necessary condition
of communication is an agreement between the communi cants.
But how can this agreement be reached? Where is the initial point of the
coordination of individual experience of different persons?
The present book deals with this and related questions. Special
attention is given to the role of deixis in the process of communi ca tion
and to the mechanisms of linguistic comprehension.
The book is intended for specialists in general linguistics and
also for all those who are interested in the functioning of language.
Contents
Foreword . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
Chapter I
Deixis and communication:
Language as a means of creating virtual reality
§ I. General remarks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
§ II. The status of personal pronouns. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
§ III. The specifi c character of the pronoun “I” (in language):
The absence of a plural form . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
§ IV. The specifi c character of the pronoun “I” (in speech):
restrictions in reproducing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31
§ V. Deictic words and postulating objective reality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33
§ VI. Interpretation of reality:
creating a metalanguage for its description . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42
§ VII. Deictic words and language acquisition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47
§ VIII. The classifi cation of linguistic signs (words) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50
Notes to Chapter I . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54
Chapter II
Communication and understanding:
The relation between understanding and the generation of speech
§ I. Preliminary remarks: general premises of linguistic
communication . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 110
§ II. Sense and translation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 113
§ III. Linguistic communication as a heuristic process . . . . . . . . . . . 115
§ IV. A common context uniting the addresser and the addressee
as the condition of understanding . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 119
§ V. Understanding as the modeling of a situation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 124
§ VI. The character of language acquisition:
how do we learn to understand? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 127
§ VII. Thinking and autocommunication . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 135
§ VIII. Some illustrations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 137
Notes to Chapter II . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 157
Chapter III
Communication and understanding:
Understanding and linguistic experiment
§ I. Figurative sense and the problem of creating a senseless text . . . 180
§ II. The transformation of situations in a comical texts . . . . . . . . . 190
§ III. Can we understand a text consisting of non-existing words? . . . 199
§ IV. The transformation of language in poetical texts . . . . . . . . . . . 227
§ VI. Some generalizations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 236
Notes to Chapter III . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 240
List of Works Cited . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 267
Abbreviations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 319
Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 320
Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Most acceptability judgments reported in the syntactic literature are obtained by linguists being their own informants. For well-represented languages like English, this method of data collection is best described as a process of community agreement, given that linguists typically discuss their judgments with colleagues. However, the process itself is comparably opaque, and the reliability of its output has been questioned. Recent studies looking into this criticism have shown that judgments reported in the literature for English can be replicated in quantitative experiments to a near-perfect degree. However, the focus of those studies has been on testing sentence pairs. We argue that replication of only contrasts is not sufficient, because theory building necessarily includes comparison across pairs and across papers. Thus, we test items at large, i. e. independent of counterparts. We created a corpus of grammaticality judgments on sequences of American English reported in articles...

Most acceptability judgments reported in the syntactic literature are obtained by linguists being their own informants. For well-represented languages like English, this method of data collection is best described as a process of community agreement, given that linguists typically discuss their judgments with colleagues. However, the process itself is comparably opaque, and the reliability of its output has been questioned. Recent studies looking into this criticism have shown that judgments reported in the literature for English can be replicated in quantitative experiments to a near-perfect degree. However, the focus of those studies has been on testing sentence pairs. We argue that replication of only contrasts is not sufficient, because theory building necessarily includes comparison across pairs and across papers. Thus, we test items at large, i. e. independent of counterparts. We created a corpus of grammaticality judgments on sequences of American English reported in articles published in Linguistic Inquiry and then collected experimental ratings for a random subset of them. Overall, expert ratings and experimental ratings converge to a good degree, but there are numerous instances in which ratings do not converge. Based on this, we argue that for theory-critical data, the process of community agreement should be accompanied by quantitative methods whenever possible.