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

Authors Lau, Jey Han and Clark, Alexander and Lappin, Shalom Year 2017 Abstract 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. [Read More]