Remarks on Acceptability and Grammaticality

Authors

  • Bent Jacobsen

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.7146/hjlcb.v5i8.21490

Abstract

In the present paper a distinction is drawn between acceptability and grammaticality. These two concepts have often been confounded in the literature. Thus linguists have been prone to say that 'the native speaker makes grammaticality judgments'. Nothing could be more mistaken. He makes acceptability judgments, and that is something entirely different. In this article, I shall make use of the sentence-schema which has been current since Chomsky (1986a) - a logical extension of X-bar syntax. Readers who are not familiar with the basic modules of modern TG-theory are referred to my articles in Hermes, 1 and Hermes, 2 (see references). In these two articles I adhered to the S-bar/S-schema of sentence structure. This is now obsolete. I shall adopt a relatively conservative view of bounding nodes (subjacency); i.e. I make no attempt to introduce the sophisticated theory of barrierhood developed in Chomsky (1986a). This is immaterial to the argument conducted in this paper.

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Published

1992-07-28

How to Cite

Jacobsen, B. (1992). Remarks on Acceptability and Grammaticality. HERMES - Journal of Language and Communication in Business, 5(8), 7–22. https://doi.org/10.7146/hjlcb.v5i8.21490

Issue

No. 8 (1992)

Section

Artikler

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