Book contents
- The Cambridge Handbook of Experimental Syntax
- The Cambridge Handbook of Experimental Syntax
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Tables
- Contributors
- Introduction
- Part I General Issues in Acceptability Experiments
- 1 Sentence Acceptability Experiments: What, How, and Why
- 2 Response Methods in Acceptability Experiments
- 3 Approaching Gradience in Acceptability with the Tools of Signal Detection Theory
- 4 Variation in Participants and Stimuli in Acceptability Experiments
- 5 Acceptability, Grammar, and Processing
- 6 Satiation
- 7 Acceptability (and Other) Experiments for Studying Comparative Syntax
- Part II Experimental Studies of Specific Phenomena
- Part III Experimental Studies of Specific Populations and Language Families
- Part IV Experimental Syntax beyond Acceptability
- Index
- References
1 - Sentence Acceptability Experiments: What, How, and Why
from Part I - General Issues in Acceptability Experiments
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 December 2021
Edited by
Book contents
- The Cambridge Handbook of Experimental Syntax
- The Cambridge Handbook of Experimental Syntax
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Tables
- Contributors
- Introduction
- Part I General Issues in Acceptability Experiments
- 1 Sentence Acceptability Experiments: What, How, and Why
- 2 Response Methods in Acceptability Experiments
- 3 Approaching Gradience in Acceptability with the Tools of Signal Detection Theory
- 4 Variation in Participants and Stimuli in Acceptability Experiments
- 5 Acceptability, Grammar, and Processing
- 6 Satiation
- 7 Acceptability (and Other) Experiments for Studying Comparative Syntax
- Part II Experimental Studies of Specific Phenomena
- Part III Experimental Studies of Specific Populations and Language Families
- Part IV Experimental Syntax beyond Acceptability
- Index
- References
Summary
The notion of acceptability has played a crucial role in linguistics. Formal sentence acceptability experiments are relatively recent, but standardly make use of a factorial design, multiple lexicalizations of the stimuli, full counterbalancing of the stimuli, well-designed filler items, and an appropriate response method. Such experiments are sensitive to grammaticality, of course, but also to the presence of a dependency, the length of the dependency, and the frequency of the lexical items and structures. These experiments are useful for testing claims of (un)acceptability, but also for making cross-linguistic comparisons and comparing populations of speakers. Formal acceptability experiments are similar to traditional methods of collecting acceptability judgments, but each can do things that the other cannot and both have important roles to play in syntactic research.
Keywords
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- The Cambridge Handbook of Experimental Syntax , pp. 7 - 38Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2021
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