34.699, Review: Linguistic Theories, Morphology, Syntax: Francis (2022)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-34-699. Tue Feb 28 2023. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 34.699, Review: Linguistic Theories, Morphology, Syntax: Francis (2022)

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Date: Tue, 28 Feb 2023 18:02:10
From: Caterina Cacioli [caterina.cacioli at gmail.com]
Subject: Gradient Acceptability and Linguistic Theory

 
Discuss this message:
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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/33/33-2205.html

AUTHOR: Elaine J Francis
TITLE: Gradient Acceptability and Linguistic Theory
SERIES TITLE: Oxford Surveys in Syntax & Morphology
PUBLISHER: Oxford University Press
YEAR: 2022

REVIEWER: Caterina Cacioli, Università degli Studi di Firenze

SUMMARY

In this book, the author discusses the interpretation and use of acceptability
judgments in linguistic theories, mainly in the context of syntactic
investigation. Her main purpose is to disentangle the many aspects that affect
speaker’s judgments on sentences beyond syntax and to isolate the reasons for
the variability in acceptability judgments. 
 
 The book features 8 chapters. Chapter 1 (“The problem of gradient
acceptability”) introduces the methodological problem raised over the years
around acceptability judgments and their interpretation. It introduces the
core themes of the book, that is, those which the author considers to affect
acceptability judgments: syntactic, prosodic, pragmatic, semantic, and
judgments relating to cognitive processing. The author exemplifies each of
these categories, with examples that will be returned to in the following
chapters.
 
 In Chapter 2, (“Theories of grammatical knowledge in relation to formal
syntactic and non-syntactic explanations”) the author provides an overview of
linguistic theories of grammatical knowledge to explain the implications of a
theory-committed assumption in relation to the interpretation of acceptability
judgments. The linguistic theories explored are derivational grammars
(Minimalism, Principles and Parameters), constraint-based theories (e.g.,
Sign-based Construction Grammar, Simpler Syntax), competition-based theories
(e.g., OT Syntax, Stochastic OT, Decathlon Model), and usage-based theories
(e.g., Usage-Based Theory, Cognitive Construction Grammar). The author argues
that some theories tend to interpret acceptability judgments according to
formal syntactic explanations (derivational theories), non-syntactic
explanations (constraint-based theories), or frequency effects (usage-based
theories). The chapter starts by describing these theories, focusing on how
they understand form-meaning correspondences, showing that they differ in the
degree of isomorphism allowed between syntax and semantics or between syntax
and information structure – it is higher in derivational accounts and lower in
constraint-based accounts. The focal argument of the book is introduced:
gradience in grammar and support for soft syntactic constraints, proposing
constructionist usage-based approaches as a useful way to understand them.

 Chapter 3 (“On distinguishing formal syntactic constraints from other aspects
of linguistic knowledge”) is dedicated to disentangling syntactic knowledge
from other aspects of linguistic knowledge when interpreting acceptability
judgments. It introduces evidence about manipulations of semantic, prosodic,
or pragmatic aspects of language which can be used to predict increases in the
acceptability of sentences – thus helping to interpret the reasons for variety
in acceptability judgments. It also brings to the reader’s attention the fact
that non-syntactic explanations in the gradience of acceptability judgments
can be, and should be, further found in data from spontaneous speech
production and other online experiments. The author presents four case
studies, reviewing a variety of sources for each of them: 

Outbound anaphora in English and the pragmatic constraints investigated using
attested examples in context combined with a reading time experiment; 
Factive islands and manner of speaking islands in English, with acceptability
judgements of long-distance relations in constructions with different main
verbs and in frequency manipulations;
Prosodic effects in Czech and pragmatic explanations for results in
acceptability judgments;
Split intransitivity in auxiliary selection and impersonal passives in German,
at the interface of syntax and event semantics

The first two case studies are aimed at showing non-syntactic successful
evidence. Considering case study 2, the author argues that this case study
provides good evidence for non-syntactic explanations of islands: gradient
acceptability of sentences such as “What did Jess think/?whisper/?realize that
Dan likes?” may be purely pragmatic or a frequency effect, or a combination of
the two, but results from the different studies mentioned show that the
variation goes beyond a purely syntactic explanation. The second pair of case
studies points out two possible reasons why non-syntactic explanations might
not be enough to explain variation: first, there might be residual differences
in acceptability judgments that are not fully accounted for by the
non-syntactic manipulation (as is the case with prosody in Czech); second,
there might be theoretical reasons driving the explanations (as with split
intransitivity). The author shows that taking two different theoretical
perspectives on form-meaning isomorphism results in giving a different
interpretation to acceptability judgments of split intransitivity: the fact
that acceptability judgments are sensitive to semantic constraints can be
interpreted to mean that: (a) semantic differences are symptoms of underlying
syntactic differences, as in derivational approaches, or (b) the semantic
properties are confined at the level of conceptual semantics and specified
independently of syntactic structure, as in constraint-based approaches. 

 Chapter 4 (“On distinguishing formal syntactic constraints from processing
constraints”) is dedicated to non-linguistic aspects that might account for
explaining acceptability judgments. These are related to cognitive processing,
mainly facilitation manipulations (amelioration and syntactic satiation) and
memory capacity manipulations. The author reviews relevant literature on the
topic, discussing studies which manipulate the ease of processing by means of
changing lexical items in the same syntactic structure (syntactic satiation)
or improving the discourse context. Gradience of judgments resulting from the
above-mentioned experiments may be seen as an effect of cognitive processing:
given a difficult to process sentence, there is an illusion of
ungrammaticality or, vice versa, the illusion of grammaticality for a sentence
that is made easy to process. However, given that manipulations of both
grammatical and ungrammatical sentences drive gradable acceptability
judgments, these are not taken as definitive evidence for syntactic
explanations. Cross-linguistic differences are also discussed here, to
distinguish grammatical or processing-based explanations of grammaticality.
Cross-linguistic evidence, instead, may support grammar-based explanations
according to the author. 

 Chapter 5 (“On the relation between corpus frequency and acceptability”)
deals with frequency effects on acceptability judgments, based on usage-based
theories. The chapter reviews evidence from close correspondences of
acceptability, corpus frequency and evidence from mismatches, evidence from
unusual verb-construction matches and machine learning attempts to derive
patterns from corpus frequency. Here the author explores contrasting views. On
the one hand, Dabrowska (2008) examines long distance wh-questions using the
spoken data from the BNC to extract the most frequent templates for long
distance wh-questions and what deviates from the most frequent templates, to
then test them in acceptability judgments and show that less frequent
templates received lower acceptability scores. On the other hand, Newmeyer
(2003) shows that grammaticality is independent of frequency of use in a study
in which extremely rare ungrammatical sentences score lower judgments than
extremely rare grammatical sentences.

 Chapters 6 and 7 present two individual case studies: “Relative clause
extraposition and PP extraposition in English and German” (Ch. 6) and
“Resumptive pronouns in Hebrew, Cantonese and English relative clauses'' (Ch.
7). The first case study draws attention to form-meaning isomorphism and
gradient acceptability in the interpretation of judgments. The author provides
argumentation for this case study, taking the perspective of derivational
theories and constraint-based theories: it is shown that this depends on one’s
theoretical assumptions (a theory that requires form-meaning isomorphism or
one that allows for gradience). The aim of the chapter is to show how
theoretical assumptions guide our interpretation of data, even when the data
are ambiguous, and the same interpretation could be compatible with more than
one theory. The author argues that comparing the same case study using more
than one theoretical interpretation is an exercise towards a better
understanding of theories and awareness of researchers’ interpretations. A 
good move to make when at a crossroads is to gather different types of data to
combine with acceptability judgments. According to the examples provided in
the chapter, corpus data may help  to clear up ambiguous data (e.g., in
subclausal locality conditions on RCE in German). The interest for the second
case study lies in the different factors that give resumptive pronouns in
relative clauses higher or lower acceptability ratings – not only syntax or
typological dichotomies but also pragmatic and processing-related factors.
Hebrew and Cantonese are taken as examples of languages with grammatical
resumption, while English is taken as an example of a language with intrusive
resumption. The author discusses the results of acceptability judgments and
online experiments which shed light on the contribution of syntax-external
factors (as well as comparing early informal acceptability judgments and more
structured tests) to acceptability. Although the results are consistent with
the traditional distinction between intrusive and grammatical resumption, it
emerges that acceptability is more nuanced and that this gradience could be
syntactically accounted for by adopting the notion of soft constraints. 

 Chapter 8 (“Gradient acceptability, methodological diversity and theoretical
interpretation”) presents arguments in favor of a view of soft constraints and
acceptability judgments from an interdisciplinary and multi-methodological
perspective. This chapter brings together considerations made throughout the
book, thus stressing how combining corpus data, spontaneous language use, and
online experimental tasks can help in interpreting acceptability judgments and
narrowing down explanations for the gradience in acceptability. The author
concludes that given the compelling evidence in support of gradience within
grammar, this should be accounted for in any linguistic theory.

 Finally, the author provides the reader with a glossary consisting of 118
entries of technical terms mentioned throughout the chapters. 

EVALUATION

The author manages to provide a coherent account and to achieve her main aim.
The book bridges the interests of theoretical linguistics in the field of
syntax, experimental syntax, and related aspects in the psychology of
language. 
 First, it provides a clear and easy to follow account of different linguistic
theories (from the formal to the usage-based) that serves as an excellent and
compact overview of the field. It is well-reasoned and goes in depth into
concrete themes and case studies that separate the different theories. This is
an interesting frame per se, in addition to the focus on gradient
acceptability judgments. Acceptability judgments here may also be seen as a
pretext to learn about linguistic theories themselves and as a way to
understand the claims of different theories based on their use of
acceptability judgments. For this reason, the book may find readership in
linguistic courses. In fact, throughout the book the author makes reference to
the development of linguistic theories, intertwined with each other, where a
theory has come from or where it is going, and also to the classification of
theories. Moreover, basic notions are nicely explained in the first chapters
of the book (e.g., what is a merge operation: p. 21; what is a usage-based
approach: p. 47; what is split intransitivity: p. 67) and, in the glossary,
gradually becoming more complex. The structure seems to follow a spiral model:
the main claims are touched upon from the beginning and explained in further
detail or with further examples as the book unfolds. Even if different aspects
of linguistic knowledge are touched upon (semantics, pragmatics, discourse
analysis) and many non-linguistic aspects are brought into discussion
(cognitive processing), these are all used to discuss syntactic theory and
explain syntactic phenomena, rather than having their own relevance, so that
the book is better addressed to readers in this specific field rather than
linguistic theories in a broader sense. 
 With well-chosen case studies, the book puts forward two main claims: the
importance of consulting converging evidence from multiple sources (e.g.,
online comprehension tasks, corpora, elicited production tasks) to explain
variability in acceptability judgments and that interpreting acceptability
judgments is a matter of commitment to particular theoretical assumptions. The
author’s claims are backed up by an impressive amount of literature,
insightful argumentation about case studies, and critical reasoning on the
case studies in order to reach a synthesis. In fact, throughout the exposition
of the detailed review, the author puts forward her own views on two main
themes: gradience in the grammar and soft constraints. 
 If one thing could be said to be missing, as the author acknowledges, it is a
discussion of the method itself (number of participants in the studies, number
of trials, type of trials and variety of syntactic patterns per study,
instructions to participants, etc.). Such factors affect the results and are
relevant for their interpretation, and could be further reviewed in future
work. All in all, this book is a must for future work on acceptability
judgments for the complete overview it offers, the well-reasoned
argumentation, and the author’s own claims on gradience and soft constraints
to capture the wide range of linguistic factors that can affect judgments on a
gradient scale.  

REFERENCES

Dabrowska, Ewa. 2008. “Questions with Long-Distance Dependencies: A
Usage-Based Perspective.” Cognitive Linguistics 19 (3): 391-425.
Newmeyer, Frederick, J. 2003. “Grammar Is Grammar and Usage Is Usage.”
Language 79 (4): 682-707.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

I am a doctoral student at the universities of Florence (Italy) and Lund
(Sweden). My research interests are in event and verbal semantics, construal
and experimental methodologies in cognitive linguistics and construction
grammar, with a cross-linguistic perspective.





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