Call for papers
The goal of this workshop is to reflect on and re-consider the notion of “acceptability” and related concepts, and the ways in which they can inform linguistic theorizing. Judgments of “well-formedness” and “deviance” are standardly employed in generative linguistics since Chomsky’s (1955/1975, 1957, 1965) foundational works, despite the fact that these notions have never been clearly defined and their relevance for natural language prominently denied (cf. Chomsky 1986, Chomsky & Lasnik 1993, and Ott 2017 for a survey, amon many others). Is our theory of grammar primarily a model of acceptability (and if so, what exactly is acceptability/deviance?), or of something else, e.g. the constrained ways in which sound and meaning can be paired in natural language, including in “deviant” expressions (Chomsky 1993)? What kinds of speaker intuitions do we want our theory to account for, and which should we exclude as extraneous “noise”? Can naive speakers provide relevant intuitions, or should we rely on linguistically trained informants? How does acceptability relate to grammaticality--if at all? And what can related notions such as speaker preferences, negative data, intra-speaker variation, and substandard/non-frequent data tell us about the language faculty, and the ways in which we can elucidate its nature?
Papers addressing any aspect of the workshop topic are welcome. Submissions are limited to a maximum of one individual and one joint abstract, or two joint abstracts per author. Authors are asked to submit their anonymous abstracts as a PDF file through EasyChair. Abstracts should be no longer than two pages in length (including examples and references), in 12-point font, single-line spacing and 2.5cm margins.
References
Chomsky, Noam. 1955 / 1975. The Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory. Ms., Harvard University and MIT. New York: Plenum.
Chomsky, Noam. 1957. Syntactic Structures. The Hague: Mouton & Co.
Chomsky, Noam. 1965. Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Chomsky, Noam. 1986. Knowledge of Language. New York, NY: Praeger.
Chomsky, Noam. 1993. “A minimalist program for linguistic theory.” In K. Hale and S. J. Keyser (eds.), The View From Building 20, 1–52. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Chomsky, Noam and Howard Lasnik. 1993. “The theory of principles and parameters.” In J. Jacobs, A. von Stechow, W. Sternefeld, and T. Vennemann (eds.), Syntax, 506–569, Berlin / New York: Walter de Gruyter.
Ott, Dennis. 2017. “Strong Generative Capacity and the Empirical Base of Linguistic Theory”. Frontiers in Psychology 8: 1617. DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2017.01617.
Schutze, C. T. 1996. The empirical base of linguistics: Grammaticality judgments and linguistic methodology. University of Chicago Press. Revised version published as: Schutze, C. T. (2016). The empirical base of linguistics: Grammaticality judgments and linguistic methodology. Berlin: Language Science Press.
Sprouse, J. 2007. “Continuous acceptability, categorical grammaticality, and experimental syntax”. Biolinguistics. 1: 123–134.
Sprouse, J. 2013. “Acceptability judgments”. In M. Aronoff (ed.), Oxford Bibliographies Online, Linguistics.
Sprouse, J., C. T. Schütze, & D. Almeida. 2013. “A comparison of informal and formal acceptability judgments using a random sample from Linguistic Inquiry 2001-2010". Lingua 134: 219-248.
Sprouse, J. and D. Almeida. 2017. “Design sensitivity and statistical power in acceptability judgment experiments”. Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics 2: 14.