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Miller, Philip: Usage Preferences: The Case of the English Verbal Anaphor do so
In this paper I introduce the notion of Usage Preferences (UPs), which are statistically significant
preferences in usage which can concern any aspect of linguistics. I suggest that multiple violations
of UPs can have additive effects, causing grammatical sentences to be judged as unacceptable. A new
judgment on sentences is proposed, the downarrow (↓) to mark sentences that are taken to be
grammatical but unacceptable due to UP violations. I illustrate the idea of UPs on the basis of a
discussion of the English verbal anaphor do so, involving both a corpus analysis and two
acceptability experiments. This leads to a discussion of the relationship between grammaticality and
acceptability and to remarks on the methodological importance of taking UPs into account both in
linguistic theorizing and in the construction of acceptability experiments.
Maintained by Stefan Müller Created: November 5, 2013 Last modified: January 09, 2019 |
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