Talk:Grammaticality/Archive 1

Old comments
Lyons 1968 is hardly the final word on theoretical linguistics. A lot has happened in the field since then, and I doubt you would find this sort of definition in a well-respected modern work. 139.179.55.47 (talk) 11:16, 14 October 2010 (UTC)

One doesn't have to believe in intuition being the only source of grammaticality judgement to be a generativist; there are certainly generativists who are very empirically inclined. --Kiwibird (talk) 14:51, 14 May 2008 (UTC)
 * You're probably right. Carson Schütze whose well-known book I'm just reading would be one of them. But when I found the article, I turned the view originally expressed as a tenet of linguistics in general to a generative conception. Just feel free to get the right literature and make the statement more precise yet again. This way, it can only get more appropriate. But when doing so, please be aware of one thing: “grammaticality is a matter of linguistic intuition” doesn’t entail that this intuition can be accessed by native speakers in order to make acceptability judgements. (cp. Schütze (1996): The empirical base of linguistics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Page 24) Nativism is not that unsophisticated. G Purevdorj 00:02, 16 May 2008 (UTC)

Psst... Chomsky denied the existence of grammaticality as a basis for generative linguistics in "The View from Building 20", in 1993. See page 44. So is it really true to say that generative linguists view grammaticality as intuitive if Chomsky denies that there is any such thing? (I'm just asking -- I'm not a generativist.) —Preceding unsigned comment added by 134.58.128.29 (talk) 09:06, 22 October 2010 (UTC)
 * Not a bad point, but no time and energy to follow it up. As for the link: 1. insufficient context (in link, assumedly not in book) 2. if so, question whether it holds true. As the shortness of this lexicon article was not destilled down from at least a few dozen articles, I would not surprised if it contains inaccuracies. But what I saw of the source in question does not show that it is so. G Purevdorj (talk) 10:36, 22 October 2010 (UTC)

Peer Review
Hello Grammaticality group! Great work so far! I’m especially impressed with how well inter-linked this article is. Lots of lovely blue text for finding out more about important terminology and concepts. As far as improvement goes, I want to comment on the background section - not because it’s terrible, but because I feel like I know what I’m talking about a bit more than in some of the other sections. It might enhance the clarity of the second paragraph of the background to say explicitly that grammaticality is sometimes measured/reported on a Likert scale, (and you can provide a link to the article on Likert scales) rather than implying it by listing the terms (acceptable, marginally acceptable, unacceptable, etc) and symbols (?, *, **) which sometimes used as points on a scale. This could also be aided by providing examples of sentences that might commonly fall on different points along this scale (eg, garden-path sentences, which are characteristically hard to parse, but generally considered grammatical after a bit of thought.) Colinej (talk) 16:50, 4 November 2014 (UTC)

Great start to the project. Your lay-out is well thought out and you made good use of headings and subheadings which made it flow nicely and easy to read. The concepts in the article are very clear to understand and well supported. To help those without a linguistic background it could be a good idea to take “Models and Debates” and section it off into subsections based on the different models/debates and further expand upon these. It would also help to have more examples, both in English and in another language, of grammatical/ungrammatical sentences. Keep up the good work! Kerrkelsey (talk) 20:25, 3 November 2014 (UTC)

Hi Group A2! Your article is coming together nicely! Just a few recommendations that I hope are helpful in further developing your entry. The first request is clarification in the Background section regarding the relationship between grammaticality and the acceptability of a sentence. A clear definition of acceptability and how grammaticality fits into that definition/concept would be helpful. You do mention that grammaticality and semantic soundness are complementary components of acceptability but there is no further explanation. Some examples to illustrate grammaticality judgments versus semantic plausibility judgments would be a positive addition (to illustrate a grammaticality judgement and isolate this type of judgement from judgement based on meaning). Also, when I read the feral children case study, I am not sure how it fits into the context of grammaticality. The study demonstrates that children who lack language experience early in life can acquire language later but, as far as I can tell, does not say anything about grammaticality judgements. It is likely the case that if children can acquire language later in life then they can simultaneously acquire the ability to make grammaticality judgements, though the link to grammaticality is not explicitly stated in the article (does the study itself contain comments about grammaticality?). My recommendation would be to remove this section or add a couple of sentences relating this study directly to grammaticality. Gaytonan (talk) 01:29, 4 November 2014 (UTC)

Greetings from group A4. You guys did an excellent job of communicating your article in a neutral fashion. Your prose was very well-crafted; instead of objectively stating research findings as fact, you introduce them transparently as the findings of researchers. Your group does this consistently throughout the article. A possible improvement could be expanding the ‘Models and debates’ section to incorporate models of grammaticality from other schools of linguistic study than Generativism (though it would be understandable that the article should maintain a focus on grammar & syntax as such topics are the main focus of our Ling 300 course). Expansion to any other sections would obviously also work towards furthering an even more unpartial and diverse article. --LeKevin1919 (talk) 01:52, 4 November 2014 (UTC)

Hey A4! The one thing I really enjoyed about this article is that the authors stuck to quality over quantity! To add to this quality, I would suggest adding a few more citations, especially in areas where there isn’t a hyperlinked wiki page. For example, when mentioning Lyons 1968 in the second paragraph in background, there should be a citation there because it is the first time this paper is being mentioned. However, you may continue to refer to it as Lyons 1968 after you have cited it. Additionally, if you hyperlink another wiki page in your article and it shows up as red, it means that there’s no Wikipedia page for that term. In the case of the term “acceptability” in paragraph 2 of the background section, it’s better to “un-link” it so that it doesn’t stand out as an error in your article.

The style of writing throughout the article is fairly consistent, which is impressive considering certain people wrote certain sections and there are bound to be some differences in style of writing. For the most part, the article is concise and professional. As a suggestion, try to use minimal adjectives for the purposes of being concise and neutral to what is being written. Expressions such as “on the other hand” could be replaced by a more scholarly substitute, such as “contrastively”. This would allow for more concise and professional writing, of which this group is already doing a great job at! As well, adjectives such as “enormous” (in First Language Acquisition section) and “extraordinarily severe” (in Feral children grammar) aren’t required to get your point across. Using just one adjective (ie. just use “severe” instead of extraordinarily) that is more professional and scholarly will convey the desired message.

Lastly, images would definitely help supplement this great article! Charts or graphs that visualize the results found in any of the studies mentioned, especially in the First Language Acquisition section, would be a great addition to the article, considering that some of the results are quite ground-breaking. Emmaharris32 (talk) 06:10, 4 November 2014 (UTC)

Further Suggestions
Nice work! I like the writing style. It's concise and easy to follow. I think that article would benefit from an attention grabber in the introduction such as a visual aid that explains the concept of grammaticality, along with other visual aids throughout the article to explain your concepts. It would also be helpful to provide an example of different sentences ranging from grammatical to ungrammatical. --Jessicabarclay (talk) 18:05, 6 November 2014 (UTC)

The page looks really interesting and made me think of a few things you might want to consider as examples. One being "deviant" forms of language, like slang, and speech patterns among youth. AAVE (African American Vernacular English) is an excellent example of this where traditional views of grammatically would say example sentences are incorrect, but the language has strict grammar rules etc. that make something grammatical. LingAnthNerd (talk) 18:18, 6 November 2014 (UTC)

Suggestions for improvement
Add examples that illustrate the general points being made. Add references and page numbers. Add more trees for the examples that you present, and describe the examples in more detail (i.e. explain exactly why they are grammatical/ungrammatical). Explain the asterisk notation, and other diacritics and provide examples.--RM Dechaine (talk) 19:51, 6 December 2014 (UTC)

This is bettr
My brief exposure to this article is more positive. The article seems to be more balanced, i.e. less focused on one particular school of syntax and grammar. --Tjo3ya (talk) 21:16, 19 December 2014 (UTC)

Schütze's book now republished
Carson T. Schütze. 2016. The empirical base of linguistics: Grammaticality judgments and linguistic methodology (Classics in Linguistics 2). Berlin: Language Science Press. http://langsci-press.org/catalog/book/89

This work has been republished as Open Access. The article might profit from updating the references from the 1996 edition to this work. Jasy jatere (talk) 10:57, 9 March 2016 (UTC)

Dubious graph


This Euler diagram is nonsensical—it shows that some things are both grammatical and ungrammatical (those in the intersection of the two); moreover, it shows that things are acceptable if and only if they are both grammatical and ungrammatical. So I'm removing it. Loraof (talk) 03:23, 8 March 2017 (UTC)

His poor handling of the business neared on negligence
His poor handling of the business neared on negligence — Preceding unsigned comment added by 51.253.41.68 (talk) 18:39, 11 October 2019 (UTC)