In 1975 Chomsky wrote that "an adequate linguistic theory will have to recognize degrees of grammaticalness", and more recently, in 2000 for Frank Keller "Gradience in Grammar (...) [is] the fact that some linguistic structures are not fully acceptable or unacceptable, but receive gradient linguistic judgements". But what does "degrees of grammaticalness" exactly mean? And how can a linguistic theory account for it?

Keller addresses these questions In his PhD Thesis, where on the basis of experimental evidences he developed a model of gradient grammaticality based on Optimality Theory.

In this talk, I'd like to discuss with you different aspects of Keller's model, and maybe more widely debate around this notion of gradient grammaticality.

References:

Keller, Frank. 2000. Gradience in Grammar: Experimental and Computational Aspects of Degrees of Grammaticality. PhD Thesis, University of Edinburgh.

Sorace, Antonella and Frank Keller. 2004. Gradience in Linguistic Data. To appear in Lingua.

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