The notion of syntactic Gradience denotes the existence of degrees of acceptability of an utterance, i.e. the existence of an acceptability gradient in human language processing. This basically means that acceptability no longer comes in only two flavours and that an ill-formed utterance can be considered as more or less acceptable.

One way to account for this syntactic gradience is to assign an utterance a degree of acceptability. The idea is not new but how to automatically compute such a figure remains an open question that my work aims to address.

In this presentation I'll describe the parser I've been developping and I'll show how it provides us with a suitable environment for computing such degrees of acceptability.

Please send comments or queries about this web site to jpprost@ics.mq.edu.au