Chapter 6 discusses another issue in efficient computations that language change casts some light on, namely through changes affecting adjuncts. Chomsky (2000, 2001) distinguishes between arguments (subjects and objects) and adverbials in terms of ordered pair-merge and unordered set-merge, respectively. I examine changes of VP and NP adjuncts to specifiers positions of functional categories (ASPP and DP, respectively) and of adjuncts to arguments. These changes show that pair-merge can be avoided. Adjuncts that are in specifier positions of functional categories in their turn reanalyze as heads, driven by labeling pressures. I also address the question of whether subordinate and insubordinate adjunct clauses change in unidirectional ways, and conclude that they don’t.

Acceptability and grammaticality are clearly closely related, but the relationship is not always straightforward. Sometimes, sentences that are thought to be ungrammatical are perceived as acceptable, leading to an illusion of grammaticality, or grammatical sentences are perceived as unacceptable, leading to an illusion of ungrammaticality. Such cases occur with morphological ambiguity, attachment ambiguity, agreement attraction, and negative polarity items, among others. Processing difficulty is one of the factors that can lower the acceptability of a grammatical sentence, as may be seen in the effects of constituent length and dependency length on acceptability. In some cases, such as superiority violations and island violations, it has been argued that these may actually be grammatical, but unacceptable, though this is the topic of much ongoing research involving cross-linguistic work and studies on repeated exposure (satiation) and memory capacity. Having better models of acceptability and better ways of directly measuring grammaticality would be desirable.

This chapter outlines a framework for using signal detection theory (SDT) to guide the design and analysis of acceptability judgment studies in experimental linguistics. It presents a worked example experiment on the syntactic phenomenon of D-linking (discourse linking) and wh-movement. It shows how to derive common SDT measures (like d_sub_a and s), how to do inferential statistics over those measures, and how to find additional theoretical and practical resources.

We present a selective review of studies on Romance languages wherein acceptability experiments played an important role in advancing our knowledge of the grammars of particular linguistic varieties and, by extension, furthering our knowledge of human language and linguistic theory. First, we examine recent studies on word order in wh-questions across varieties of Spanish. Next, we examine the value of acceptability experiments in the study of infrequent structures (e.g. clitic left-dislocation, focus fronting). We highlight the importance of data triangulation by examining studies of information focus in Spanish, emphasizing the impact that methodological choices can have on results. We also examine control and raising structures in Brazilian Portuguese, where conflicting results have required innovative methodological approaches. Since acceptability intuitions may be uniquely nuanced for minority languages, we also briefly discuss how data that is typically used in other theoretical paradigms can contribute to data triangulation with lesser-spoken Romance varieties.

Recent developments in the experimental syntax program have challenged some of the standard practices for collecting and analyzing linguistic evidence. In doing so, the methodological and theoretical gap between other areas of language science has begun to close. It is more common than ever before for research in theoretical syntax to incorporate multiple methodologies in the same study. Online elicitation methods, adopted from psycholinguistics, have been the most visible new addition to the theoretical syntactician’s toolbox. Yet observational data, in the form of corpora, has begun to play a larger role in contemporary syntactic investigation. The aim of this chapter is to contextualize the evolving role of corpus studies in syntactic investigation as a methodology that can be used to externally validate results from other methods as well as generate hypotheses. I highlight theoretical and practical advantages of employing corpora in tandem with other methods and point to future directions where gains can still be made.

Anaphora play a key role in syntactic theorizing, but experimental investigations of coreference – especially when using acceptability judgments – involve unique methodological challenges. Given that non-linguist participants are unlikely to be familiar with linguistic notations such as the use of subscripts, how can researchers indicate the coreference relation whose acceptability is being assessed? In other words, if a researcher wants to test whether a particular coindexation relation is acceptable, how can this information be conveyed to participants? Ignoring this issue can yield uninterpretable data. This chapter provides an in-depth discussion of different methods for indicating coreference when researchers want to elicit acceptability judgments from participants who are not trained linguists. The chapter also discusses other approaches relevant for anaphora, including antecedent-choice tasks and real-time methods (self-paced reading, eye-tracking), and explains how they differ in terms of the kind of data they yield and thus the kinds of hypotheses they can be used to investigate.

Neuroimaging methods are of interest to those in search of non-traditional methods, and hopefully new insights, for the study of syntax. To the extent that activation in a “syntax area” of the brain can be used to discriminate among syntactic theories, we must have good confidence in the localization of syntax to begin with. Therefore what seem like separate interests – the linguist’s interest in using neuroimaging experiments to understand language, and the neuroscientist’s interest in spatial localization of language – are in fact inseparable. Section 27.2 introduces the reader to the various neuroimaging methods currently available and provides a crash course in the cortical neuroanatomy relevant to language. Section 27.3 reviews attempts to localize syntax in the brain through the use of neuroimaging methods. Section 27.4 discusses attempts to use neuroimaging data to adjudicate linguistic questions: the adequacy of syntactic theories, parsing models, and particular structural analyses.

In this chapter, I discuss the relationship between acceptability judgments and other experimental techniques and the broader goals of comparative syntax. Acceptability judgment experiments quantify the impact that a small number of factors exert on acceptability across a sample of participants. By contrast, comparative syntax has typically sought to characterize systematic similarities and differences between grammatical systems, on various scales of abstraction (languages, dialects, individual grammars). In this chapter, I argue that acceptability judgment experiments can contribute to comparative syntax by quantifying subtle judgments within a language as a ”check” on intuitive judgments collected from underresourced languages, by establishing reliable trends across languages, and by exploring individual differences within a population. I emphasize that careful factorial designs, appropriate controls, and previously established, theoretically informed hypotheses are crucial to the success of applying experimental approaches to comparative syntax.

Satiation refers to an increase, over time, in the willingness of a native-speaker consultant to agree that a given syntactic structure is grammatically well-formed. Studies show that satiation can be induced under laboratory conditions, within a single testing session; that the effect is restricted to a small number of sentence types (chiefly those involving wh-extraction from wh-islands, subjects, and certain complex NPs); that experimentally induced satiation can persist for at least four weeks; and that satiation sometimes ”carries over” to syntactically related sentence types. Tables are provided showing the methods and findings of satiation studies on seven different types of syntactic violation. Larger issues include (i) whether the satiable sentence types form a natural class within generative syntax; (ii) whether satiation is a unitary phenomenon, or merely a family of similar phenomena; and (iii) how, in principle, satiation can serve as a tool for language research.

The chapter reviews a number of empirical domains that recently came into the focus of research in Slavic experimental syntax, including island phenomena, syntactic Superiority effects, various types of agreement, word order, and scope interaction, among others. This research mostly relies on sentence acceptability experiments applied across larger pools of participants, but the chapter also reviews selected studies using related experimental methods (e.g. elicited production and sentence–picture verification). The chapter concludes by identifying a number of conceptual issues in syntactic theory, for which we believe Slavic experimental syntax has a potential to make a particularly strong contribution.

This chapter attempts to give an overview of current methods of gathering controlled acceptability judgments, noting what parameters of variation there are.Issues dealt with include the ways that the stimulus can be presented, the task assigned to the informant, the criterion for acceptability which the informant is instructed to use, and the format in which the response is delivered.A particular focus is the issue of the scale type on which the judgments are given.The chapter argues for more sophisticated (and admittedly) complex scales, and presents the case for anchoring the scale points with lingustic examples in order to ground the scale intersubjectively. These anchor points can be provided by the use of standard items instantiating cardinal well-formedness values, such as those proposed in Gerbrich et al. (2019).

The notion of acceptability has played a crucial role in linguistics. Formal sentence acceptability experiments are relatively recent, but standardly make use of a factorial design, multiple lexicalizations of the stimuli, full counterbalancing of the stimuli, well-designed filler items, and an appropriate response method. Such experiments are sensitive to grammaticality, of course, but also to the presence of a dependency, the length of the dependency, and the frequency of the lexical items and structures. These experiments are useful for testing claims of (un)acceptability, but also for making cross-linguistic comparisons and comparing populations of speakers. Formal acceptability experiments are similar to traditional methods of collecting acceptability judgments, but each can do things that the other cannot and both have important roles to play in syntactic research.

The that-trace effect is one of several long-distance extraction phenomena that have been the focus of much work in generative syntax. The core pattern, though easily stated, remains a conundrum. It is evident in numbers of unrelated languages, but also appears to vary even in closely related languages. Experimental work that has tested the core contrasts both corroborates and refines them across languages and dialects. We find consistent evidence for the core pattern, as well as a reduction in the acceptability of object extraction over that. Experiments on German have uncovered previously unrecognized subject-object asymmetries, though the relevance to that-trace remains unclear. We also discuss the use of experimental approaches to assess theoretical accounts of the that-trace effect. We conclude with a summary of experimental findings bearing on that-trace and their implications for the general role of judgments in generative theory.

Judgments in acceptability judgment tasks are not uniform – because of the conditions involved, but also because of additional variation across participants and across items. Some of the variation is meaningful, some is noise. This chapter discusses both types of variation and provides recommendations on how to deal with them. We show how some of the interspeaker variation stems from micro-differences between grammars. Statistical procedures like distribution analysis or cluster analysis help in detecting such variation. The same procedures can be used to identify variation across items. Further, we outline how to reduce variation across and within items. In particular, we recommend keeping length and complexity of sentences constant as well as the accessibility of NP-antecedents. The rest of the chapter deals with variation stemming from extralinguistic sources. Beside individual differences related to performance factors, e.g. working memory, we discuss methodological artifacts like scale effects and non-cooperative behavior.

Purportedly (morpho)syntactic-event-related brain wave components – P600, LAN, and e[arly]LAN – have over the years proved more likely to be domain-general responses. Studies comparing late positive responses to anomalies across cognitive domains, and manipulating their probability of occurrence, suggest that the P600 is a member of the P300 family. Other studies report individual variation in response to (morpho)syntactic anomalies, smudging the distinction between N400 and P600 responses, and suggesting that LAN responses to morphosyntactic anomaly may be an artifact of N400+P600 overlap. The eLAN has similarly been shown to be a methodological artifact. We argue that studies of long-distance dependencies have produced the most consistent and reliable results, partly because they largely avoid violation paradigms, although current insights may be profitably applied to ERP studies of syntactic islands. We also suggest that what are taken to be specialized effects of referential processing are in fact another manifestation of such long-distance (anaphoric) effects.