Gradient perception of grammaticality: On the Interaction of grammar, frequency of usage and processing complexity

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An assumption shared by most formal syntactic theories over the last decades has been that syntactic knowledge ist a discrete symbolic system which is put ot use during language comprehension and language production but is otherwise distinct from the performance mechanisms. This assumption has been challenged recently in several ways. A first challenge derives from a new appreciation of the fact that grammaticality judgments are not binary but gradient. A second challenge comes from new findings concerning the relationship between grammar and frequency of usage. This has led to the development of syntactic theories which augment the symbolic grammar system with numerical information which is often assumed to be derived from the frequencies with which syntactic structures occur in language use.The aim of the current proposal is to evaluate these challenges with argument and verb linearization in German as the principal areas of investigation. The main research strategy will be to construct models of the selected grammatical phenomena within the framework of weight-based Optimatility Theory and to evaluate these models with regard to data about frequency of usage and data from experimental investigations of grammaticality judgments. When the relevant data are not available from prior research, they will be obtained within the proposed research project.