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

在过去的几十年里，大多数形式句法理论都认为句法知识是一个离散的符号系统，它在语言理解和语言产生过程中被使用，但在其他方面不同于语言的执行机制。这一假设最近在几个方面受到了挑战。第一个挑战来自于对语法性判断不是二元的而是梯度的这一事实的新认识。第二个挑战来自于关于语法和使用频率之间关系的新发现。这导致了句法理论的发展，增加了符号语法系统的数值信息，这往往是假设来自频率与句法结构发生在语言use.The目前的建议的目的是评估这些挑战与参数和动词线性化在德国的主要领域的调查。主要的研究策略是在基于权重的优化理论框架内构建所选语法现象的模型，并根据使用频率和语法判断实验调查数据对这些模型进行评估。如果以前的研究没有提供相关数据，则将在拟议的研究项目中获得这些数据。

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.