Judgments of the grammaticality of sentences violating Chomsky's principle of Full Interpretation

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According to Chomsky's generative grammar, his theory concerns the knowledge of language, i.e., what native speakers know about their language. This study explored the psychological reality of the principle of Full Interpretation, a principle that, given his realist position, must be attributed to the mind of the native speakers. Five experiments yielded the following major findings :1.Ungrammatical bitransitive sentences violating this principle were not judged as completely ungrammatical contrary to the expectation realized if the principle had been applied in an all-or-none fashion. Instead, they were judged as moderately grammatical. Ungrammatical sentences that included a verbal noun comprising a noun followed by a verb, shita (did), were judged to be highly grammatical despite the violation of the principle.2.Ungrammatical sentences given punctuation were judged more grammatical than the ones without punctuation.3.Ungrammatical transformed bitransitive sentences were judged less grammatical than their basic counterparts. For the transformed sentences emphasis slightly increased the judged grammaticality of both the subjective and the objective sentences.These findings would not be expected if the speakers possess and judge the sentences in conformity with the principle of Full Interpretation, hence raising doubt concerning Chomsky's assertion that native speakers possess the same knowledge as is defined by his generative grammar.