Sentence Acceptability Experiments: What, How, and Why

Abstract

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.