What do you mean by contrast in syntax?

• 발행기관: 경희대학교 언어정보연구소
• 저자명: Sanghoun Song Eunjeong Oh
• 간행물 정보: 『언어연구』제34권 제3호, 387~426쪽, 전체 40쪽
• 주제분류: 인문학 > 언어학
• 파일형태: PDF
• 발행일자: 2017.12.30

국문 초록

The present work proposes a non-binary evaluation of contrast in syntax and elaborates the benefits of considering gradience and degree in syntactic study. Contrast is one of the most important notions in contemporary linguistics, but the field lacks consensus about its definition and its role. Syntactic contrast has long been used in the field as a binary means of distinguishing grammatical from ungrammatical sentences via introspective judgments. Given that not all (un)grammatical sentences sound equally good or bad, contrasts should also be posited as gradient, thereby being measurable on a continuum of acceptability. The present study argues that a gradient view of syntactic contrasts is often more informative, revealing a greater variety of syntactic underpinnings in human language. To substantiate the merits of the gradient view of contrast over the dichotomous view, the present study presents results from a series of experiments conducted on Korean. The test items consist of 287 sentence pairs randomly extracted from Studies of Generative Grammar 1991-2014. The experimental tasks include a two-alternative forced choice task, a binary yes/no task, and a 5-point Likert scale task. The analysis is four-pronged covering direction, position, distance, and intensity of contrast. First, the direction of syntactic contrasts is examined with respect to whether linguists’ judgments and naïve speakers’ judgments converge with each other. Second, the position of contrasts on acceptability continuum examines absolute goodness of sentences on the assumption that the ‘good’ and ‘bad’ sentence must absolutely sound good and bad to the vast majority of speakers. Third, the distance of contrasts pertains to strength of grammatical constraints. This indicates the magnitude of difference in acceptability between two pairwise sentences. Finally, the intensity of contrasts relates to judgment variation across speakers. This examines whether most naïve speakers agree with the acceptability of a particular sentence and if not, it estimates how much their judgments are scattered in terms of the gradience of acceptability.

목차

1. Introduction

2. Fundamentals

3. Experimental Methods

4. Analysis

5. Direction, Position, Distance, and Intensity

6. Conclusion

키워드

contrast dichotomy gradience acceptability judgments language experiments