Relating (Un)acceptability to Interpretation. Experimental Investigations on Negation
Etxeberria, Urtzi (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (França))
Tubau Muntaña, Susagna (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. Departament de Filologia Anglesa i de Germanística)
Deprez, Viviane (Rutgers University. Department of Linguistics)
Borràs Comes, Joan Manel 1984- (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. Departament de Filologia Espanyola)
Espinal, M. Teresa (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. Departament de Filologia Catalana)

Date:	2018
Abstract:	Although contemporary linguistic studies routinely use unacceptable sentences to determine the boundary of what falls outside the scope of grammar, investigations far more rarely take into consideration the possible interpretations of such sentences, perhaps because these interpretations are commonly prejudged as irrelevant or unreliable across speakers. In this paper we provide the results of two experimentsin which participants had to make parallel acceptability and interpretation judgments of sentences presenting various types of negative dependencies in Basque and in two varieties of Spanish (Castilian Spanish and Basque Country Spanish). Our results show that acceptable sentences are uniformly assigned a single negation reading in the two languages. However, while unacceptable sentences consistently convey single negation in Basque, they are interpreted at chance in both varieties of Spanish. These results confirm that judgment data that distinguish between acceptable and unacceptable negative utterances can inform us not only about an adult's grammar of his/her particular language but also about interesting cross-linguistic differences. We conclude that the acceptability and interpretation of (un)grammatical negative sentences can serve linguistic theory construction by helping to disentangle basic assumptions about the nature of various negative dependencies.
Grants:	European Commission 613465 Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad FFI2014-51878-P Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad FFI2014-52015-P Agència de Gestió d'Ajuts Universitaris i de Recerca 2014/SGR-1013
Note:	Altres ajuts: UPV/EHU/IT769-13
Rights:	Aquest document està subjecte a una llicència d'ús Creative Commons. Es permet la reproducció total o parcial, la distribució, la comunicació pública de l'obra i la creació d'obres derivades, fins i tot amb finalitats comercials, sempre i quan es reconegui l'autoria de l'obra original.
Language:	Anglès
Document:	Article ; recerca ; Versió publicada
Subject:	(un)acceptability ; Interpretation ; Negative dependencies ; Basque ; Castilian Spanish ; Basque Country ; Spanish
Published in:	Frontiers in psychology, Vol. 8 (Febrer 2018) , ISSN 1664-1078

DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2017.02370
PMID: 29456515

15 p, 785.3 KB

The record appears in these collections:
Articles > Research articles
Articles > Published articles