Gradient well-formedness

Gradient well-formedness is a problem that arises in the analysis of data in generative linguistics, in which a linguistic entity is neither completely grammatical nor completely ungrammatical. A native speaker may judge a word, phrase or pronunciation as "not quite right" or "almost there," rather than dismissing it as completely unacceptable or fully accepting it as well-formed. Thus, the acceptability of the given entity lies on a "gradient" between well-formedness and ill-formedness. Some generative linguists think that ill-formedness might be strictly additive, thus trying to figure out universal constraints by acquiring scalar grammaticality judgements from informants. Generally, however, gradient well-formedness is considered an unsolved problem in generative linguistics.

See also

• Constituent (linguistics)
• Grammaticality
• List of linguistic example sentences

References

• Albright, Adam (January 2007), Gradient phonological acceptability as a grammatical effect, http://www.mit.edu/~albright/papers/Albright-GrammaticalGradience.pdf, retrieved 2009-04-11 
• Featherston, Sam (2004), Judgements in syntax: Why they are good, how they can be better, http://www.sfb441.uni-tuebingen.de/~sam/papers/DGfS04.handout.pdf, retrieved 2008-04-09 
• Hayes, Bruce P. (August 1997), Gradient Well-Formedness in Optimality Theory, http://www.linguistics.ucla.edu/people/hayes/gradient.pdf, retrieved 2006-09-20