Judgments of grammaticality of Japanese sentences lacking an argument or an adjunct

This study explored Japanese speakers' linguistic intuition in judging the grammaticality of isolated simple sentences which lacked an argument or an adjunct. The argument is often required to be included in a sentence while the adjunct is not in the Japanese language, 36 participants (M age = 21.4 yr.) judged the grammaticality of (a) sentences with or without an argument or (b) sentences with or without an adjunct. Findings indicated that speakers judged the sentences without an argument as less grammatically correct than those with an argument and those with or without an adjunct. However, the grammaticality of the sentences without an argument was judged not as low as predicted by the Chomskyan linguistic analysis that adopts an all-or-none dichotomy as a criterion for grammaticality. The findings suggest that the state of actual speakers' knowledge of language differs significantly from that of idealized speakers.