Relating (Un)acceptability to Interpretation. Experimental Investigations on Negation

Area of Science:

• Linguistics
• Psycholinguistics
• Comparative Grammar

Background:

• Contemporary linguistic studies often use unacceptable sentences to define grammatical boundaries.
• The interpretation of these unacceptable sentences is frequently overlooked or dismissed as unreliable.
• Negative dependencies are a key area for understanding grammatical competence and cross-linguistic variation.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the interpretation of unacceptable sentences with negative dependencies in Basque and Spanish.
• To compare how speakers of different languages judge both the acceptability and interpretation of grammatical and ungrammatical sentences.
• To determine if acceptability judgments alone are sufficient for understanding linguistic competence.

Main Methods:

• Conducted two experiments involving parallel acceptability and interpretation judgments.
• Utilized sentences with various negative dependencies in Basque, Castilian Spanish, and Basque Country Spanish.
• Analyzed how judgments of acceptability correlate with interpretation outcomes across languages.

Main Results:

• Acceptable sentences consistently yielded a single negation reading in all tested languages.
• Unacceptable sentences were uniformly interpreted as single negation in Basque.
• Unacceptable sentences in both Spanish varieties resulted in chance-level interpretation, indicating ambiguity.

Conclusions:

• Acceptability and interpretation data provide crucial insights into adult language grammars and cross-linguistic differences.
• The study highlights significant divergences in how speakers of Basque and Spanish process ungrammatical negative sentences.
• Findings contribute to linguistic theory by refining assumptions about negative dependencies and sentence interpretation.