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

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 experiments in 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 senten

SUBMITTER: Etxeberria U 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5801287 | biostudies-literature | 2017

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature