Language and Computation introductory course:
Grammaticality Judgements as Linguistic Evidence.

• Brian Murphy ()

The current use of grammaticality judgements to evaluate the "goodness" of linguistic utterances is controversial (see e.g. Schutze; Wasow & Arnold). The more systematic approaches advocated by Bard and others remain a minority practise. Now, a new consensus is emerging (see e.g. Murphy; Featherston; Weskott & Fanselow), that i) theories of grammar may be investigated independently of models of acceptability judgements and ii) various judgement scales access a single cognitive competence. The course will begin with a quick review of theoretical views of grammaticality. The main part of the course will then introduce concrete methodological guidelines for gathering materials, composing instructions, presenting utterances, choosing among different judgement scales, and selecting appropriate statistical tests for analysis. Publicly available software will be introduced, with an emphasis on web-based testing. Acceptability judgements will be situated relative to other methodologies, including ERP analysis, timed reading and corpus analysis. The course will assume foundational knowledge of linguistics. particulars