“Good is good and bad is bad”: but how do we know which one we had?
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Thomas Hoffmann
Abstract
1. Introduction
As Geoffrey Sampson points out in his target article “Grammar Without Grammaticality”, a key concept of modern linguistics is the distinction of “good”, a. k. a. grammatical, and “bad”, a. k. a. ungrammatical, sentences. As such most linguists seem to subscribe to what I shall call the “Sheryl Crow view”, i. e., that grammaticality is a question of yes-or-no. Sampson, on the other hand, appears to take a more Hamlet-like approach in suggesting that “the concept of ‘ungrammatical’ or ‘ill-formed’ word sequences is a delusion” (p. 1). Instead he basically divides sentences into the “set of sequences which feel familiar to a speaker, and the set of sequences which are unfamiliar” (p. 11), with the latter including “sequences destined never to have a use, and those which will in due course be useful” (p. 11). In order to provide an adequate description of the set of familiar and unfamiliar sentences of a language, Sampson furthermore argues that linguists should only draw on corpus data, and not native speaker introspection.
© Walter de Gruyter
Articles in the same Issue
- Grammar without grammaticality
- Ungrammaticality, rarity, and corpus use
- Advancing linguistics between the extremes: Some thoughts on Geoffrey R. Sampson's “Grammar without grammaticality”
- Linguistics beyond grammaticality
- Real bad grammar: Realistic grammatical description with grammaticality
- “Good is good and bad is bad”: but how do we know which one we had?
- Take empiricism seriously! In support of methodological diversity in linguistics
- Reply
Articles in the same Issue
- Grammar without grammaticality
- Ungrammaticality, rarity, and corpus use
- Advancing linguistics between the extremes: Some thoughts on Geoffrey R. Sampson's “Grammar without grammaticality”
- Linguistics beyond grammaticality
- Real bad grammar: Realistic grammatical description with grammaticality
- “Good is good and bad is bad”: but how do we know which one we had?
- Take empiricism seriously! In support of methodological diversity in linguistics
- Reply
