Grammar Without Grammaticality
eBook - PDF

Grammar Without Grammaticality

Growth and Limits of Grammatical Precision

  1. 358 pages
  2. English
  3. PDF
  4. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - PDF

Grammar Without Grammaticality

Growth and Limits of Grammatical Precision

About this book

Linguists have standardly assumed that grammar is about identifying all and only the 'good' sentences of a language, which implies that there must be other, 'bad' sentences - but in practice most linguists know that it is hard to pin those down. The standard assumption is no more than an assumption. A century ago, grammarians did not think about their subject that way, and our book shows that the older idea was right: linguists can and should dispense with the concept 'starred sentence'. We draw on corpus data in order to support a different model of grammar, in which individuals refine positive grammatical habits to greater or lesser extents in diverse and unpredictable directions, but nothing is ever ruled out. Languages are not merely alternative methods of verbalizing universal logical forms. We use empirical evidence to shed light on the routes by which school-age children gradually expand their battery of grammatical resources, which turn out to be sometimes counter-intuitive. Our rejection of the 'starred sentence' concept has attracted considerable discussion, and we summarize the reactions and respond to our critics. The contrasting models of grammar described in this book entail contrasting pictures of human nature; our closing chapter shows that grammatical theory is not value-neutral but has an ethical dimension.

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Yes, you can access Grammar Without Grammaticality by Geoffrey Sampson,Anna Babarczy in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Languages & Linguistics & Grammar & Punctuation. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Table of contents

  1. Preface
  2. Acknowledgements
  3. Table of contents
  4. List of figures
  5. List of tables
  6. Chapter 1. Introduction
  7. Chapter 2. The bounds of grammatical refinement
  8. Chapter 3. Where should annotation stop?
  9. Chapter 4. Grammar without grammaticality
  10. Chapter 5. Replies to our critics
  11. Chapter 6. Grammatical description meets spontaneous speech
  12. Chapter 7. Demographic correlates of speech complexity
  13. Chapter 8. The structure of children’s writing
  14. Chapter 9. Child writing and discourse organization
  15. Chapter 10. Simple grammars and new grammars
  16. Chapter 11. The case of the vanishing perfect
  17. Chapter 12. Testing a metric for parse accuracy
  18. Chapter 13. Linguistics empirical and unempirical
  19. Chapter 14. William Gladstone as linguist
  20. Chapter 15. Minds in Uniform: How generative linguistics regiments culture, and why it shouldn’t
  21. References
  22. Index