ITRW on Experimental Linguistics Athens, Greece August 28-30, 2006

Gradience and Parametric Variation

Theodora Alexopoulou, Frank Keller

Savoirs, Textes, Langage, Lille III, France
RCEAL Cambridge, UK
Informatics, University of Edinburgh, UK

The paper assesses the consequences of gradience for approaches to variation based on the Principles and Parameters model. In particular, the discussion focuses on recent crosslinguistic results obtained through magnitude estimation, a methodology particularly suited to the study of gradient acceptability/grammaticality. Results on superiority and relativised minimality effects in questions are discussed in the light of current theoretical assumptions regarding the locus of crosslinguistic variation.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Alexopoulou, Theodora / Keller, Frank (2006): "Gradience and parametric variation", In ExLing-2006, 69-72.