A critical look at partial acceptability in English and Polish

Authors:

• Sylwiusz Żychliński

Abstract

This paper is primarily concerned with the role of p artial acceptability (and its ‘fla- vors’) in English linguistic examples taken from th e field of generative grammar. Par- tially acceptable judgments as a subset of acceptab ility judgments form a heterogene- ous group that plays a significant role in linguist ic research and yet the extent to which partial acceptability is employed in the linguistic literature has not been studied exten- sively. The first part of the paper discusses a num ber of relevant issues related to the use of partial acceptability, such as problems with the conceptualization of gradience or excessive creativity with regard to levels of acc eptability present in generative pa- pers. The second part of the paper reports on a met a-linguistic study of partial accept- ability in a pre-selected corpus of generative pape rs on English, with the focus on the types of partial acceptability and their function. Lastly, the English results are com- pared with the results of a previously conducted sim ilar study of partial acceptability in Polish.