1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910815729603321

Autore

Sampson Geoffrey <1944->

Titolo

Grammar without grammaticality : growth and limits of grammatical precision / / Geoffrey Sampson, Anna Babarczy

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Berlin ; ; Boston : , : De Gruyter Mouton, , [2014]

©2014

ISBN

3-11-048806-X

3-11-029001-4

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (360 p.)

Collana

Trends in linguistics. Studies and monographs, , 1861-4302 ; ; volume 254

Classificazione

ET 100

Altri autori (Persone)

BabarczyAnna

Disciplina

415

Soggetti

Grammaticality (Linguistics)

Grammar, Comparative and general

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Description based upon print version of record.

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Nota di contenuto

Frontmatter -- Preface -- Acknowledgements -- Table of contents -- List of figures -- List of tables -- Chapter 1. Introduction -- Chapter 2. The bounds of grammatical refinement -- Chapter 3. Where should annotation stop? -- Chapter 40. Grammar without grammaticality -- Chapter 5. Replies to our critics -- Chapter 6. Grammatical description meets spontaneous speech -- Chapter 7. Demographic correlates of speech complexity -- Chapter 8. The structure of children's writing -- Chapter 9. Child writing and discourse organization -- Chapter 10. Simple grammars and new grammars -- Chapter 11. The case of the vanishing perfect -- Chapter 12. Testing a metric for parse accuracy -- Chapter 13. Linguistics empirical and unempirical -- Chapter 14. William Gladstone as linguist -- Chapter 15. Minds in Uniform: How generative linguistics regiments culture, and why it shouldn't -- References -- Index

Sommario/riassunto

Grammar is said to be about defining all and only the 'good' sentences of a language, implying that there are other, 'bad' sentences - but it is hard to pin those down. A century ago, grammarians did not think that way, and they were right: linguists can and should dispense with 'starred sentences'. Corpus data support a different model: individuals develop positive grammatical habits of growing refinement, but



nothing is ever ruled out. The contrasting models entail contrasting pictures of human nature; our final chapter shows that grammatical theory is not value-neutral but has an ethical dimension.