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Thomas Hoffmann

Good is good and bad is bad: but how do we know which one we had?

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.

Corpus Linguistics and Lingustic Theory, Walter de Gruyter

Print ISSN: 1613-7027
Volume: 3, 04/2007
Seiten: 87 - 98

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