Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

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

2007; De Gruyter; Volume: 3; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1515/cllt.2007.006

1613-7035

Thomas Hoffmann,

Language, Discourse, Communication Strategies

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.