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Grammaticality and Ungrammaticality in Phonology
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 19 February 2026
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In this article, I make two theoretical claims. (i) For some form to be grammatical in language L, it is not necessary that the form satisfy all constraints that are active in L; that is, even grammatical forms can violate constraints. (ii) There are degrees of ungrammaticality; that is, not all ungrammatical forms are equally ungrammatical. I first show that these claims follow straightforwardly from the basic architecture of an optimality-theoretic grammar. I then show that the surface sound patterns used most widely in formal phonology cannot be used to test the truth of these two claims, but argue that results from speech processing experiments can. Finally, I discuss three experiments on the processing of nonwords of the form [stVt], [skVk], and [spVp] in English that were designed to test these claims, and show that both claims are confirmed by the results of the experiments.
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- Copyright © 2008 Linguistic Society of America
Footnotes
*
This article benefited greatly from discussion with and feedback from many people, and I express my appreciation to all of them: John McCarthy, John Kingston, Joe Pater, Pam Beddor, Sally Thomason, Jaye Padgett, the audiences at GLOW 27, LabPhon 9, the University of Maryland, Cornell University, Stanford University, Indiana University, Harvard University, the University of Massachusetts, and the University of Michigan. I also need to express my thanks to the anonymous referees, the associate editor in charge of this article, and the editor of the journal. Their insistence on high standards, and their suggestions for improvements, resulted in this article becoming much better. I, of course, accept all responsibility for the views expressed here.
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