Gradient HPSG

Abstract

Prevailing grammatical frameworks treat grammaticality as a binary concept, despite strong experimental evidence suggesting it is better understood as a gradient notion. This highlights a serious disconnect between linguistic theory and empirical data. While a few truly gradient frameworks have been proposed to bridge the gap, none have been developed within a constraint-based formalism – an approach particularly well-suited for modeling gradient grammaticality. This work formally introduces a gradient version of HPSG and subsequently employs it to analyze acceptability judgment data on unlike coordination phenomena in Turkish, which display distinctly gradient patterns.