When We Don't Speak Good

Reviews the book, Investigating Linguistic Acceptability by Randolph Quirk and Jan Svartvik (1966). This monograph is a report of several experiments which were performed to study the notion "acceptability of a sentence" and relate this to how people perform various operations on strange or semi-grammatical sentences. Author's subjects rated the acceptability of a sentence on a three-point scale labeled "wholly natural and normal," "marginal or dubious," and "wholly natural and abnormal." The authors found that the acceptability of a sentence was correlated with success in performing operations on it; the less acceptable the sentence, the smaller was the number of subjects who would write out a properly transformed version of it in the twenty second time interval. The most serious criticism of the book that this reviewer has is that there is not enough rationale presented to justify the choice of specific materials and procedures. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)