Less is Better

Abstract

In theoretical linguistics, grammaticality is the quality of a linguistic utterance of being well-formed. For native speakers of natural languages, grammaticality is a matter of linguistic intuition, a linguistic competence acquired in childhood. On the other hand, there has been an increasing trend for acceptability over grammaticality by linguists who emphasize the social acquisition of language in contrast to innate factors. This paper claims that information structure plays a role in determining ellipsis preference and that information structural effects are not unique to ellipsis. For this aim, I investigate the preference of native speakers with respect to deep vs. surface anaphora. I show that there is a general tendency on reducing information as much as possible in discourse.