What do you mean by contrast in syntax?

Abstract

The present work proposes a non-binary evaluation of contrast in syntax and elaborates the benefits of considering gradience and degree in syntactic study. Contrast is one of the most important notions in contemporary linguistics, but the field lacks consensus about its definition and its role. Syntactic contrast has long been used in the field as a binary means of distinguishing grammatical from ungrammatical sentences via introspective judgments. Given that not all (un)grammatical sentences sound equally good or bad, contrasts should also be posited as gradient, thereby being measurable on a continuum of acceptability. The present study argues that a gradient view of syntactic contrasts is often more informative, revealing a greater variety of syntactic underpinnings in human language. To substantiate the merits of the gradient view of contrast over the dichotomous view, the present study presents results from a series of experiments conducted on Korean. The test items consist of 287 sentence pairs randomly extracted from Studies of Generative Grammar 1991-2014. The experimental tasks include a two-alternative forced choice task, a binary yes/no task, and a 5-point Likert scale task. The analysis is four-pronged covering direction, position, distance, and intensity of contrast.