North Germanic Negation - Munin

2 Methodology
The first part of this chapter concerns some general methodological issues in Generative Grammar,
before I in the second part turn to the whats and hows of the specific resources and tools I have
made use of in the present work.
2.1 General remarks
As stated in the previous chapter, the object of study in Generative Grammar is mental grammars,
and in order to study such a hidden reality one needs to study its expressions. Because of this, the
methodology of Generative Grammar can be accused of being circular (cf. Dyvik 1980). I think a
better description is upward spiralling: In order to model a hidden reality (I-language), it is necessary
to go back and forth between empirical data and the model in order to steadily adjust the model to
existing and new data (cf. Åfarli 2000 on hypothetic modelling).
This section starts with a discussion of the concepts of grammaticality and acceptability, before I
turn to some notes on linguistic judgements and corpus data. For an extensive discussion of
methodological issues within theoretical linguistics, I refer to Schütze (1996).
2.1.1 Grammaticality and acceptability
I assume the dichotomy grammaticality – acceptability. Grammaticality concerns I-language, and
indicates whether something is or is not in accordance with a particular (hypothesised) I-language.
Acceptability concerns E-language and hence also the concept of dialect grammar with which I will
operate.
The dichotomy is necessary, because the terms concern two different entities. If a string is
grammatical, it is in accordance with a (hypothesised) I-language. An acceptable string, on the other
hand, need not be in accordance with a (hypothesised) I-language for various reasons (cf. 1a), and
vice versa, an unacceptable string can be in accordance with an I-language (cf. 1b).
(1) a. I går Lisa gikk til skolen (No.)
yesterday Lisa walked to school.DEF
‘Yesterday Lisa walked to school’
b. Derfor skal heldigvis sannsynligvis tydeligvis kanskje allerede Jon gå til skolen
therefore shall luckily probably evidently maybe already John walk to school.DEF’
‘Therefore, John will luckily probably evidently maybe already walk to school’ (No.)
The sentence in (1a) is ungrammatical in Norwegian, based on the hypothesis that the I-languages of
Norwegians contain something that demands the finite verb to appear in second position in
declarative clauses. (1b), on the other hand, is grammatical, based on the hypothesis that Norwegian
I-languages share the feature of enabling iterative instances of adverbs. Still, (1a) may be considered
acceptable in the sense that it is parsable and makes sense, whereas (1b) may be considered as
unacceptable, for instance because such an accumulation of adverbs seems unnatural and
(potentially) makes the sentence less comprehensible.
One may of course object that the distinction between grammaticality and acceptability is
meaningless, on the grounds that the underlying systems that linguists detect, which strictly
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