1.1.5 What fields of grammar can be analysed with Magnitude Esimation?

Generally, all grammatical phenomena can be examined via Magnitude Estimation. It is especially useful for the comparison of language varieties, e.g. of L1 (British English) and L2 (Advanced Learners' English) language varieties. It is particularly well-suited for distinguishing e.g. semantic from syntactic violations. Though Magnitude Estimation, in essence, gives more insight into an informant's subjective acceptability judgement and provides less information on the actual grammaticality of the respective stimulus, it will, nonetheless, prove a useful method for obtaining introspective grammatically judgements, as acceptability, to some extent, is based on grammaticality. An individual will consider a sentence as acceptable, if the structure seems immediately comprehensible to him/her or natural in discourse, quite independently from its grammatical “correctness”. Thus, relative acceptability judgements of speakers get as close to the so called grammaticality as possible. Generally speaking, Magnitude Estimation “allow[s] the investigation of rare phenomena or negative data, while frequency and stylistic effects appear to be better explored by corpus studies” (Hoffmann, Chapter 5).

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