3.1.1 Tables

Table 20 (cf. Study Matrix) illustrates the data input, i.e. the individual judgements of all informants by-sentence and the respective maximum value given. As the results of the BE group of informants were available only in form of a summary (cf. British Informants' Acceptability Judgements), the respective results could not be assigned to individual informants. However, this did not affect the calculation as we focused on means per group and sentence. The data input was then normalized by rule of three to make the results comparable and interpretable by percentage (cf. Table 4). Table 4 exposes the group means per sentence in the order of their appearance. Table 5 shows the rating of the sentences per group.

Table 4

Table 5

It becomes evident that sentences 3, 17, and 18 received the highest acceptability judgements by all three groups of informants. Further, it has to be noticed that the reference sentence 0, which is a grammatically correct sentence, was not rated the most acceptable sentence by any of the groups, though it was judged as acceptable. The highest rating for the reference sentence 0 was given by the AE informants (91.7%) followed by the BE informants (90%) and the ALE (88.4%).

AE informants considered sentence 3 (96.7%) to be the most acceptable one, while the ALE speakers judged sentence 7 (94.3%) to be the most exemplary item and the BE subjects gave sentence 18 the highest acceptability rating (100%). Generally, almost all experimental stimuli were rated as acceptable (i.e. a rating of at least 50%), while the ungrammatical fillers were identified as unacceptable (i.e. a rating of less than 50%; cf. rating of ungrammatical filler sentences such as 11 and 8.). Strikingly, the ungrammatical filler sentences 1 and 5, which were given low ratings by both groups of native speaking informants, were considered to be quite acceptable by the ALE to a relatively high degree (41.2%). It seems as if the informants did not notice or rate the lack of either a personal pronoun or a reflexive pronoun in concordance with the third person female subject in number and gender (either She troubles me with grieves or She troubles herself with grieves) as grammatically unacceptable.

Similarly irritating are the estimation results of sentence 20 (He troubles very little with affairs of state.). AE informants rated this experimental stimulus with a percentage of 43.3, which equals their rating of sentence 2 (Robin washed itself.). Sentence 2, however, is an ungrammatical filler sentence, whereas sentence 20 as an experimental stimulus is taken from authentic sources (from American websites) which prove the appearance and evident acceptability of this linguistic item among native speakers of American English. As one distorting factor, it has to be kept in mind that the group of AE informants consisted of three individuals only, which is probably the reason why a valid interpretation of the results becomes problematic. Nonetheless, the mini-study shows the trend that the ALE (61.3%) and the BE informants (56.4%) found sentence 20 to be grammatically acceptable.

Sentence 8, an ungrammatical filler sentence, is rated lowest by both the BE informants (10.8%) and the ALE (36.9%) and second lowest by the AE informants (20%).

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