is that a sentence is either grammatical or ungrammatical. Many modern linguists, including Sprouse, support this idea.

Acceptability judgments, on the other hand, fall in a continuous spectrum. Sentences may either be clearly acceptable or clearly unacceptable, but there are also sentences that are partially acceptable. Hence, according to Sprouse, the difference between grammaticality and acceptability is that grammatical knowledge is categorical, but acceptability is a gradient scale.

Linguists may use words, numbers, or typographical

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