Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Theoretical linguistics commonly distinguishes between syntactic ungrammaticality, semantic anomaly, and pragmatic in- felicity, yet there is no established behavioral method for empirically separating these categories. We report two experiments aimed at deriving an empirically grounded typology of unacceptability judgments using multi-dimensional behavioral data. Participants evaluated sentences from a wide range of phenomena against prompts targeting naturalness, truth, interpretability, or contingency. Across both experiments, unsupervised clustering revealed that a stable classification emerges when multiple judgment dimensions are considered and when dimensions which further divide the semantic category are controlled. The resulting typology robustly separates syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic violations, and consistently groups several meaning-driven phenomena, including unlicensed negative polarity items and existential there constructions, with core syntactic violations rather than with semantic or pragmatic ones.