Grammaticality and Acceptability in the Urhobo Language

Abstract

This paper examines grammaticality and acceptability in the Ulrhobo language. Grammaticality has to do with well formedness of syntactic structures; grammaticality is usually considered as the structure of sentences and the order in which they are combined together to form sentences. A sentence can conform to the syntactic rule if it is constructed in a grammatical form. The study adopts the truth conditioning theory of meaning as a theoretical framework. The truth conditioning theory of meaning deals with the grammaticality and acceptability of sentence structures. The study reviews that the basic grammar of the Urhobo language conforms to the standard paradigm of a language structure such as Qualifier + Noun + verb + modifier + Adjective, etc and that when these sentences are not properly ordered according to the grammatical rules of the Urhobo language, they are systematically deformed (by inversion, suppression or addition of non-terminal elements in its production rules) to produce a series of grammars generating grammatical, semantically acceptable, semi-grammatical or ungrammatical sentences. It also reviewed that the sentence structures of the Urhobo language conform with the constraints of a sentence structure rule and are, therefore, rule, accepted, while others that don’t are, therefore, rule unaccepted. The study further reveals that a sentence must have a string of words that conform to the rule of syntax, such as subject and predicate, which form the basis of grammaticality or acceptability of the sentence. Finally, the study reveals that grammaticality and acceptability can occur in both written and spoken language. It is also a finding that acceptability is more basic rather than grammaticality since all hearers of the Urhobo language can understand or interpret what the speakers convey in a given structure of the language.