R

Radical Pragmatics Theories of grammar and semantics posit sets of rules (or principles) which allow for the construction of natural language sentences and for their compositional interpretation. These theories are broadly taken to be empirical theories and hence are subject to (dis-)confirmation given data from language users. In particular, it is incumbent on a theory of grammar to explain our judgements of acceptability of sentence forms. For example, the theory should explain why informants regularly attest to the ill-formedness of (1) and to the well-formedness of (2):

(1) John thinks Mary likes himself. (2) John thinks Mary likes him.