Good French isn't always best. Acceptability and linguistic prescriptivism

Acceptability judgments are one of the major tools for (psycho)linguists to assess speakers’ preferences for specific utterances in a given language, shedding light on the grammar of the language under study. However, it is well known that factors that are not related to grammaticality, such as frequency of exposure, cognitive constraints, and others, can influence the perceived acceptability of an utterance. We will use the system of wh-interrogatives in French as an example to study the impact of linguistic norms on what is considered “good” French. In three experiments, we show that adult L1 French speakers have internalized the dichotomy between variants that are considered “good French”, according to the norms, and those that are suited to more informal daily life situations. Speakers can express these differences when given the appropriate tools, but not with a unique general acceptability scale. In line with previous work, we argue that acceptability judgments are a useful task, but that they need to be refined to account for sociolinguistic factors that constrain speakers’ assessments (i.e., linguistic norms, but also speaker group and formality of the context of interaction).