Usage preferences: The case of the English verbal anaphor do so

In this paper I introduce the notion of Usage Preferences (UPs), which are statistically significantpreferences in usage which can concern any aspect of linguistics. I suggest that multiple violationsof UPs can have additive effects, causing grammatical sentences to be judged as unacceptable. A newjudgment on sentences is proposed, the downarrow (↓) to mark sentences that are taken to begrammatical but unacceptable due to UP violations. I illustrate the idea of UPs on the basis of adiscussion of the English verbal anaphor do so, involving both a corpus analysis and twoacceptability experiments. This leads to a discussion of the relationship between grammaticality andacceptability and to remarks on the methodological importance of taking UPs into account both inlinguistic theorizing and in the construction of acceptability experiments.