ACCEPTABILITY & GRAMMATICALITY in Language

Acceptability is the extent to which a
sentence allowed by the rules to be
grammatical is considered permissible
by speakers and hearer; grammaticality
is the extent to which a ‘string’ of
language conforms with a set of given
rules. It is assumed that a native
speaker’s grammar generates grammatical
strings and that the speaker
has the ability to judge a certain string
to be either acceptable or not in her
language. In practice, the two notions
are frequently confounded and speakers
are typically asked to give their
‘grammaticality judgements’ instead
of ‘acceptability judgements’.

satisfactoriness by virtue of conforming to approved standards.