It is well-known that the acceptability judgments at the core of current syntactic theories are continuous. However, an open debate is whether the source of such gradience is situated in the grammar itself, or can be derived from extra-grammatical factors. In this paper, we propose the use of a top-down parser for Minimalist grammars (Stabler, 2013; Kobele et al., 2013; Graf et al., 2017), as a formal model of how gradient acceptability can arise from categorical grammars. As a test case, we target the acceptability judgments for island effects collected by Sprouse et al. (2012a)
