Grammaticality judgements and linguistic methodology. Schütze, C. Master's thesis, Department of Linguistics, University of Toronto, September, 1991. abstract bibtex My goal is to argue that the absence of a methodology of grammaticality judgements in linguistics constitutes a serious obstacle to meaningful research, and to begin to propose a suitable remedy. Since at least the beginning of the generative paradigm in linguistics, judgements of the grammaticality / acceptability of sentences have been the major source of evidence in constructing grammars, leading some to suggest that theoretical linguists are in fact constructing grammars of linguistic intuitions, which need not be identical with the competence underlying production or comprehension. Also, in this pseudo-experimental procedure of judgement elicitation, there is typically no attempt to impose any of the standard experimental control techniques, and often the only subject is the theorist himself or herself. We provide a survey of how grammaticality judgements are currently used in theoretical syntax, and argue that such uses, in combination with the problems of intuition and experimental design, demand a careful examination of judgements, not as pure sources of data, but as instances of metalinguistic.
Several important issues arise when this view of grammaticality judgements is taken, including what tasks one can use to elicit them, how people might go about giving them, and what they might tell us about linguistic competence. Our central hypothesis is that grammaticality judgements result from interactions between primary language faculties of the mind and general cognitive properties, and crucially do not involve special components dedicated to linguistic intuition. We review the psycholinguistic research that has examined ways in which the judgement process can vary with differences between subjects and with experimental manipulations. Parallels with other cognitive behaviours that our hypothesis predicts are pointed out. We then integrate the substantive and methodological findings in the form of a model of linguistic knowledge that reflects what is known about linguistic intuitions, and a proposed methodology for collecting grammaticality judgements while avoiding the pitfalls of previous work and taking account of the conditions that have been shown to influence them. Finally, we discuss how mainstream linguistic theory might be affected by the growing body of research in this area.
@MastersThesis{ schutze2,
author = {Carson Schütze},
title = {Grammaticality judgements and linguistic methodology},
school = {Department of Linguistics, University of Toronto},
month = {September},
year = {1991},
abstract = {<P> My goal is to argue that the absence of a methodology
of grammaticality judgements in linguistics constitutes a
serious obstacle to meaningful research, and to begin to
propose a suitable remedy. Since at least the beginning of
the generative paradigm in linguistics, judgements of the
grammaticality / acceptability of sentences have been
the major source of evidence in constructing grammars,
leading some to suggest that theoretical linguists are in
fact constructing grammars of linguistic intuitions, which
need not be identical with the competence underlying
production or comprehension. Also, in this
pseudo-experimental procedure of judgement elicitation,
there is typically no attempt to impose any of the standard
experimental control techniques, and often the only subject
is the theorist himself or herself. We provide a survey of
how grammaticality judgements are currently used in
theoretical syntax, and argue that such uses, in
combination with the problems of intuition and experimental
design, demand a careful examination of judgements, not as
pure sources of data, but as instances of
metalinguistic.</p> <P>Several important issues arise when
this view of grammaticality judgements is taken, including
what tasks one can use to elicit them, how people might go
about giving them, and what they might tell us about
linguistic competence. Our central hypothesis is that
grammaticality judgements result from interactions between
primary language faculties of the mind and general
cognitive properties, and crucially do not involve special
components dedicated to linguistic intuition. We review the
psycholinguistic research that has examined ways in which
the judgement process can vary with differences between
subjects and with experimental manipulations. Parallels
with other cognitive behaviours that our hypothesis
predicts are pointed out. We then integrate the substantive
and methodological findings in the form of a model of
linguistic knowledge that reflects what is known about
linguistic intuitions, and a proposed methodology for
collecting grammaticality judgements while avoiding the
pitfalls of previous work and taking account of the
conditions that have been shown to influence them. Finally,
we discuss how mainstream linguistic theory might be
affected by the growing body of research in this area.</p>},
download = {http://ftp.cs.toronto.edu/pub/gh/Schutze-MA-1991.pdf}
}
Downloads: 0
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Since at least the beginning of the generative paradigm in linguistics, judgements of the grammaticality / acceptability of sentences have been the major source of evidence in constructing grammars, leading some to suggest that theoretical linguists are in fact constructing grammars of linguistic intuitions, which need not be identical with the competence underlying production or comprehension. Also, in this pseudo-experimental procedure of judgement elicitation, there is typically no attempt to impose any of the standard experimental control techniques, and often the only subject is the theorist himself or herself. We provide a survey of how grammaticality judgements are currently used in theoretical syntax, and argue that such uses, in combination with the problems of intuition and experimental design, demand a careful examination of judgements, not as pure sources of data, but as instances of metalinguistic.</p> <P>Several important issues arise when this view of grammaticality judgements is taken, including what tasks one can use to elicit them, how people might go about giving them, and what they might tell us about linguistic competence. Our central hypothesis is that grammaticality judgements result from interactions between primary language faculties of the mind and general cognitive properties, and crucially do not involve special components dedicated to linguistic intuition. We review the psycholinguistic research that has examined ways in which the judgement process can vary with differences between subjects and with experimental manipulations. Parallels with other cognitive behaviours that our hypothesis predicts are pointed out. We then integrate the substantive and methodological findings in the form of a model of linguistic knowledge that reflects what is known about linguistic intuitions, and a proposed methodology for collecting grammaticality judgements while avoiding the pitfalls of previous work and taking account of the conditions that have been shown to influence them. 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