Linguistic Intuitions. Evidence and Method

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Frontmatter Contents Acknowledgements List of abbreviations The contributors 1 Introduction (Brøcker et al.) PART I. ACCOUNTS OF LINGUISTIC INTUITIONS 2 Linguistic intuitions (Gross) 2.1 Introduction 2.2 Devitt on the "Voice of Competence" and his modest alternative 2.3 Clarifying the options and locating the current proposal 2.4 Candidate monitoring mechanisms 2.5 Error signals and linguistic intuitions 2.6 Error signals as the Voice of Competence 2.7 Other linguistic intuitions, other sources 2.8 Why not intuitions elsewhere Acknowledgments 3 A defense of the Voice of Competence (Rey) 3.1 A "Voice of Competence" 3.1.1 Devitt's skepticism about (non-)standard models 3.1.2 I-languages vs. E-languages 3.1.3 Devitt's alternative proposal 3.2 Grammar, parsing, and perception 3.2.1 Linguistic perception, phonology, and parsing 3.2.2 Non-ceptual content: NCSDs 3.2.3 Having vs. representing linguistic properties 3.2.4 How NCSDs would help 3.3 The evidence 3.3.1 Involuntary phonology 3.3.2 "Meaningless" syntax 3.3.3 Syntax trumping "the message": Garden paths, structural priming, and "slips of the ear" 3.4 Conclusion Note 4 Linguistic intuitions again (Devitt) Part I: VoC and ME 4.1 Introduction 4.2 Voice of Competence 4.3 Modest explanation 4.4 The rejection of VoC Parti II: Gross, Rey, and the defense of VoC 4.5 Background 4.6 Intuitive linguistic usage versus intuitive metalinguistic judgment (= linguistic intuition) 4.7 Rey's bait and switch 4.8 Rey's arguments for VoC 4.9 Gross' argument for VoC 4.10 Conclusion 5 Do generative linguists believe in a Voice of Competence (Brøcker) 5.1 What is the received view? 5.2 Dissecting VoC 5.2.1 Competence or experience with reflecting on sentences? 5.2.2 Acceptability or grammaticality? 5.2.3 Role of mental grammar: Supplying dta or content? 5.2.4 Falibility/direct access? 5.2.5 Mentalist view of grammar? 5.2.6 Implemented structure rules? 5.3 The study 5.3.1 Materials and aprticipants 5.3.2 Results 5.4 The received view assessed 5.5 Appendix Acknowledgments 6 Semantic and syntactic intuitions (Collins) 6.1 Introduction 6.2 Semantics and syntax: Linguistic phenomena 6.3 The distinction between syntactic and semantic intuitions 6.4 Semantic intutions 6.5 Why the attitude view is wrong 6.6 The right view of semantic intuitions 6.7 Syntactic intuitions 6.8 Grammaticality without interpretation 6.9 Interpretations without grammaticality 6.10 Conclusion Acknowledgments 7 Intuitions about meaning, experience, and reliability (Drożdżowicz) 7.1 Introduction 7.2 Intuitive judgments about meaning and their use 7.3 Intuitions and the phenomenology of language understanding: The experience-based strategy 7.4 Intuitive judgments and the monitoring of speech comprehension: The reliabiilist strategy 7.5 Comparing the two strategies 7.5.1 Descriptive adequacy 7.5.2 Addressing recent criticisms 7.5.3 Epistemological assumptions 7.6 Objections and replies 7.7 Concluding remarks Acknowledgments 8 How can we make good use of linguistic intuitions, even if they are not good evidence (Santana) 8.1 The evidential role of linguistic intuitions 8.2 Fruitfulness 8.3 Apt etiology and the ontology of language: The social account 8.4 The etiological defense: Mentalistic 8.5 Reliability 8.6 The non-evidential role of linguistic intuitions 8.7 Conclusion PART II. EXPERIMENTS IN SYNTAX 9 The relevance of introspective data (Newmeyer) 9.1 Introduction 9.2 A critique of "Transitivity, clause structure, and argument structure: Evidence from conversation" 9.3 The grammatical complexity of everyday speech 9.4 Some general issues regarding conversational corpora 9.4.1 Some positive features of conversational corpora 9.4.2 Some negative featurs of conversational corpora 9.5 Concluding remarks Acknowledgments 10 Can we build a grammar on the basis of judgments? (Featherston) 10.1 Introduction 10.2 The quality of armchair judgments 10.2.1 Armchair judgments are less sensitive 10.2.2 Armchair judgments are noisy 10.3 Reassessing SA12 and SSA13 10.3.1 What counts as success? 10.3.2 Do binary oppositions make a grammar? 10.3.3 Do armchair judgments make too many distinctions? 10.4 Towards a better grammar 10.4.1 Crime and punishment 10.4.2 Gathering quantified judgments 10.5 Summing up 10,6 Appendix 11 Acceptability ratings cannot be taken at face value 11.1 Introduction 11.1.1 Motivation 11.1.2 The approach 11.1.3 Roadmap 11.2 Background 11.2.1 What we did 11.2.2 What we found and what we can and cannot conclude 11.2.3 Why we should not be surprised 11.3 Experimental methods 11.3.1 Properties common to all three experiments 11.3.2 Properties unique to individual experiments 11.4 Results 11.4.1 General observations 11.4.2 Case studies 11.5 Conclusions and future directions Acknowledgments 12 A user's view of the validity of acceptability judgments as evidence for syntactic theories (Sprouse) 12.1 Introduction 12.2 A theory of acceptability judgments 12.2.1 What is the goal of syntactic theory? 12.2.2 What is the cognitive source of acceptability judgments 12.2.3 What is the logic that is used to convert acceptability judgments into evidence 12.2.4 What are the criteria for evaluating the success (or failure) of acceptability judgments? 12.3 The emprical properties of acceptability judgments 12.3.1 The reliability of acceptability judgments 12.3.2 Theoretical bias in acceptability judgments 12.3.3 The sensitivity of acceptability judgments 12.4 The choice to continue to use acceptability judgments 12.4.1 The scientific question 12.4.2 The practical question 12.5 Conclusion 13 Linguistic intuitions and the puzzle of gradience (Häussler & Juzek) 13.1 Introduction 13.1.1 The process of community agreement and acceptability judgment tasks 13.1.2 Acceptability and grammaticality 13.2 Linguistic intuitions 13.2.1 Acceptability intuitions 13.2.2 Source intuitions 13.2.3 Grammatical reasoning 13.2.4 A proposal concerning diacritics 13.3 Our experiments 13.3.1 Experiment 1: A differnent quality of gradience 13.3.2 Preliminary discussion 13.3.3 Experiment 2: Scale effects 13.4 The puzzle of gradience 13.4.1 Extra-grammatical factors 13.5 Concluding remarks Acknowledgments 14 Experiments in syntax and philosophy (Schindler & Brøcker) 14.1 Introduction 14.2 Experimental syntax 14.3 Is XSyn methodoligcally superior? 14.3.1 Better reliability of the data gathered through XSyn? 13.4.2 Better validity through XSyn? 14.3.3 Richer data through XSyn? 14.3.4 Is XSyn more scientific? 14.4 Experimental philosophy: Common motivations 14.5 Lessons for XPhi from XSyn 14.5.1 Better reliability of data gathered by XPhi? 14.5.2 Better validity of XPhi? 14.5.3 Richer data through XPhi? 14.5.4 Is XPhi more scientific? 14.6 Conclusion Acknowledgments References Index