Intuition and Acceptability Judgment:
How important are these criteria for explaining linguistic phenomena?
Based on William Labov’s “When Intuitions Fail” & James D MacCawley’s “Acceptability Judgments”
Disciplines differ considerably in the relative emphasis they place on Data Collection versus Theory Construction. Linguistics, too, has subfields (including Psycholinguistics and Sociolinguistics) in which theories tend to be data-driven and others (notably Generative Grammar) that focus almost exclusively on the formulation of elegant theories, with little attention devoted to careful data collection. Unfortunately, the findings of the experimentalists in Linguistics very rarely play a role in the work of Generative grammarians. Rather, theory development tends to follow its own course, tested only by the unreliable and sometimes malleable intuitions of the theorists themselves.
The need for extending the criteria for explaining linguistic phenomena arises from the Generative grammarians’ reliance on the type of data and the methodology of data collection. Generative grammarians relied on introspective intuitions of well-formedness as their primary source of data elicitation. There is no problem in the use of intuitions as evidence for theoretical claim. But what has been identified as major problems with the use of intuitions in linguistic argumentation are the way they are collected and over-reliance on this type of evidence. Intuitions can be helpful in formulating interesting hypothesis. But when it comes to theorizing linguistic principles, they do not constitute enough evidence. In the article ‘When Intuitions Fail’ Labov has identified some conditions like social pressure, pragmatic opacity, semantic suspension etc. that promote the failure of linguistic intuition.
Generative linguists appear to regard intuitions as primary source of more direct evidence for linguistic competence than other type of data. But the problem with this belief is that knowledge of this competence is not observable. They somehow escape the semantic and pragmatic dimension of language use. By leaving all contextual factors up to the imagination, the use of primary intuitions regarding sentences in isolation is arguably more subject to irrelevant interference than an experimental method that explicitly controls context. In the Generative paradigm data arises from an explicitly metalinguistic context, one in which both the investigator and the informant are thinking about language. The investigator asks question like- ‘Can you say this?’ By contrast, sociolinguists ask- ‘Do you say this?’ Data here is gathered through observation, broadly defined as opposed to data on the basis of intuition/introspection.
Another point that the Sociolinguists relates to the need for an alternative explanation for linguistic data is the approach to variability. In Chomsky’s primary concern of ‘ideal speaker-hearer in homogeneous speech community’, variability is treated as a methodological complication. The perceived periphery of variation is reduced to the distinction of ‘core grammar’ and periphery that segments off language structure from language use. One obvious distinction between treatments of variability within the Generative tradition and the Sociolinguists is that the latter makes reference to linguistic as well as social (extra linguistic) performances.
The orientation of Sociolinguists like Labov in linguistic data is that analysis of language behavior must be based on empirical data. Empirical data represents speaker’s performance, the way they actually use language. According to them, language data should be shared with adjacent fields as Linguistic Anthropology and Conversational Analysis. Anthropological Linguists emphasizes on ethnographic methods of observation in speech communities with a primary focus on speakers as social actors rather than on abstract language pattern. In the second type of data collection (often named as Variation Studies), data have been collected in the context of conversational analysis or interviews in which the subject remains unaware that his/her linguistic usage is the focus of investigation.
In Generative grammar, grammaticality judgment using intuition is linked to competence. A speaker’s competence is the underlying ability to produce and interpret well formed sentences in a given language and to distinguish ill formed strings from the grammatical ones. The specifics of such competence are derived from eliciting intuitions of grammaticality. This link needs to be examined because the elicitation of intuitions is done via judgment of sentences which are clearly affected by performance factors. Some sentences are unacceptable while still grammatical (Colorless green ideas sleep furiously). This can be caused by semantics, processing limitations, context and many other performance factors. In these cases acceptability statements are performance data. According to Chomsky people are incapable of making judgment about grammaticality since they have no access to grammatical knowledge which is internal. The remedy can be sought in the light of intuitions and tests. In any case, performance is striped away.
Native speaker intuitions are often used as competence data. However, obtaining facts about competence is very hard, if not impossible. Data based on sampling peoples’ intuitions can be affected by misunderstanding of grammaticality and acceptability. If the linguist tries to resolve this by using his own intuitions, he/she is at the very real risk of introducing investigator’s bias into the result. Disputes about grammaticality can not be solved without reliable and comparable data. The major drawback with theories based on intuitions is that the results can be unfalsifiable, which is not the case with corpus data.
So Labov’s examination of problems in the use of intuitions either of the analyst or of the individual whose language is being studied, are quite valid. His criticism of the concept of ‘performance’ in Chomskyan terms is also convincing that performance is not only the manifestation of competence in actual language use (as Chomsky has put it), but also the effects of perception and other social factors. Therefore, in conclusion it can be said that no sources of linguistic data that linguists attempt to derive reliable information has a privileged role and need a sharing in understanding general character of grammar believing these to be affected by the social characteristics of human group.
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