Differences between linguists and nonlinguists in intuitions of grammaticality-acceptability

Modern transformational grammarians, using only their own intuitions as the basic data for rule construction, may not be analyzing the common, natural language of the speech community. Do native speakers share the intuitions of linguists? One hundred and fifty exemplar sentences from 6 linguists' articles were presented to 43 linguistically naive and 22 linguistically nonnaive native speakers. Native speakers agreed among themselves as to the acceptability or unacceptability of 80% of the sentences. Subjects shared intuitions with linguists in only a half of the exemplars. It is suggested that linguists consult nonlinguists as to the acceptability of exemplars, which illustrate the rules proposed, as a check that those rules reflect the formal structure of the common language being described.

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