ABSTRACT
How should we go about finding the truth about a language? The received answer in linguistics gives a very large role to the intuitive linguistic judgments of competent speakers about grammaticality/acceptability,1 ambiguity, coreference, and the like. Thus, Noam Chomsky claims that “linguistics … is characterized by attention to certain kinds of evidence … largely, the judgments of native speakers” (1986, 36). Carson Schütze remarks:
Throughout much of the history of linguistics, judgments of the gramma-ticality/acceptability of sentences (and other linguistic intuitions) have been the major source of evidence in constructing grammars.
(1996, xi)