ABSTRACT
Native speakers’ intuitions about language have served as the touchstone of linguistic methodology and validation of linguistic hypotheses. The transformational theory of grammar gave judgments of grammatical acceptability a central position. Adult speakers of a language are said to possess not only the ability to produce and understand utterances, but also to judge whether sentences are grammatically well formed and semantically coherent (Gleitman & Gleitman, 1970). The set of sentences judged well formed by the adult serves as an important source of data for linguists engaged in formulating grammatical theories.
