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Those example sentences linguists come up with are actually very reliable. Here's Sprouse & Almeida. 2012. Assessing the reliability of textbook data in syntax:
by ar-jan 8y ago
Those example sentences linguists come up with are actually very reliable. Here's Sprouse & Almeida. 2012. Assessing the reliability of textbook data in syntax: Adger's Core Syntax. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0022226712000011 https://doi.org/10.1017/S0022226712000011
" [...] This suggests that even under the (likely unwarranted) assumption that the discrepant results are all false positives that have found their way into the syntactic literature due to the shortcomings of traditional methods, the minimum replication rate of these 469 data points is 98%."
98% replicability!! Compare that with psychology.
- mpweiher 8y agoInteresting result, but seems to answer a different question: do naive native speakers find those examples acceptable? The first problem is that asking people how they speak or what is acceptable does not accurately represent how they actually speak when not observed/asked: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observer%27s_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observer%27s_paradox The second problem is that, even if the first isn't an issue, the most this can demonstrate is that linguistic example sentences are a subset of actual language.
- ar-jan 8y agoThat's a fair point, but then the question is what should the question be? There are many subfields and disciplines of linguistics all of which are imo fascinating. In theoretical/generative linguistics the distinction between acceptability and performance is relevant, and acceptability seems to be a very robust measure.