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From: rickw@eskimo.com (Richard Wojcik)
Subject: Re: Q: How's un/grammaticality DEFINED?
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References: <3lrdvp$15u@decaxp.harvard.edu> <smryanD6Iz63.AFI@netcom.com> <3m4kgt$mc3@decaxp.harvard.edu>
Date: Sat, 8 Apr 1995 15:13:49 GMT
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In article <3m4kgt$mc3@decaxp.harvard.edu>,
Zorro  <berriz@husc.harvard.edu> wrote:
>smryan@netcom.com (Pastor Rod Flash) writes:
>
>>Chomsky defined it in terms of a competent speaker. If such a speaker
>>says it grammatical, it is. If not, it's not. There is also a
>>questionable category: some speakers accept, some don't, a speaker
>>might never generate the phrase but can still understand it.
>
>I know, I know, but this is all a theoretical construct.  What about
>experimental work?  Don't linguists ever gather *data* from the
>field??  What would then be the *operational* definition of
>grammaticality?  Or is all of modern linguistics more or less a
>thought experiment?

Ok, I'll try again.  You miss the point.  Laymen use the term "grammatical"
conventionally to express a generalization about standard usage in a
language community.  Generative linguists use it in a different way--to
make a point about the psychological grammar that an individual ("ideal" or
otherwise) might possess for a language.  Often, it does not matter whether
the majority of speakers agree with a grammatical intuition, because the
objective of the linguist is to describe the behavior of the grammar, not
the speech community.  You are confusing the conventional meaning of
"grammatical" with a technical meaning.

Do linguists gather *data* from the field?  Of course they do, but only
when they are interested in making generalizations about speech
communities.  I am not going to say that linguists always keep the
difference between the psychological and the social perfectly distinct, but
nothing in their theories prevents them from doing so.

>(Why this strange feeling I just stepped into a mess?  :)   )

(Why this strange feeling that you did so intentionally?  :) )
-- 
Rick Wojcik  rickw@eskimo.com     Seattle (for locals: Bellevue), WA
             http://www.eskimo.com/~rickw/
