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From: alderson@netcom.com (Richard M. Alderson III)
Subject: Re: Q: How's un/grammaticality DEFINED?
In-Reply-To: Zorro's message of 8 Apr 1995 00:14:21 GMT
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Date: Sat, 8 Apr 1995 01:08:50 GMT
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In article <3m4kgt$mc3@decaxp.harvard.edu> Zorro <berriz@husc.harvard.edu>
writes:

>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?

In this context, how do you define "experimental work"?  What do you mean by
"from the field"?  What gains do you get from you "operational definition" with
respect to what you call "a thought experiment"?  What do you *expect* to get
from it?

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

Because you did?

There is a basis for using introspective judgments in certain studies, for
example in grammaticality judgments:  It can be shown that most speakers of a
language will respond to questions of whether something sounds "right" or
"wrong" to them.  Thus, as the speaker of a language under investigation, the
judgments of the investigator are as valid as those of any other speaker.

Arguments against the results of such studies based on strawmen such as "People
don't usually speak in complete sentences" miss the point that while people may
indeed not speak in complete sentences, they *can* and *do* understand such,
and further can expand any short (non-sentential) utterance into a complete
sentence if asked to do so.

Thus the introspective study of complete sentences, while not the totality of
linguistics, is indeed a respectable part therof.  One I don't usually partici-
pate in, so I can be called a more or less neutral party.
-- 
Rich Alderson   You know the sort of thing that you can find in any dictionary
                of a strange language, and which so excites the amateur philo-
                logists, itching to derive one tongue from another that they
                know better: a word that is nearly the same in form and meaning
                as the corresponding word in English, or Latin, or Hebrew, or
                what not.
                                                --J. R. R. Tolkien,
alderson@netcom.com                               _The Notion Club Papers_
