with syntactic well-formedness, but both kinds of judgment can help guide our analyses.
You now have enough information to do WBE3 & 4, GPS3 & 4, and CPS4–6.
Judgments as Science?
Many linguists refer to the acceptability judgment task as “drawing upon our native speaker intuitions”. The word “intuition” here is slightly misleading. The last thing that pops into our heads when we hear the term “intuition” is science. Generative grammar has been severely criticized by many for relying on “unscientific” intuitions. But this is based primarily on a misunderstanding of the term. To the layperson, the term “intuition” brings to mind guesses and luck. This usage of the term is certainly standard. When a generative grammarian refers to “intuition”, however, she is using the term to mean “tapping into our subconscious knowledge”. The term “intuition” may have been badly chosen, but in this circumstance, it refers to a real psychological effect. Intuition (as an acceptability judgment) has an entirely scientific basis. It is replicable under strictly controlled experimental conditions (these conditions are rarely applied, but the validity of the task is well established). Other disciplines also use intuitions or judgment tasks. For example, within the study of vision, it has been determined that people can accurately judge differences in light intensity, drawing upon their subconscious knowledge (Bard et al. 1996). To avoid the negative associations with the term intuition, we will use the less loaded term judgment instead.
2. SYNTAX AS A COGNITIVE SCIENCE
Cognitive science is a cover term for a group of disciplines that all have the same goal: describing and explaining human beings’ ability to think (or more particularly, to think about abstract notions like subatomic particles, the possibility of life on other planets or even how many angels can fit on the head of a pin, etc.). One thing that distinguishes us from other animals, even relatively smart ones like chimps and elephants, is our ability to use productive, combinatory syntax. Language plays an important role in how we think about abstract notions, or, at the very least, it appears to be structured in such a way that it allows us to express abstract notions.4 The discipline of linguistics is thus one of the important subdisciplines of cognitive science.5 Sentences are how we get at expressing abstract thought processes, so the study of syntax is an important foundation stone for understanding how we communicate and interact with each other as humans.
3. MODELS OF SYNTAX
One dominant theory of syntax that fits into the cognitive science mold is due to Noam Chomsky and his colleagues, starting in the mid 1950s and continuing to this day. This theory, which has had many different names through its development (Transformational Grammar (TG), Transformational Generative Grammar, Standard Theory, Extended Standard Theory, Government and Binding Theory (GB), Principles and Parameters approach (P&P) and Minimalism (MP)), is often given the blanket name generative grammar. A number of alternate approaches to syntax have also branched off of this research program. These include Lexical-Functional Grammar (LFG) and Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG). These approaches are also considered part of generative grammar; but we won’t cover them extensively in this book. But I have included two additional chapters on these theories in the web resources for this book.6 The particular version of generative grammar that we will mostly look at here is roughly the Principles and Parameters approach, although we will occasionally stray from this into the more recent version called Minimalism.
The underlying thesis of generative grammar is that sentences are generated by a subconscious set of procedures (like computer programs). These procedures are part of our minds (or of our cognitive abilities if you prefer). The goal of syntactic theory is to model these procedures. In other words, we are trying to figure out what we subconsciously know about the syntax of our language.
4. COMPETENCE VS. PERFORMANCE
Consider sentences such as (14). Native speakers will have to read this sentence a couple of times to figure out what it means.
14) # Cotton shirts are made from comes from India.
This kind of sentence (called a garden path sentence) is very hard to understand and process. In this example, the problem is that the intended reading has a noun, cotton, that is modified by a reduced relative clause: (that) shirts are made from. The linear sequence of cotton followed by shirt is ambiguous with the noun phrase cotton shirts. Note that this kind of relative structure is okay in other contexts; compare: That material is the cotton shirts are made from. Sentences like (14) get much easier to understand with really clear pauses (where … is meant to indicate a pause): Cotton … shirts are made from … comes from India. Or by insertion of a that which breaks up the potentially ambiguous cotton shirts sequence: The cotton that shirts are made from comes from India. What is critical about these garden path sentences is that, once one figures out what the intended meaning is, native speakers can identify them as acceptable sentences or at the very least as sentences that have structures that would otherwise be acceptable in them. The problem for us as linguists is that native speakers have a really hard time figuring out what the intended meaning for these sentences is on those first few passes!
A similar situation arises when we have really long sentences with complex syntactic relations. Look at (15). A first reading of this sentence will boggle your average speaker of English. But if you read it a couple of times, it becomes obvious what is intended. In fact, the sentence seems to be structured grammatically.
15) Who did Keisha say Monique claimed that Suzanne seems to have been likely to have kissed?
The reason this sentence is hard to understand is that the question word who is very far away from where it gets interpreted (as the object of kiss), and what lies in between those two points is quite a lot of sophisticated embeddings and structure. But once you get a chance to think about it, it gets better and better as a sentence. The most famous example of this kind of effect is called center embedding. English speakers tolerate a small amount of stacking of relative clauses between subjects and verbs, so (16) – while a little clumsy – is still a good sentence for most speakers of English. We have some cheese, the kind that mice love, and it stinks. If you have trouble with this sentence put a big pause after cheese and before stinks.
16) Cheese mice love stinks.
But no pauses will fix a sentence in which we put another reduced relative right after mice, with the intended meaning that cheese which is loved by mice who are caught by cats is stinky:
17) #Cheese mice cats catch love stinks
This sentence is essentially uninterpretable for English speakers. Chomsky (1965) argued that the problem here is not one of the grammar (as English grammar allows reduced relative clauses after subjects and before verbs), but instead either a constraint on short- term memory7 or a constraint on our mental ability to break apart sentences as we hear them. The English parsing system – that is the system that breaks down sentences into their bits for comprehension – has certain limits, and these limits are distinct from the limits on what it means to be “grammatical”. Sentences (14), (15), and (16) are unacceptable to native speakers in a qualitatively different way than the ones in (13).
The distinction we’ve been looking at here is often known as the competence/performance distinction. When we speak or listen, we are performing the act of creating a piece of language output. This performance can be interrupted by all sorts of extraneous factors: we can be distracted or bored; we can
