Data and grammar: Means and individuals
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Marcel Den Dikken
Abstract
1. Introduction
In the abstract of his target piece, Featherston states that ‘it is no longer tenable for syntactic theories to be constructed on the evidence of a single person's judgements’. In our commentary, we focus on this issue and on (what we perceive to be) Featherston's claims that individual speakers' judgments are intrinsically unreliable and ‘noisy’, that variation among individuals' judgments should be smoothed out by averaging the judgments of a large pool of informants, and that only this golden mean counts as genuine data. We argue that these claims are at odds with the basic premises of Chomskian linguistics, which is centered on the I-language of the individual speaker/hearer, not the E-language of the speech community. This is not to say that the way generative grammar approaches and accumulates its data is in no need of improvement: we will make some specific recommendations of our own to this end in the last section of our commentary.
© Walter de Gruyter
Articles in the same Issue
- Data in generative grammar: The stick and the carrot
- The wolf in sheep's clothing: Against a new judgement-driven imperialism
- Data and grammar: Means and individuals
- Carrots – perfect as vegetables, but please not as a main dish
- Empirical evidence and theoretical reasoning in generative grammar
- As a matter of facts – comments on Featherston's sticks and carrots
- Commentary on Sam Featherston, ‘Data in generative grammar: The stick and the carrot‘
- Reply
Articles in the same Issue
- Data in generative grammar: The stick and the carrot
- The wolf in sheep's clothing: Against a new judgement-driven imperialism
- Data and grammar: Means and individuals
- Carrots – perfect as vegetables, but please not as a main dish
- Empirical evidence and theoretical reasoning in generative grammar
- As a matter of facts – comments on Featherston's sticks and carrots
- Commentary on Sam Featherston, ‘Data in generative grammar: The stick and the carrot‘
- Reply
