Empirical evidence and theoretical reasoning in generative grammar

Abstract

In his paper “Data in generative grammar: the stick and the carrot”, Sam Featherston offers an interesting plea for a change in linguistic methodology. He criticizes the “inadequate praxis” of the majority of generative linguists to use their own intuitive judgments as evidence for their syntactic hypotheses. He claims that with this bad scientific practice, which has not changed in the thirty years after Greenbaum's (1977) harsh criticism of “dubious” empirical reasoning, generative linguists are producing unsatisfactory work and are thus undermining the reputation of syntax. On the basis of their introspective judgments, they have stated wrong empirical generalizations and, as a consequence, suggested inadequate theoretical accounts. As an alternative for the better he postulates “that theory building requires a better basis than this” and calls upon generative linguists to take more care with their data and to subject their theoretical claims to objective empirical tests such as acceptability rating experiments which are carried out with multiple informants, permit multiple degrees of well-formedness, and use multiple lexical variants of the structures to be checked. He illustrates the benefits of this empirical strategy with experiments on object-related anaphors in German as well as on that-trace and superiority effects in German, and thereby demonstrates how syntacticians have been led astray by their intuitive judgments.