In defense of linguists’ introspections. A view from a generativist’s perspective

• Przemysław Tajsner ^[1]
  1. [1] Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań

     Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań

     Poznań, Polonia

     
• Localización: Poznan Studies in Contemporary Linguistics, ISSN 1732-0747, ISSN-e 1897-7499, Vol. 53, Nº. 4, 2017, págs. 593-647
• Idioma: inglés
• Texto completo no disponible (Saber más ...)
• Resumen

  • There is a widespread criticism of the use of linguists’ introspective judgments as data in syntactic generative research. The critics point to a few major inadequacies of this type of data. First of all, data from introspections are claimed to be unreliable and heavily biased, but also simply irrelevant by not representing real utterances produced in real situations. In view of some critics such inadequacies disqualify linguists’ judgments as legitimate data, other authors concede that they remain a viable source of data but should always be cross-checked by other types of evidence which typically include: corpus data, experimental syntax data, and empirical evidence provided by neuro- and psycholinguistic experimentation.

    The aims of the paper are: (i) to raise a point in defense of the validity and practical non-substitutability of introspective data in generative research, (ii) to assess the practical utility of the new types of evidence for generativists’ needs. The way to achieve these goals will be by analyzing how a specific research problem (wh-extractions from embedded indicative clauses in Polish) can be handled with the use of different types of data. The final part will be concerned with the worries and hopes concerning the implementation of the data available from neuro-linguistic experimentation in generative syntactic research.