Linguistic Intuition and Calibration

A traditional source of evidence in linguistics is intuition, the judgments of competent speakers of a language. Patterns in the intuitions motivate theoretical developments, and hypotheses are tested against those intuitions. In much of the literature on intuitions in linguistics, 'intuition' is used synonymously with 'grammaticality judgment,' which in turn is a (widely-recognized) misnomer for 'acceptability judgment.' Acceptability judgments are a paradigmatic type of intuition, consider the following examples from discussions of binding theory: (1) a. Jim1 reasoned that he1 got the promotion. b. *He1 reasoned that Jim1 got the promotion. In these sentences, the star (*) affixed to the front of (1b) indicates that the sentence is judged to be unacceptable (given that 'he' and 'Jim' co-refer, as indicated by the subscripts). On the basis of this judgment, the sentence is inferred to be ungrammatical (and indeed, the star is at times interpreted as if it represents this further claim). Whether