Grammaticality judgements, intuitions and corpora 175-015 Syntax

The syntactician’s toolkit relies heavily on grammaticality judgements. Tests determining the structure of language often involve transforming a language fragment and then checking the grammaticality of the result. For example, distributional tests for constituency. However, determining grammaticality is not always a straightforward task. Tests for grammaticality have been characterized by two forms of evidence used. Native speaker intuitions have been the preferred evidence in the past fifty years of syntactic inquiry. On the other hand, frequency data obtained from corpora have developed an increased support base in recent times. In this essay, I review native speaker intuitions and corpus derived frequencies and their appropriateness as data for grammaticality testing. Finally considering how they may be used together to form a stronger empirical base of evidence for grammaticality.