FAQ: Do Non-linguists Share the Same Intuition as Linguists?

Abstract

When studying the nature of human language, we frequently ask ourselvesthe following question: Do native speakers agree with our judgmentsof the sentences in question? Many of us have encountered quitea few sentences which linguists report to be grammatical but whichnon-linguists find ungrammatical. Linguists try their best in their languageanalyses to accommodate the native speakers’ intuitions in a systematicway, but these efforts are mostly confined to the so-called‘informal’ method. A natural question that arises is if the naïve nativespeakers would agree to the introspective acceptability judgments. Inorder to properly answer this question, a rigorous and formal methodthat will ensure more systematic and fine-grained results is required. This paper aims to address questions relating to this issue, exclusivelyfocusing on Korean. The present work intends to provide some substantivediscussion on how similar or different linguists’ intuitions are to/from those of the general public estimating grammatical acceptability. Our main experiment was carried out with 138 subjects, using aboutone thousand sentences excerpted from two volumes of a linguisticjournal. We calculated the convergence rate focusing on the pairwisesentences in the data, and the rate was computed to be 84.75%. Thismeasure is somewhat lower than the convergence rate of 95% reportedin Sprouse et al. (2013) for the English data.