The relevance of introspective data

Abstract

Introspective judgments of acceptability have long been criticized for being both inconsistent and irrelevant. A number of publications have addressed the former issue and have argued that such judgments, carefully collected, are generally consistent. It remains the case, however, that many linguists question whether introspective data are or can be relevant to the construction of the correct theory of language. In the view of many usage-based grammarians, the sentences made up by analysts rather than real-life utterances lead inevitably to the supposedly unrealistic and complex abstract structures posited by generative grammarians. The chapter challenges that view. Appealing to a 170 MB corpus of conversational English, it argues that introspective data and conversational data do not lead to different conclusions about the nature of linguistic theory.