Syntactic and semantic data: replication results

Abstract

Substantially all recent work in syntax and semantics is based on the linguist's introspective judgments of meaning and grammaticality. As is well known (cf. Labov 1972: 197ff.), other linguists often disagree with the original judgments; and such disagreements are, if anything, more common on examples of major theoretical importance. These disagreements cast doubt on introspection as a primary method for data collection, which in turn casts doubt on all the recent theoretical work using this methodology. It is therefore a crucial problem to develop an improved methodology to control or replace the use of the linguist's introspection.