Assessing introspective linguistic judgments quantitatively: the case of The Syntax of Chinese
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Assessing introspective linguistic judgments quantitatively: the case of The Syntax of Chinese Zhong Chen1 · Yuhang Xu2 · Zhiguo Xie3 Received: 4 October 2019 / Accepted: 22 April 2020 © Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract The informal judgments of the well-formedness of phrases and sentences have long been used as the primary data source for syntacticians. In recent years, the reliability of data based on linguists’ introspective intuitions is increasingly subject to scrutiny. Although a number of studies were able to replicate a vast majority of English judgments published in a textbook and in peer-reviewed journal articles, the status of data in many non-English languages has yet to be experimentally examined. In this work, we employed formal quantitative methods to evaluate the reliability of judgments in the widely used textbook, The Syntax of Chinese (Huang et al. 2009). We first assessed example sentences based on the acceptability ratings from 148 native Mandarin Chinese speakers. Using a target forced-choice task, we further explored the potentially problematic sentence pairs. Results of the two experiments suggest an eminently successful replication of judgments in the book: out of the 557 data samples tested, only five sentence pairs require further investigation. This large-scale study represents the first attempt to replicate the judgments in a non-English syntax textbook, in hopes to bridge the gap between the informal data-collection in Chinese linguistic research and the protocols of experimental cognitive science. Keywords Acceptability judgments · Reliability · Experimental syntax · Chinese
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Zhong Chen [email protected] Yuhang Xu [email protected] Zhiguo Xie [email protected]
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Department of Modern Languages and Cultures, Rochester Institute of Technology, Rochester, USA
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Department of Linguistics, University of Rochester, Rochester, USA
3
Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures, The Ohio State University, Columbus, USA
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Z. Chen et al.
1 Introduction Over the past 50 years, the empirical base of forming syntactic theories has largely relied on acceptability judgments (Chomsky 1965; Schütze 1996). Sentences are constructed, compared, and discussed with respect to whether they are grammatically acceptable. The data collection process, however, is often introspective and informal, which reflects the judgments of only the researcher(s) and occasionally feedback from colleagues and a small number of “naïve” speakers. Researchers have long been asking questions about the grammaticality–acceptablility relationship and the reliance on individual syntacticians’ intuition as opposed to consulting native speakers of the target language (Langendoen et al. 1973; Levelt et al. 1977; Labov 1978; Newmeyer 1983; Birdsong 1989; Schütze 1996; Edelman and Christiansen 2003, among others). In recent years, the reliability of judgments and the syntactic theories which they support are increasingly subject to scrutiny (e.g. Edelman and Christiansen 2003; Gibson and Fedorenko 2010; Gibson et
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