Abstract Leonie Cornips

Standardization of syntactic elicitation tasks, speakers of dialects and why acceptability judgments do not provide direct access to speakers' linguistic competence.

The aim of this course is to evaluate a number of factors why acceptability judgments from non-linguists do not provide direct access to speakers' linguistic competence. In the first part of the course, we will discuss major reasons why a native speaker may reject structures on other grounds than those are relevant to the researcher. We will for instance show that various acceptability tasks have 'unwanted' effects. Furthermore, the unreliability of native speaker intuitions will also be dealt with by notions such as prescriptive norms, implicit and explicit knowledge, relation between standard variety and dialects, the differences between oral and written elicitation, more of less difficult structures to elicit and which subject is a good subject. It is shown that elicitation data are useful for every syntactic analysis once the native speaker intuitions and tasks-effects are interpreted carefully.
In the second part of the course, we will discuss in more detail two case studies showing that (i) different elicitation tasks bring about different judgments and (2) native speakers of local dialects may accept more than one construction which is not predicted by formal theories revealing syntactic variation along geographical and/or social dimensions.


References

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