LINGUIST List 5.1301

Mon 14 Nov 1994

Sum: Native speaker intuitions

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1. Marilyn Silva, Sum: Native Speaker Intuitions

Several weeks ago I posted a question about the current status
of "native speaker intutions" in our discipline. In particular, I
wondered about the problems posed by variations in the
interpretation of sentences. Such variations sometimes become
apparent when I teach "Modern English Grammar," a course that
treats English syntax in nonformal, surface-structure terms and
primarily is aimed at nonlinguists. In my post, I mentioned two
sentences that gave rise to varying intuitions, but I will discuss
in this summary only the first, viz., "John asked Mary to leave,"
which one student claimed was ambiguous between the reading
where Mary would do the leaving and that in which John would do
the leaving. She claimed she got this second reading by thinking
something like "John asked to leave," which clearly means that
John would leave, and WHO he asked was Mary.

Before I continue this discussion, I must point out that in my
class I did not solicit interpretations of this sentence, nor did
I expect any challenges to my reading, which I essentially
presupposed, assuming--erroneously--that all my students saw
it as I did. Perhaps I did not make this point clear in my posting
to this List, since several respondents implied that problems
will arise when we solicit interpretations or judgments, or
indeed if we do "generative" grammar at all. However, though my
approach to syntax in this course is not generative and I did not
request an interpretation for this sentence, students sometimes
will challenge my assumptions about meaning. If the students
involved were merely contentious, then I would chalk up such
differences to personality and continue unabashed. But describing
my students as contentious in this case would certainly be a
distortion. Their observations arose, it seems to me, out of a
genuine desire to come to grips with the issue.

Several respondents pointed out that recent research in syntax
has had to deal with the thorny issue of interpretation. Georgia
Green reports that one of her students, Tim Williams, "has just
completed a dissertation on infinitive complements, and one of
the major points is that, as illustrated by the reaction to . . .
'John asked Mary to leave,' the subject of the infinitive in so-
called Equi constructions is not syntactically fixed. (His
dissertation deals with articulating the pragmatic principles
that govern the interpretation, and misled us for so long into
thinking that the interpretation was syntactically fixed.)"

Both Dan Alford and Dale Russell noted that the interpretation
of a sentence such as "John asked Mary to leave" as meaning
"John asked Mary's permission to leave" could be enhanced if
there were a power/status differential between the two NPs.
Dale wrote that "real-world stuff makes us lean toward one
[reading] or the other to the point where we're not even aware
of the potential ambiguity." He provides an example of such
real-world stuff in "Johnny asked the teacher to go get a drink
of water," a sentence in which it is far easier to read the
subject of the sentence as also being the subject of the
infinitive. He points out that "we've only changed lexical items,
made the first object someone who is likely to be in a position
to grant permission, and the subject of the sentence someone
who is likely to want to perform the action of the infinitival."

Following this line of inquiry, Tony Bex offers an enlightening
pair of examples:

[1] The teacher asked the child to leave the room.
[2] The child asked the teacher to leave the room.

He contends that these sentences "are typically interpreted
pragmatically taking into account perceived authority; i.e.,
in [1] the teacher TELLS the child to leave; in [2] the child asks
WHETHER s/he can leave." In either case, it is likely that it is
the child who will be leaving. I should note that this pair of
examples proved to be particularly amusing and illuminating
to my students--especially to those who, like me, found the
'permission' reading peculiar. Tony's examples demonstrated
to them to what extent pragmatic knowledge plays a part in
interpretation.

The responses to the infinitive problem constituted only one of
several lines pursued by my respondents. Some, who like me
teach undergraduate syntax courses, commented on the difficulty
a few students have with even rudimentary syntactic analysis
(e.g., the subject/predicate split, often claimed to be a universal
strategy among English speakers). Others commented on the
familiar problem of intuition fatigue (which could be summed
up as "say a weird string 50 times and it sounds good; say a
good string 50 times and it sounds weird"). And still others took
issue with the entire enterprise of a separate syntax, particularly
of the generative variety, though by now it should be clear that
any decontextualized sentence has the potential to give rise to
more than one intepretation. In fact this very idea is discussed
in Carson Schutze's forthcoming book, _The Empirical Base of
Linguistics: Grammaticality Judgments and Linguistic
Methodology_, to be published by University of Chicago Press in
1995. In his post to me, Carson contends that judgment data "can
provide real, useful data, if we would just be more systematical
and careful about how we collect them. Of course speakers will
differ on certain points . . . . the interesting question is whether
the range of variation we find is systematically constrained in
ways that interesting theories of grammar can explain."

Finally, one last thread was contributed by Larry Hutchinson, who
mentioned the history of introspection in this century: "In point of
fact, the first psychology labs had been set up by introspectionists,
but they were completely taken over by behaviorists and
introspection dumped . . . . Linguists in the 50's were pretty much
under the sway of behaviorists, and emotionally against
introspectionism . . . . But then the enthusiasm generated by
Chomsky just swept away the behaviorist viewpoint, and along
with it the contempt for the unguided use of speaker opinions."

I thank all of my respondents (cited below) for their insightful
and helpful remarks. I hope I have not distorted their positions
in any serious way.

Marilyn Silva

Respondents: Dan Alford, Mark Arnold, Laurie Bauer, Kirk Belnap,
Tony Bex, Scott DeLancey, Jakob Dempsey, Susan Ervin-Tripp,
Georgia Green, Larry Hutchinson, Ingo Plag, Jim Jewett,
Jules Levin, Chris Li, Steve Matthews, Dan Maxwell, Micheal Palmer,
Jeanmarie Rouhier, Dale Russell, Mary Ellen Ryder, Carson Schutze,
Linda Shockey, Jacques Steyn, and one respondent who prefers to
remain anonymous