Abstract
Several recent critiques have claimed that the empirical foundations of generative linguistics are weak due to the reliance on informally gathered grammaticality judgments drawn from the intuitions of the researcher. Phillips (In: Japanese/Korean linguistics, vol. 17, 2009) argued i.a. that, in order for there to be a theoretical crisis, two criteria should be fulfilled, namely (i) intuitive judgments have led to generalizations that are widely accepted yet bogus, and (ii) misleading judgments form the basis of important theoretical claims or debates. Furthermore Phillips claimed that (i, ii) have not been fulfilled. I argue that (i, ii) have in fact been satisfied because Chomsky’s (Q. Prog. Rep.—Mass. Inst. Technol., Res. Lab. Electron. 41:64–65, 1956; Syntactic structures. Mouton, The Hague, 1957) intuition-based claim that English is not a finite-state language is demonstrably false.
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Karlsson, F. (2012). Is There a Crisis in Generative Linguistics?. In: Santos, D., Lindén, K., Ng’ang’a, W. (eds) Shall We Play the Festschrift Game?. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-30773-7_1
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