How do linguists deal with losing normal intuition?

Question

Sometimes when I see an example sentence in a linguistics textbook which is supposed to be incorrect or unparseable, I get annoyed because the sentence seems just fine to me. Garden paths aren't the same to me anymore, either, because after studying them I can parse new ones without much problem. For example, most linguists know the famous 'the horse ran past the barn fell'; because of that, 'the boat floated sank' and 'the car turned went straight' are easier to parse. How do linguists maintain a sense of what non-linguists can and can't do? There are always surveys, of course, but a linguist can't just write every sentence on a survey and ask for opinions on every one.

2 more examples. It has been claimed that starting a sentence with multiple 'that' is not possible; but I am just fine with saying

That that she did that was a bad idea was not a good thing to hear.

Perhaps not the best wording, but I would give it a '?', not a '*'. Triple embeddings are fine sometimes, too, if there's an adverb. For example,

The computer the guy your mom saw yesterday bought broke

is fine with me. Am I abnormal, or am I just a linguist?:)

Answer 1

This question suffers from a presupposition failure. In general, linguists don't lose their "normal intuitions", if you assume for example that only experienced linguists are publishing in Linguistic Inquiry — Jon Sprouse and Diogo Almeida have tested a bunch of examples from LI and from Adger's intro syntax book on naive informants using sophisticated methods and have found that the judgments confirm those reported in print. You can get into this literature at this page.

What your discussion points to is something that is often pointed out to students as a cautionary note is that even though you might be able to extract the intended meaning of a given ungrammatical string, it doesn't mean that the string HAS that meaning. We can often understand what a string with an island violation in it is supposed to mean, but that doesn't make it any less ungrammatical. It's facts like these, too, that are often taken to claim that natural language is not identical to the language of thought (whatever that might be).

Answer 2

Contrary to some of the other answerers, I do think "intuition blurring" is a real thing. It's a bit like what happens if you say the word "zebra" a few dozen times in a row and suddenly it stops sounding like an English word and starts sounding like a meaningless noise. If you read dozens of complicated, multiply embedded sentences to yourself, they'll all start sounding equally good or equally funny after a while.

But:

• This isn't a permanent loss of ability. It's more like temporary sensory overload. Going out for a walk or having a conversation that isn't about linguistics usually fixes it in my experience.
• Like Knitter says, it's a bit different from what you're experiencing, because you're looking at processing effects. You can definitely teach yourself to process some "hard" sentences faster than a normal person. But researchers who do language processing tend to work with controlled experiments rather than intuitive data, so it's not a huge issue for them.
• If you need grammaticality data and you really feel like your intuition is hopelessly fuzzy, you can ask your friends. Hang out in a linguistics department long enough and someone will come running out of their office and ask "Hey, you speak English, right? Can you say X?"

Answer 3

Your question is a bit confused because it conflates ungrammaticality with things like garden paths and center embeddings. Both of these (garden paths and center embeddings) are indeed grammatical but are often at first perceived to be ungrammatical because of processing difficulty. In this way, the linguist is in fact more equipped to determine the relevant sentences' grammaticality than your average Joe.

It's also the case that there is a normal amount of variation in intuition, sometimes because of dialect and sometimes just differing acquisition. In other words even two people who grow up in relatively similar circumstances are probably walking around with slightly different grammars of English. (Clearly, in yours, multiple that is fine: in mine, it's not.) Some grammaticality judgments are more rigid than others, of course; everybody would say that a determiner following its noun in English is ungrammatical, but certain ECP violations will sound better or worse depending on the exact sentence and the listener. (And in fact adding words like "yesterday" to a triple embedding does help its parse-ability.) It does not necessarily mean that you are out of touch if people differ in their grammaticality judgments, although you might be an outlier. That is why it's important to check with other real people, even as haphazard as that can be. (Lack of evidence for a construction, for example on the Internet or in a corpus, does not necessarily mean it is ungrammatical, as is the case for triple center embeddings.) Rarely will an argument ride entirely on one judgment, though.