I'm not a linguist, but I took "linguistics 101" in college, and remain interested in the subject.
One aspect of the linguistics field that has baffled me for years is the fact that much of the discourse in it hinges on the ability to distinguish "grammatical" from "non-grammatical" sentences (or fragments thereof), but the details of this discrimination are never made clear.
(I used to think that these classifications were based on surveys of native speakers, but at some point a professional linguist told me that such a procedure is relatively uncommon.)
What happens when experts disagree on whether a particular sentence is grammatical or not?
I don't really expect a satisfying answer to this question here. Rather, I'm looking for pointers to articles that focus on the question of establishing objective/operational criteria for establishing grammaticality. (It's basically two big questions rolled into one: 1) is it important to have an objective criterion for labeling sentences grammatical or ungrammatical; and 2) if the answer of "1" is yes, what should this criterion be?)
(I'd prefer to start exploring this question by reading those authors who think that having such an objective standard would be a good thing.)