LINGUISTIC INTUITION

Linguistic Intuition

Linguistic Intuition

Introduction

When linguistic intuition originated in the late sixties, early seventies of the previous centuries, it borrowed some important methodological assumptions from the generative tradition in linguistics concerning intuitions, competence, linguistic facts and their connections. These assumptions helped shape a certain methodological practice in which intuitions play a key role. Today one witnesses a substantial theoretical and conceptual diversity, in linguistics in general and increasingly also in semantics. Linguistic intuition established itself as a distinct discipline in the seventies and continued to thrive in the decades that followed. It is still very much a flourishing field, but not longer the dominant paradigm, being in the company of corpus-based investigations, including typological and historical databases, work that extensively uses computational modeling, and so on. With this diversity in theories and approaches comes one in methodologies. And in the light of that it seems apt to reflect on the origins of the methodology of linguistic intuition to see how it compares (Peters, 2007).

While methodological diversity certainly can be regarded as a good thing, it seems much more difficult to say the same of the lack of consensus one may notice on what the proper conceptualization of the core phenomena of semantics is to be. It is one thing to study the same phenomenon with a variety of methods; it is quite something to note that there is no agreement on the basic properties of the phenomenon as such. Natural language meaning nowadays is conceptualized in strikingly different ways, not just in semantic s itself, but also in neighboring disciplines, such as philosophy. This variety not only leads to substantial incomparability of results, it is also unsatisfactory from a conceptual point of view. It is one thing for semanticists to disagree about the right way to go about their business, it is quite another if they don't see eye to eye about what that business is supposed to be. These are quite substantial and complicated issues that need a sustained and multivaried investigation to sort out. The present paper focuses on just one small detail: the original motivation of the 'methodology of intuitions' that has shaped formal semantics. We will do so by drawing mainly on what is stated about this issue in textbooks, encyclopaedic overviews, and lecture notes. The reason for that is the following. What we are interested in is an aspect of the framework of formal semantics, i.e., the set of assumptions and principles from within which formal semanticists work.

If one looks at that work, i.e., the actual research, one will find the framework as such hardly ever discussed. This to be expected as the framework is used there, rather than investigated. It is in introductions to the discipline, such as textbooks, that the framework is discussed explicitly: after all, that is what is at stake when one introduces students to a discipline: teach them the framework. Ideally, of course, such an investigation should be comprehensive and systematic. It should make sure that the material used ...