Speaker intuitions
Native speakers of any given human language will have strong intuitions about what combinations of sounds or words are possible in their language, and which interpretations can be paired with which combinations. For example, native speakers of English will agree that example (6), repeated here, is a well-formed sentence, and that it may have two possible meanings:
They will also agree that (7) and (8), repeated here, are both well-formed sentences, but that each has only one possible meaning:
Finally, and perhaps most strikingly, speakers will agree that all of the follow ing examples are impossible in English:
Facts like these show that language, and speakers’ intuitions about language, can be seen as a ‘window’ to the underlying system. On the basis of the pat terns that emerge from the description of language, linguists can begin to build theoretical ‘models’ of language. A model of language is a set of statements that is designed to capture everything we know about this hidden cognitive system in a way that is principled, based on empirical evidence and psychologically plausible.
