Relying on introspection2 as the sole source of data has been common practice amongst generative grammarians at least since the 1960s, much under the influence of Chomsky, who clearly advocated its value and legitimacy in the study of linguistic
2By ‘introspection’ I mean the linguist’s own sentence acceptability judgments, as opposed to judgments given by informants (see section 4.5).
Methods and material 55 competence (see, e.g., Chomsky 1965, pp. 18–20). The use of introspective data has also been strongly defended in more recent times, e.g. by Newmeyer (1983, especially chapter 2), who goes as far as claiming that introspection is “the most reliable source of data” (p. 50, his italics) and that “there does not exist at present an obvious replacement for introspective data” (p. 63).
There are, however, numerous hazards associated with the use of introspection as a method in linguistic research. It has been criticized from many quarters (e.g.
Labov 1972, 1975, 1996; Sampson 2001), including from within the generative camp itself: Schütze (1996) stresses the low reliability of data from acceptability judgments in general, much due to a lack of standardized methodological techniques typical of psychological experiments, and points out that “[p]erhaps worst of all, often the only subject in these pseudoexperiments is none other than the theorist himself”
(p. 4). Schütze agrees with Labov in his “painfully obvious conclusion—obvious at least to those outside linguistics—that linguists cannot continue to produce theory and data at the same time” (Labov 1972, p. 199), and raises the legitimate question: “What is to stop linguists from (knowingly or unknowingly) manipulating the introspection process to substantiate their own theories?” (Schütze 1996, p. 5) Later in the same work Schütze goes to greater lengths to achieve methodological rigor, and suggests that “... the investigating linguists’ own intuitions are never counted as evidence, even if their data have not been disputed” (1996, p. 200, his italics).
Similar objections are found in Johannessen (2003, p. 139), who regards intro-spection as highly problematic from a scientific point of view. She lists six points on which the method fails, namely (i) that it is impossible for other researchers to verify the data; (ii) it is pointless to argue against the accuracy of the data as, strictly speaking, it is the researcher’s own idiolect that is their source; (iii) it is hard to predict to what degree hypotheses and theories built on introspective data may be generally applicable; (iv) researchers tend to be biased in their evaluation of the data due to their theoretical standpoint; (v) many people (even linguists) have a distorted conception of their own actual language usage; (vi) due to the lack of external input, one may overlook other relevant data.
I will, to the extent possible, refrain from using myself as an informant and my own intuitions as the sole source of data in the present work. But I will,
56 Chapter 4
despite the above-mentioned shortcomings, still maintain that my being born and reared in Stavanger—and as such a native speaker of the dialect—has given me important qualifications when it comes to acquaintance with existent word order phenomena in the Rogaland dialects. My intuitions have thus served as clues as to what kind of constructions to search for, in corpora and elsewhere, and even as a means of control, against which to compare, when encountering data in the corpus, making sure they are not obvious speech errors, cut-off utterances etc. All in all, I have benefited from a favorable combination of myself as a linguist on the one hand, and as a native dialect speaker on the other, when searching for data.
Although the data are in principle accessible to all, simply knowing what to look for, or what may be of syntactic interest, is not necessarily obvious to non-native speakers or non-linguists. In this regard introspection is a useful tool, at least as an idea-sparking device. This use is in agreement with Schütze (1996), who acknowledges that “[o]f course, linguists’ intuitions will always be used to inspire theoretical work; I merely wish to exclude them from the verification of data” (p.
200, n.21).
In addition to the above use, I will turn to my own intuitions for acceptability judgments on some occasions in the following chapters. I will claim that some sentences are acceptable and some are not, even though no judgments other than mine are available. This is almost inevitable when it comes to specific, perhaps infrequent, constructions that are not contained within any corpus, and particularly constructions that, for whatever reasons, have not been tested on any informants (i.e. are not covered by the Nordic Syntactic Judgment Database or my own questionnaires, see sections 4.5.1 and 4.5.2). However, this mostly applies to ill-formed examples with negative judgments of the uncontroversial sort, e.g. that postverbal subjects are disallowed in om-questions (see section 6.2) and in a subset ofwh-questions (see section 5.3)—constructions that are neither found nor expected to be found in any corpus, no matter its size. So in those cases where a sentence is starred out or marked as dubious, and no negative data from the Nordic Syntactic Judgment Database or my own questionnaires are explicitly referred to, the judgment is my own. Admittedly, this occasional reliance on introspective data is a potential methodological weakness, although not a major one. By and large, my own judgments do not constitute a major part of the empirical basis.
Methods and material 57