Practice question · True or false
Grammaticality judgements are uncontroversial as evidence because they report competence directly.
Hints
- Ask what a speaker is doing when they produce a judgement.
- Producing a judgement is itself an act of performance.
Show the answer
False
Why
False, and the objection is a serious one. Corpus and usage-based linguists point out that a judgement about an invented sentence is itself something the speaker does, subject to fatigue, priming and prescriptive training. Judgements remain widely used; "uncontroversial" is what they are not.
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