查看文章

The prevalent method in theoretical syntax and semantics research involves obtaining a judgment of the acceptability of a sentence/meaning pair, typically by just the author of the paper, sometimes with feedback from colleagues. The weakness of the traditional non‐quantitative single‐sentence/single‐participant methodology, along with the existence of cognitive and social biases, has the unwanted effect that claims in the syntax and semantics literature cannot be trusted. Even if most of the judgments in an arbitrary syntax/semantics paper can be substantiated with rigorous quantitative experiments, the existence of a small set of judgments that do not conform to the authors’ intuitions can have a large effect on the potential theories. Whereas it is clearly desirable to quantitatively evaluate all syntactic and semantic hypotheses, it has been time‐consuming in the past to find a large pool of naïve experimental …