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THEME 4. LINGUISTIC INTUITION
Plan:
1.
What is linguistic intuition?
2.
Native speakers, non-native speakers and linguistic intuition
3.
The contents of our linguistic intuitions
For linguists, it’s a powerful methodology to explore the limits of
grammatical structure
allowed in a language, to articulate the rules
that determine what is and is not part of a given language’s grammar.
For example:
Elena chopped up the parsley/Elena chopped the parsley up. Both
correct
Elena walked up the stairs/Elena walked the stairs up. 1st yes/2nd no
The jarring impression that ‘Elena walked the stairs up’ makes
on us is our linguistic intuition. By manipulating phrases,
transforming
them in various ways, and noting the resulting
acceptability of the results, we come to discover phrasal boundaries;
‘chop up’ forms a unit and can move its particle ‘up’ beyond the
object of the verb, but in the
second pair of examples, ‘up’ is inside
the unit ‘up the stairs’ and is a directional preposition, not part of the
preceding verb. We have strong intuitions about how prepositional
units should occur in English.
Linguistic intuitions are not infallible in every, nor are they the
only method available to study the properties of language. Consider
more cases of examples related to those above.
not I/not me (it was not I, it was not me) both okay?
happy is he who finds his own way/happy is him who finds his own
way ?
it was indeed they/it was indeed them both okay?
it were they/it were them both bad, right?
The verb ‘to be’ is felt to
agree with ‘it’, not the extraposed subject.
These engage both word order (syntax) and meaning
(semantics).
a big red ball/a red big ball
a small yellow satin purse/a yellow small satin purse/a satin yellow
small purse
the tallest biggest strongest gladiator/the biggest strongest tallest
gladiator/the strongest biggest tallest gladiator
the strangest prettier blue flower/the prettier strangest blue flower
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a tall smart young woman/a young smart tall woman/a smart young
tall woman
1
Some non-native speakers may claim they don’t have intuitions
about L2. What they might be saying is they don’t
feel confident
about them. In reality, they must have these kinds of intuition and its
development must be essential to the progress in L2. Furthermore, we
have to recognize that there must be input from a deeper level and
some of these must relate to L1, so it would be impossible to say that
non-native speakers lack access to a subconscious level of intuitions -
something we could call, reflexive intuition. James (1996), posits the
idea that, Since one never knows a second-language in isolation from
one’s first knowledge can be held at the procedural level of
performance (being manifest in MT (mother tongue) interference on
FL (foreign language use), or at the cognitive
level of intuition in
which case we talk of Cross-linguistic Intuition (XLI).
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