A user’s view of the validity of acceptability judgments as evidence for syntactic theories

The primary goal of this chapter is to discuss the validity of acceptability judgments as a data type. The author’s view is that acceptability judgments have most, if not all, of the hallmarks of a valid data type: syntacticians have a plausible theory of the source of acceptability judgments, a theory of how to leverage judgments for the construction of syntactic theories using experimental logic, and a set of evaluation criteria that are similar to those used for other data types in the broader field of psychology. At an empirical level, acceptability judgments have been shown to be relatively reliable across tasks and participants, to be relatively sensitive, and to be relatively free of theoretical bias. Therefore the author’s view is that acceptability judgments are at least as valid as other data types that are used in the broader field of language science.