A Study of Linguistic Analysis and Native Speaker’s Intuition | Original Article

ABSTRACT:

The fundamental data source for generative grammarians has been introspective intuitions about well-formedness. Because of the dependence on this one form of data and the haphazard way it is obtained, the empirical foundation for a lot of syntactic theory is called into question. Native (L1) and nonnative (L2) speaker intuitions concerning single word frequency have dominated research into frequency intuition. Much work has to be done on the intuitive perceptions of collocation (or phrasal) frequency in L1 and L2. It was the goal of this research to close the knowledge gap by providing an answer to the following question: When it comes to subjective evaluations of collocation frequency, how do L2 learners and native speakers stack up against one another and across corpora? We asked native Italian speakers and Italian learners to classify 80 noun-adjective pairs as high, medium, low, or extremely low frequency. For the most part, L1 intuitions correlated with corpora for extremely low frequency pairs, but not L2 intuitions. According to the results of mixed-effects modelling, L2 learners' assessments of the four frequency bands were similar to those of native speakers, although there were some discrepancies as well. The research, when taken as a whole, sheds light on the nature of intuitions concerning phrasal frequency in L1 and L2.