intuition (n.)

A term in LINGUISTICS referring to the judgement of SPEAKERS about their LANGUAGE, especially in deciding whether a SENTENCE is ACCEPTABLE or not, and how sentences are interrelated. It is sometimes referred to as TACIT knowledge, or Sprachgefühl. Native-speaker intuitions are always a crucial form of evidence in linguistic analysis, but they are given a special theoretical status in GENERATIVE GRAMMAR, where in his later work Noam Chomsky sees them as part of the DATA which the grammar has to account for. It is important, in discussion of this topic, to distinguish the intuitive responses of the native-speaker from those of the linguist – a distinction which can be easily confused when linguists are investigating their own language. Linguists’ intuitions concerning the accuracy or elegance of their analyses are quite different in kind from those of non-linguists, whose intuitions concern the sameness, difference and relatedness of MEANINGS.