Modern linguists have attempted to prove that grammar, especially its syntactic component, exists as an autonomous mental organ in our brain. They have adopted the working hypothesis that language users' intuition on the grammaticality of linguistic expressions, by and large, faithfully reflects the activity of syntax as such. In many occasions, this "idealization" approach has proven itself to be useful in elucidating core properties of syntax that do not seem to be attributable to any other cognitive faculty. Despite their vigorous quest for theoretical sophistication, however, theoretical linguists have generally made little effort to establish reliable methods of soliciting and ascertaining speakers' acceptability and grammaticality judgments.
One of the goals of this project is to build up a more precise, objective and consensual research method than those generally exercised in the formal approach to language. Taking up wh-questions (e.g., What did you eat?) in Japanese as the main empirical domain of investigation, the project will emphasize the need for attention to a larger context of language such as prosody and pragmatics for establishing a more precise and reliable methodology of eliciting grammaticality judgments. Some phonetic and psycholinguistic experiments will be carried out in order to verify and consolidate the initial observations and intuitions concerning the direct and indirect influence of extra-syntactic factors on the interpretation of wh-questions. The project will attempt to demonstrate that such an approach is essential in order to give a clear definition of the empirical domain for formal syntax, and that exercising such caution may be the key to bring back order to the chaos often observed in the field. Involving close collaboration by the researchers with different expertise, this project also has great potential to initiate a step toward more productive integration of the subfields of linguistics.
