The outcome of grammaticality judgments and elicited utterance analyses are invariably brought to bear only on distinctions between variants of current generative theory.

Generative linguists typically respond to calls for evidence for the reality of their theoretical constructs by claiming that no evidence is needed over and above the theory’s ability to account for patterns of grammaticality judgments elicited from native speakers. This response is unsatisfactory on two accounts. First, such judgments are inherently unreliable because of their unavoidable meta-cognitive overtones… Second, the outcome of a judgment (or the analysis of an elicited utterance) is i