The origin of linguistic intuitions: Communicativeness, not grammaticalness

People have spontaneous intuitions about whether a sentence is acceptable within a language. 'She gave me a fish taco' is acceptable in English but 'She gave I a fish taco' is not. A crucial goal for language science is identification of a minimal set of principles that might underpin the huge diversity of ways in which these intuitions can be triggered. Here I describe how these intuitions are ultimately intuitions of and about communicativeness, and how they are governed by a single principle of optimal cognitive utility. Precisely, when an individual treats a sentence as unacceptable, what they are revealing is that there is, in their intuition, no possible interpretation of the sentence that could satisfy the unconscious presumptions of optimal cognitive utility (‘optimal relevance’) that govern and guide the comprehension of all stimuli perceived as communicative. This conclusion stands in clear contrast to widespread assumptions that have shaped the investigation of language for decades, namely that linguistic intuitions are ultimately intuitions of and about grammaticalness. To make these arguments, the main innovation here is to link two large literatures that are at present almost entirely uncoupled: contextualist theories of communication, and constructionist approaches to the description of grammars. Together they provide a unified picture: linguistic communication is a coordination problem on the speaker’s informative intentions; and grammars are richly structured networks of micro-conventions that enable us to resolve this coordination problem far more easily than we otherwise would. This synthesis in turn explains what triggers intuitions of unacceptability, why they occur, and what makes humans a language-ready species in the first place. It also provides a new perspective on many further issues in the language sciences, to be explored in future research.