ABSTRACT
The term “intuition” has a long history in philosophy, and it has had many different meanings (Osbeck and Held 2014). As Jaakko Hintikka (1999) noted, the term was rarely used in twentieth-century analytic philosophy until Noam Chomsky and his followers popularized its use in linguistics. In Chomskian linguistics, an intuition is a spontaneous judgment about the grammatical properties or relations of sentences. The linguist proposes one or more sentences and asks a question about them: Is this sentence grammatical? Are these two sentences related as active and passive? The person whose intuitions are being probed finds that an answer almost immediately comes to mind, though typically she has never heard the sentences before and is aware of no conscious reasoning about them. The linguistic intuition is the judgment the speaker makes.
