A serious methodological weakness affecting much research in syntax and semantics within the field of linguistics is that the data presented as evidence are often not quantitative in nature. In particular, the prevalent method in these fields involves evaluating a single sentence/meaning pair, typically an acceptability judgment performed by just the author of the paper, possibly supplemented by an informal poll of colleagues. Although acceptability judgments are a good dependent measure of linguistic complexity (results from acceptability–judgment experiments are highly systematic across speakers and correlate with other dependent measures, but see Ref.