Re: USAGE: Language revival

John Cowan wrote:

> Patrick Dunn wrote:
>
> > After all, the rule for which dental to add is somewhat complicated
> > to the average joe: I suspect that most people wouldn't be able to tell
> > you why they add /t/ sometimes and /d/ other times, yet they do, and
> > flawlessly.  They've memorized the form, not the formula.
>
> But if you ask someone to finish this sentence:
>
>         Today the man will /stark/, because yesterday he also ___.
>
> they will automatically answer /starkt/.  Conscious knowledge of the rule,
> and the ability to apply it, are two different thigs.

John:

My reasoning comes down to two factors:

1. I learned from reliable sources that recall is, in general brain
function, vastly superior to computation.

2. I believe that language uses essentially similar brain processes
to any other human activity, not different ones in kind.

(2) was explicitly rejected by the Chomskian tradition, and that
tradition has formed many of the foundational assumptions of language
study for the past several decades.  Indeed, the opposite idea from my
claim -- that computation is preferable to storage, and so we should
always describe patterns in language in terms of "rules" (implying
that the results of these "rules" are computed on-line) -- has been
taken for granted for a long time in linguistics.  So it's not at all
surprising that my claim sounds controversial to the point of being
intuitively false.

And yet, given (1) and (2), which I hold, it follows inevitably.

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