Re: CHAT: Parallelism

Nik Taylor wrote:

> Boudewijn Rempt wrote:
> > I still wager however, that
> > cows once learnt is stored as cows, not as cow-s... Which is at
> > the root of the development of new suppletive paradigms.
>
> Hmmm, maybe.  I doubt we'll be able to decide for sure anytime soon.
> That may actually explain why children sometimes learn the correct
> irregular plural, and then lose it when they figure out the -s rule, and
> then regain it - perhaps in that interim period they're using *only* the
> rules to figure out words, which would be logical if the objective is to
> figure out if the rule is correct, and then later regains access to
> individual stems.  Also would explain forms like "felled", a
> transitional period in which both the rules are being used directly, and
> the stored forms.
As I mentioned, according to the book _Wet Mind_ by Kosslyn & Koenig,
a popularized but still fairly intense, hardcore, and technical work
on neuroscience by two of the big names in the field, in the brain,
storage is *always* preferable to computation.  This is a general
cognitive principle (though contradictory to the explicit assumptions
of much mainstream linguistics in the latter half of this century) and
it is reasonable to accept that it is true in language unless one has
overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

Ed Heil ------ edheil@postmark.net
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