Re: To Matt Pearson

--- You wrote:
Matthew Pearson scripsit:

> Well, human language is rule-governed, pure and simple,
Except for the parts that aren't.  Being a Registered Old Fart (who didn't
know what the connotations of "It's the bomb" are), I use "stank" as the
preterite of "stink", where younger speakers tend to use "stunk".  But
I spent quite a long time scratching my head about whether the participle
is also "stank" or whether it is "stunk" in my idiolect.  I finally
settled on "stunk", without any too much confidence about it.

Some parts of language are just plain associative, like non-linguistic
memory.  Other examples: French or German or Swahili gender,
Chinese or Japanese classifiers, German noun plurals.
--- end of quote ---

Obviously I didn't mean that each and every aspect of language is rule-governed. I was
speaking generically, and generic statements admit of exceptions ("Dogs have
four legs" is a true statement even though some dogs have fewer legs due to
accidents or birth defects; it is clearly not synonymous with "All dogs have
four legs"). [* Perhaps you misunderstood my "pure and simple", which I was
using to mean "incontrovertibly" rather than "absolutely"...]

Some aspects of language are purely arbitrary, and do not admit of analysis in
terms of principled rules. Vocabulary is the most obvious example (the fact
that "fish" means fish is not derivable by rule; this is something you just
have to learn when you learn English). And even when it comes to the
combinatory aspects of language, exceptions creep in: Irregular morphology,
suppletion, and non-compositional idioms like David's "kick the bucket" come to
mind. But such things exist at the margins of grammar: No language has a
morphology which is largely or completely irregular or suppletive, for example.
Human language is at its essence a discrete combinatory system: Smaller units
(sounds, words) are combined into larger units (words, phrases, sentences)
according to a finite system of rules. A language which worked otherwise would
be difficult if not impossible to acquire.

Matt.

Matt Pearson
Department of Linguistics
Reed College
3203 SE Woodstock Blvd
Portland, OR 97202 USA
ph:  503-771-1112 (x 7618)

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