Re: To Matt Pearson

In a message dated 10/23/01 3:01:44 PM, Matthew.Pearson@DIRECTORY.REED.EDU
writes:

<<What about Chinese? It certainly doesn't have anything like the example I
gave. (It has serial verb constructions, yes, but they're pretty clearly not
put together in the way implied by that category.)>>

    See, I don't know Chinese; I was actually just asking.  :)

<< Nobody claims that people are actually performing transformations as they
talk. >>

    Ahh...  I think I may have been confused about that.

<<Chomsky's point is that it is possible to abstract away from performance
and talk just about the rules which people have in their heads which allow
them to discriminate between grammatical and ungrammatical utterances.>>

    So, then, this would say that in the question, "What are you doing
tonight?", as soon as the person here's "what" they think to themselves, "Ah!
 That's an empty object noun phrase that's out of place"?  After all, after
"what" could come "is that?" (nominative), "are you doing?" (accusative),
"city do you come from?" (prepositional), etc.  True, speech happens quickly,
and so there's no need to predict, since you pretty much have the whole
utterance as soon as it's started, but what if someone hesitated, such as
"What..., uh, just a sec, um..., what…"  I don't think they'd need to wait
until the end of the utterance to figure out that this thing is going to be a
question about some thing.  I mean, it would make more sense to me if, rather
than explaining the issue by saying the person hears the sentence and then
applies all sorts of transformational rules, that either (a) they would just
be used to questions and thus don't have to think of them in that way
anymore, or (b) they predict what comes next.  To me it still doesn't make
sense that the mind has to apply rules to something to understand
it--especially such common things like questions.

-David

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