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Re: OT: ago

From:Gary Shannon <fiziwig@...>
Date:Saturday, January 21, 2006, 6:48
--- "Mark J. Reed" <markjreed@...> wrote:

> On 1/20/06, Gary Shannon <fiziwig@...> wrote: > > Trying to shoehorn an individual, unique word into > > some artifical category like "adjective" or > "adverb" > > just underscores how arbitrary those categories > are, > > and how poorly they fit the words of a living > > languages. (It's all exceptions, I tell you, and > no > > rules. (At least no universally applicable > rules.)) > > This from the guy who admits that he doens't > understand grammar? Gee, > I'm convinced. :)
<snip> hehe. But don't you see, it is BECAUSE I don't understand grammar that I must contrive substitutes for it. ;-) In my world children have no grammar gene, they have the ability to learn thousands of templates or sample sentences and sentence pieces which they learn to use like a vast game of "Mad Libs", or Tinker Toys, freely plugging into the blanks in the template, whatever words are needed for a particular occasion. At the neuron level it's not a rule driven process, but data base look-up process. That's why I think it's not always sensible to invent rules to describe what is, at its deepest level, just a table lookup operation, and not a productive or creative functional process. It's rather like trying to work out the rules for what digit will appear next in the phone directory listings. You might come up with rules that work some of the time, and where the first three digits are concerned you might find rules that work most of the time, but in the long run rules cannot accurately describe a process which is not rule-driven. At its point of origin in the human brain, language production is not governed by rules, but by memorization and recall of habitual cultural word patterns. And that's why rules will always be a poor fit, and a second-best way to describe language. Just my crazy theory. --gary