Re: OT: ago

--- "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