novel sentences

[John Myhill]

I think what they meant was sentences which were not 100% identical to
sentences which had been used before (or perhaps which the speaker had
heard before). For example, if I write `The purple and green fox gave 157
turnips to
the piebald cow', this is a sentence which in all likelihood has never been
used before in the history of the world, so it is on this understanding a
`totally
novel sentence,' even if whatever words and structures are used are
analogous to similar structures in common sentences. I'm pretty sure that
this was the idea. I think they were arguing against an extremely naive
position (probably a strawman) which might be attributed to
super-behaviorism saying something like people only reproduce sentences
which are exact copies of sentences which they've already heard. That's the
only sense I could make of such statements--
the whole discussion seems silly and pointless and the kind of argument you
would only need to make to an 8-year-old.
John Myhill