novel sentences

[Matthew S Dryer]

With respect to John Myhill's "the whole discussion seems silly and
pointless and the kind of argument you would only need to make to an
8-year-old", it is my experience that most lay people, such as
undergraduates in intro linguistics classes, are sufficiently naive about
language that nearly nothing is obvious to them and that this kind of
observation,with elaboration by example, is in fact quite instructive.
The fact that so many of the sentences we hear are novel does seem to me
an important and fundamental property of language.  Furthermore, it
represents a fundamental difference between sentences and words (at least
for most languages).  From that perspective, I see this as hardly "silly
and pointless".

It is true that this property of language was used in arguments against
behaviourism - and not just a strawman position, but versions of
behaviourism that were once dominant  in psychology - but I would have
thought that this was something sufficiently basic to be something that is
common ground for nearly all linguists, formalist, functionalist,
cognitivist or whatever.

I suspect, as Scott Delancey suggests, that the novelty of sentences one
hears is probably exaggerated, but the basic point still holds.

Matthew Dryer