No subject

[A. Katz]

Dan Slobin observed as follows:

>the child learns syntactic patterns, constructions, rich
>lexical entries, and so forth--but each actual utterance, produced or
>received, calls upon general processing skills (to use another old term,
>"competence").

I think functionalists and generativists agree that general processing skills
are required in order to produce or comprehend language. (The big question is
whether any of the actual rules are pre-wired, or they are learned by exposure
using generalized cognitive mechanisms of pattern recognition that apply to
many other acitivities besides language processing.)

What's rather interesting is that the observation that hitherto unuttered
sentences are comprehensible and have an agreed meaning is true of not just
natural language. It works for computer languages as well.

You can write a new program in any computer language using a combination of
commands that was never before juxtaposed in quite that way, and provided you
have not made a syntax error, the program will run and do exactly what you
told it to do. (Which may or may not be what you intended.)

Likewise, the `objective' meaning of an utterance in a given speech community
can be demonstrated by the phenomenon of hearers consistently interpreting a
statement one way when the speaker intended it to mean something else. "That
may be what you meant," people have been known to pronounce, "but it's
certainly not what you said."

The cognitive mechanism behind comprehension -- whether it be generative or
not -- is not implicated by the fact of relatively original utterances having
predetermined meanings.

                         --Aya Katz

\\//\\//\\//\\//\\//\\//\\//\\//\\//\\//\\//\\//\\//\\//\\//\\//\\//\\//\\//
Dr. Aya Katz, 3918 Oak, Brookfield, Illinois 60513-2019 (708) 387-7596
//\\//\\//\\//\\//\\//\\//\\//\\//\\//\\//\\//\\//\\//\\//\\//\\//\\//\\//\\