No subject

[Ellen F. Prince]

"A. Katz" <amnfn at WELL.COM> wrote:

>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.

But what makes the notion of novel sentences interesting for natural
language is precisely the issue of acquisition, which you alluded to
in your first paragraph but dropped. The issue of acquisition of
computer languages is rather different...