novelty

[Esa]

Dear colleagues
        Thank you for the responses (some of which I got privately);
they were all useful. The consensus seems to be that in this particular
context these two expressions are synonymous: 'A is completely novel
with respect to B' = 'A is not exactly identical with B'. In any other
context, of course, they are not synonymous, so they should not be it
here either. From this notion of 'complete novelty' it follows, for
instance, that a grammar as simple as the one consisting of rules 'S ->
Sa' and 'S-> a' generates an infinite number of completely novel sentences.

Therefore my sympathy is with Fred Householder,who - in a review in 1969
- commented upon the claim of complete novelty as follows: "[This
is] a claim so obviously false that [those who make it] must mean something
else, though I cannot for the life of me figure out what."

Incidentally, the fact that most sentences that we hear are new, i.e.
not repetitions of what we have heard before, was duly noticed by
linguists like Hermann Paul and Bloomfield. It was also a common-place in
the grammatical traditions of India and Arabia.

Esa Itkonen