novel sentences

Dick Hudson dick at LINGUISTICS.UCL.AC.UK
Wed Jun 24 09:06:47 UTC 1998


Matthew Dryer and Dan Slobin both think it is worth pointing out that every
sentence is novel. Does anyone have any evidence that anyone ever thought
otherwise? The only evidence I can think of is Noam Chomsky's odd definition
of a language as a set of sentences. Do lay people think that when they take
a course in (say) German they're going to learn a list of sentences? I'd
have thought that lay people were much more likely to think of a language as
a set of words.
  Maybe I'm focussing on the wrong question. Are we really asking whether
lay people are aware that there are rules controlling the ways in which
words are combined? If so that's a very different question, because it's
possible to define all the possible combinations of words without mentioning
sentences at all. (That's how it's done in dependency grammars.)

 ==============================================================================
Richard (=Dick) Hudson
Department of Phonetics and Linguistics,
University College London,
Gower Street,
London WC1E 6BT
work phone: +171 419 3152; work fax: +171 383 4108
email: dick at ling.ucl.ac.uk
web-sites:
  home page = http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/dick/home.htm
  unpublished papers available by ftp = ....uk/home/dick/papers.htm



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