Sentences

[Wallace Chafe]

I'm afraid I introduced a red herring.  I don't want to be remembered as
a nonbeliever in sentences, and I didn't intend to elicit messages
to the effect that "my language does have sentences."  I did want to
raise a question regarding novelty, and particularly the notion that
novelty can be explained only in terms of infinite recursion within
sentence structure.  Along the way I suggested that there may be
other elements in language that have interesting constraints too,
and that those constraints may interact with, and perhaps be different in
nature from constraints on sentences.  I suspect that this subject is too
ramified to be discussed adequately in e-mail messages.
 --Wally Chafe