Storage parsimony vs. computing parsimony

Bill Croft W.Croft at MAN.AC.UK
Mon Oct 5 14:12:45 UTC 1998


Dear Funknetters,

     There is a strong methodological imperative in almost
all formalist grammatical analyses, and in a fair number of
functionalist analyses, towards what I call "storage parsimony".
What I mean is that, in aiming towards "simplicity", "elegance",
"[unmodified] parsimony", analyses are proposed with minimum
redundancy, the fewest number of distinct underlying lexical forms
or syntactic construction types---that is, the fewest items that have
to be stored, in a lexicon, morphological paradigm, set of syntactic
rules, phoneme segment inventory, etc.

    The result of this is that the analyses require a lot of computation,
using derivational rules, linking rules, inheritance, filling in of unspecified
information, etc.; plus the constraints that turn out to be required in
order to make the computations happen in the right places but not in the
wrong places. In other words, storage parsimony leads to computing
complexity.

   A number of functionalist models eschew storage parsimony, opting
instead for computing parsimony. These are the "usage-based" models,
polysemy/radial category models, Bybee-style morphological models,
construction grammar models which allow redundant specification of
constructional information in the network, etc. The rationale behind such
models is that human beings are a lot better at strorage and retrieval
of information than at computational operations involving complex
symbol-manipulation.

    Of course, computing parsimony, used as a way to judge analyses,
is a methodological imperative as much as storage parsimony is;
but at least it supposedly has the merit of being closer to what
psychologists believe about how human beings' minds work.

   My question is: what IS the psychological or psycholinguistic evidence
that people are better at storage/retrieval than at computation (of
the symbol-manipulating sort that I alluded to)? I had this question posed
to me when I was once defending the computing parsimony approach, and
I didn't know of any references to make this point.

    Please give me specific references to the literature, if possible,
since I would like to refer to these methodological approaches in a book
I'm writing. And I would also like to know approximately how widely it is
believed among psychologists that people are better at storage/retrieval
than at symbol computation.

Thanks very much,
Bill Croft

Dept of Linguistics
Univ of Manchester
w.croft at man.ac.uk



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