storage and computation

[Suzanne E Kemmer]

Wally's mention of the acquisition perspective, and the fact that I
just heard a lot about acquisition at the CSDL conference, made me
think about the relevance to Bill's question of Mike Tomasello's 'verb
island' and related work.  To elaborate on Wally's point:

Kids not only learn huge numbers of words very quickly, but they're
very slow to learn general constructional patterns. The clause-level
syntactic patterns they use are for a long time tied very tightly to
individual verbs; constructions don't just come into their grammar
across the board (Tomasello's result).

If humans were made to prefer computational processing of
constructions over storage, you'd think that general constructional
patterns would be easier and earlier acquired, and storage of large
numbers of lexical and syntactic units would come later.

Of course, child language is just the extreme case of the connection
between lexical items and syntactic constructions; constructions stay
lexically tied to some degree all the speaker's life.  If syntactic
patterns were really the result of on-line composition of syntactic
categories via rules, independently of lexical items, then we would
expect no particular connection of specific syntactic constructions to
stored lexical units.

Nor would we expect the huge number of collocations you get in
language. (Why should lexical bits in one part of the 'tree' affect
other bits? Which they do, well beyond subcategorization.)  Given that
we do have all these fixed and semi-fixed phrases, people should
presumably prefer to just compute these as needed, but instead these
elements show evidence of being stored (e.g. phonological reduction).
If composition were easier than storage, then the most FREQUENT stuff
should be processed via composition rather than just stored whole. I
assume that psychological results show us the opposite.

(Too bad the Utrecht workshop on Storage and Computation is not likely
to hear much from psychologists, or cognitive linguists...)

--Suzanne Kemmer