what does 'independent' mean

Greg Thomson gthomson at GPU.SRV.UALBERTA.CA
Wed Mar 10 10:30:19 UTC 1999


At 7:35 -0800 03-09-1999, Elizabeth Bates wrote:
>  No one is denying that grammars exist.  But
>how do they come about?

Where do grammars exist? A child is born into an environment in which
speech is going on. Gradually the child's brain learns to associate
linguistic cues (phonetic, lexical, grammatical) with conceptual events
(adding tokens to mental models, forming complex concepts out of more basic
ones, etc.). Thus gradually  conceptual processes come to be triggered by
linguistic cues (and in such a way that individual "forms" may trigger
multiple processes of various varieties). Under the influence of the
developing comprehension system a production system also develops (and is
maintained). It learns to produce the linguistic cues in such a way that
they comply with the expectations of the comprehension system. Where is the
grammar? Reflective humans may preserve records of linguistic events and
reflect upon, and categorize, the "patterns" they find therein. "Grammars",
in the old fashioned sense, framed in terms of "structural relationships"
or whatever, are the result of such reflection and categorization. But
wouldn't you imagine they  have a rather distant and indirect (if not
tenuous) relationship to the working linguistic systems inside of people.
As far as the working language systems go, there may just be the solutions
to the complex constraint-satisfaction problem you mention, which may
include 1) cue-triggered instructions (a metaphor, of course) which create
conceptual representations (comprehension), and 2) instructions triggered
by conceptual representations which produce the cues that work for the
comprehension system (production). If so, then where would the grammars be?
Why must they emerge anywhere other than in our imaginations? And why is no
one denying that they exist?

Cordially,
Greg

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
Morning by morning new mercies I see
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
Greg Thomson, Ph.D. Candidate (gthomson at gpu.srv.ualberta.ca)
SIL/Thomson, Westpost P.O. Box 109, FIN 53101,
Lappeenranta, FINLAND
Phone: 7-812-246-35-48 (in St. Petersburg, Russia)



More information about the Funknet mailing list