Grammar with a "G"

[Sydney M Lamb]

On Fri, 19 Mar 1999, Rob Freeman wrote:

> I've been kind of distantly following this discussion, but Greg's message came
> close enough to my beliefs to make me feel it might be worth posting. Has
> anything come up yet regarding 'emergent structure' from 'analogy based'
> processing? This has become a vigorous little sub-field of natural language
> processing research in recent years: 'example-based', 'memory-based',
> 'case-based' reasoning etc. Basic idea is that grammar is just the observed
> regularities of collections of examples, and analogies to them, which are what
> really control our perceptions. You still get grammar, but because the basic
> mechanism is analogy it has soft edges.

This is a start, but it leaves more questions unanswered than answered:
        "You still get grammar..."      WHO gets grammar?  The linguist
                doing an ex post facto analysis?  Or who?

        "...emergent structure..."      WHERE does the structure emerge?
                In the minds of linguists analyzing linguistic
                productions?  Or in the minds of speakers? If the latter
                then this view is no different from that which has always
                been held by everyone except 'innatists', a recently
                encountered group most of whom are not functionalists.

If grammar "is just the observed regularities of collections of examples"
then it is the grammarian and not the speaker of the language that you are
talking about.  And again we have to ask if anything new is being
proposed, since we have observed over the decades that different schools
of grammar come up with different formulations of grammar, suggesting that
grammar is just the product of the minds of the grammarians. So we can
conclude that it has (or ought to have been) generally accepted all along
that "grammar is just the observed regularities..."  Back in the fifties
and sixties people used to call it 'hocus-pocus linguistics'.

Cheers,
        Syd Lamb