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<TITLE>Re: existence and reality</TITLE>
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<FONT COLOR="#800000">> On Saturday 05 April 2003 4:10 pm, Rob wrote:<BR>
> <BR>
> I see your perspective and raise you one :-) I don't see emergence as<BR>
> primarily a functionalist/structuralist thing. Though it does gel with the<BR>
> fundaments of Functionalism based on contrast rather than category.<BR>
> <BR>
> It's more than an esoteric theoretical issue at the syntax level.<BR>
> <BR>
> Phonemes change with time, and may be essentially indeterminate, but syntax<BR>
> arguably changes with each sentence. We might have to search hard to find<BR>
> evidence for emergence at the phoneme level (certain frequency effects?) but<BR>
> a category which changes with each sentence might explain lots of<BR>
> pseudo-categorical syntactic behaviour, like phraseology, collocational and<BR>
> formulaic aspects of language. (Which behave in some ways like words, and yet<BR>
> change).<BR>
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In my understanding you are right on here. The ordering of constituents appears to be the driving force behind change in many cases. Joan Bybee has discussed this in terms of boundary phenomenon. This is all about frequency. If two constituents (words, phonemes, morphemes) occur frequently together then the boundaries become blurred. I'll shamelessly take this opportunity to plug an article that I co-authored with a fellow student Anna Vogel Sosa entitled <FONT SIZE="5"><FONT FACE="Times New Roman">Evidence for frequency-based constituents in the mental lexicon: Collocations involving the word <I>of</I>. </FONT></FONT> <FONT SIZE="5"><FONT FACE="Times New Roman"><U>Brain & Language, 83, 227-236 </U></FONT></FONT> Here we found that<B> if </B>the collocational frequency of the English word <I>of</I> and the previous word such as <I>kind</I> were high, then participants in our psycholinguistic experiment were less likely to identify the word <I>of</I>, suggesting holistic storage of the two word chunk. Exactly what one would expect when boundaries become obscured. <BR>
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An article, which has done a great deal to shape the way I think about phonemes is <I>Phonogenesis </I>by Paul Hopper. In that article he argues for a continuum between grammar and phonology. I think he has presented a great deal of evidence for emergence at the phoneme level. <BR>
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</FONT>Best,<BR>
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James MacFarlane
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