Any response to a dual-mechanism approach?

[Ping Li]

Steve Pinker's message seems to suggest that "the second sense of
the grammar-lexicon distinction" corresponds to two distinct
psychological processes: lookup vs. computation/composition. Thus,
"kick the bucket" has to be looked up, while "kick the duck" has to
be composed. But even here things are not clearcut. Take derivational
morphology as an example.  Linguists would consider "untie", "undress,
"unfasten" etc as to-be-looked-up items (i.e., distinct from "tie",
"dress", "fasten" etc), in contrast to "tied" "dressed", and "fastened"
as inflected forms of the corresponding roots. It is doubtful,
however, that English speakers always "look up" the
un-words in their mental dictionary, given that "un-" is a
productive device that can be used to compose novel items on the
spot: "he invited me but then UNINVITED me for some silly reasons".
Look-up vs. composition might simply lie on a continuum of things:
untie -- ... (e.g., untighten?)... -- uninvite.

Sincerely

Ping Li


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Ping Li, PhD.                           Email: ping at cogsci.richmond.edu
Department of Psychology		http://www.richmond.edu/~pli/
University of Richmond                  Phone: (804) 289-8125 (office)
Richmond, VA 23173                             (804) 287-6039 (lab)
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>Liz Bates's examples lead me to think that I wasn't sufficiently clear
>in the previous posting about the relationship between the lexicon and
>grammar. There are *two* distinctions here: (a) memorized versus
>composed (versus connectionist-like analogy), and (b) level of
>representation: root versus complex word versus phrase. The
>30-year-old idea that Bates refers to is that these used to be
>collapsed into a single distinction: words are stored, phrases are
>composed. Indeed, that must be rejected, because there are structures of all
>kinds that must be stored. For example, the lexicon might contain
>entries such as these (lots of notations possible):
>
>die:   VP           angry:     VP        devour:   VP       duck: N
>      / \                     / \                  /\            |
>     V  NP                   V   PP               V  NP         duck
>     |   /\                  |   /\               |
>  kick the bucket          mad at  NP          devour
>
>This embraces the continuum of structures from roots to phrases (or
>constructions) that Bates referred to. BUT: That is independent of
>the second sense of the grammar-lexicon distinction, namely lookup
>versus computation (composition, unification, etc.); that is, the
>difference between the two psychological processes below (again,
>simplified):
>
>(1)
>
>die:   VP
>      / \
>     V  NP           -->      "kick the bucket"
>     |   /\
>  kick the bucket
>
>(2)
>
>kick:   VP           duck:  N
>       / \      +           |       --> "kick the duck"
>      V  NP                duck
>      |
>   kick
>
>This distinction is largely indpendent of the first one.  Theoretical
>linguists don't talk about the composition process, because they treat
>it as a black box, to be studied by the computational linguists and
>psycholinguists. But the theory of language as a whole still needs
it.
>
>--Steve Pinker