Systematicity

[Dennis R. Preston]

>My ue of systematic in this case referred to the presence of an
>element in a "dialect" (or variety), not its status in an individual
>speaker, but since you raise the issue, I'm afraid that I'm a kind
>of psyycholingusitic rebel here. I believe in degrees of
>grammaticality; that is, I believe that some constructions are not
>as "deeply embedded" in competence - not part of a speaker's
>"vernacular." On the other hand, it's not clear to me that frequency
>would be a guide to this at all.

dInIs

>




>In the thread "Different dialects, same error",
>Dennis R. Preston wrote:
>
>: There are sporadic existential 'it' occurrences among non-southern
>: and non-AAVE speakers, but they are surely not systematic or common.
>
>Define "systematic".
>
>Seriously--this is a place where i'm running into a *lot* of trouble in some
>back-burner research i'm doing. If a speaker does something allo the time in
>a particular context, we can pretty clearly say it's systematic. If a
>speaker does it *half* the time, we still can say it's systematic. But where
>do we draw the line between systematic and non-systematic--one use in 10
>opportunities to use a feature? One in 1,000?
>
>If a speaker only uses a particular feature one time in 100,000 possible
>opportunities to use it, wouldn't that still be systematic is, after 3
>million opportunities the speaker had used the feature ~30 times? Or is that
>below the threshhold of linguistic systematicity, since it'd be really
>really hard to test for it, particularly for syntactic features?
>
>David Bowie                                         http://pmpkn.net/lx
>     Jeanne's Two Laws of Chocolate: If there is no chocolate in the
>     house, there is too little; some must be purchased. If there is
>     chocolate in the house, there is too much; it must be consumed.