Systematicity

[David Bowie]

From:    "Dennis R. Preston" <preston at MSU.EDU>

: My use of systematic in this case referred to the presence of an
: element in a "dialect" (or variety), not its status in an individual
: speaker...

Same thing in the end, IMO--all that a variety is is the idiolects (using
the term somewhat sloppily) of a bunch of speakers who share a particular
(usu. regional) characteristic, all lumped together.

: ..., 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.

I think that, actually, we're in agreement here. However, i don't think i've
ever run across any way to *objectively* say whether something is systematic
or not for any particular speaker *or* variety, other than, in the end,
counting tokens. I'm very much unsatisfied with that.

And in a perhaps-related note, i caught myself using an infixed form today
that i hadn't run across before (but that, in various spellings, gets 13
Google hits as one word, 4,156 as three): "I feel like our power's been out
from the hurricanes forlikeever." (And, yes, i used it very much as one
word.) So: Is -like- infixation systematic to my particular variety? How
would i ever be able to say for, like, sure?

Like i wrote earlier, this has been bugging me for some time now. For a
concept that one would think is so central to what we do, i just feel like
it hasn't been defined at all well.

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.