Systematicity

[David Bowie]

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

: Well, I don't agree that dialects (or languages) are idiolects
: slopped together; there is a level of abstraction that won't tolerate
: that purely empirical approach. If it was really that simple, we'd
: have a quantitative matrix of some sort to tell us exactly how many
: features would have to be shared before we could responsibly call a
: dialect a dialect, and so on up the scale. We don't.

But do we not have such a matrix because we *can't* have one, or because we
don't have the data collected or the methodology developed to have one? At
this point, i don't think there's any firm evidence one way or the other
(though i lean toward the latter option, myself).

That may just be my training poking through, though--i had it beaten into my
head early on that any social phenomenon is simply aggregated individual
behaviors interacting in sometimes intricate ways, and i really can't escape
that particular POV.

<snip>

: What remains then is to see whether it's "systematic" in your grammar
: (and the grammars of those most like you). That's the killer, of
: course, Is this an item you have non-productively or do you have lots
: of other "like" infixed items (which obey these same rules)? The
: frequency with which you use such items would be a secondary
: consideration, but your acceptance of forms innovated along these
: same lines would surely be one indication of your having this item as
: a systematic not idiosyncratic or even imitative part of your grammar.

Maybe. If you're going to use intuition as evidence you'd start to pretty
quickly run into the phenomenon where if you look at a grammatical form ten
times it starts to look ungrammatical, and if you look at an ungrammatical
form ten times it starts to look grammatical.

Sidebar: But my (possibly overly) strong suspicions against intuition as
linguistic evidence are simply a case where i *have* managed to move away
from my early training (undergrad at Maryland-College Park, back when it was
even more purely theoretically oriented than it is now).

In any event, since intution has problems of creeping subjectivity, i still
don't know that we have a seriously *objective* way to say/define whether
something's systematic or not.

<snip>

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.