novel sentences

[John Myhill]

My mention of `8-year-old' may perhaps have been hyperbola, but in fact I cannot
remember ever having heard an undergraduate student, however naive, express
a view which suggested that they were under the impression that human
beings could only repeat sentences which they had literally heard or read,
word for word. I would certainly agree that lay people are naive about many
things regarding language, but in my experience this does not seem to be
one of them. However, this may be a consequence of the time I was educated
(grad school late 70's and early 80's) and the time I have been teaching.
Some of the statements I have read about language in the 1950's sound so
bizarre from a contemporary standpoint that I can only assume that given
certain assumptions specific to certain cultures and times, what is
intuitively obvious or trivial at one point in time might be a deep insight
at another.
John Myhill



>With respect to John Myhill's "the whole discussion seems silly and
>pointless and the kind of argument you would only need to make to an
>8-year-old", it is my experience that most lay people, such as
>undergraduates in intro linguistics classes, are sufficiently naive about
>language that nearly nothing is obvious to them and that this kind of
>observation,with elaboration by example, is in fact quite instructive.
>The fact that so many of the sentences we hear are novel does seem to me
>an important and fundamental property of language.  Furthermore, it
>represents a fundamental difference between sentences and words (at least
>for most languages).  From that perspective, I see this as hardly "silly
>and pointless".
>
>It is true that this property of language was used in arguments against
>behaviourism - and not just a strawman position, but versions of
>behaviourism that were once dominant  in psychology - but I would have
>thought that this was something sufficiently basic to be something that is
>common ground for nearly all linguists, formalist, functionalist,
>cognitivist or whatever.
>
>I suspect, as Scott Delancey suggests, that the novelty of sentences one
>hears is probably exaggerated, but the basic point still holds.
>
>Matthew Dryer