storage and computation

[Greg Thomson]

At 11:34 -0500 10-13-1998, Tony A. Wright wrote:
>John Myhill wrote:

>Children notoriously regularize high-occurrence irregular verbs, i.e., "goed"
>for "went".

On the other hand, the simple, old-fashioned idea of "regularization",
replacing an exception with a form based on the application of a regular
rule, doesn't predict attested forms of the sort: _It got brokeded_
(meaning "It got broken"). You probably wouldn't want to say that the child
uttering _brokeded_ has added an uninflected root _broked_ to her lexicon
to which she is now adding the suffix -ed. (I won't vouch for the exact
example, but I've seen things like that--maybe it was "tookeded".) This
really looks more like the result of the convergence on a particular form
in response to various pressures in the system. This could be called
"computation" but may also hint that the dichotomy of storage vs.
computation is already a bit off track.

Greg Thomson