rules

[Brian MacWhinney]

Syd Lamb and Pamela Klebaum recently exchanged a couple of messages
regarding making questions from sentences of the type "The man who is
calling is yelling."  I assume that Pamela cited this particular type of
sentence largely because of the role it has played in Chomsky's argument
regarding structure dependence and the logical problem of language
acquisition.  For example, in Piattelli-Palmarini, 1980, p. 40, Chomsky
claimes that "A person might go through much or all of his life without
ever having been exposed to relevant evidence, but he will nevertheless
unerringly employ [the structure-dependent generalization], on the first
relevant occasion."

In his 1996 BLS paper, Geoff Pullum checked out Chomsky's claim by
examining questions in the Wall Street Journal.  He found that, in the
first 500 questions, there were 5 that provided the required positive
evidence.  Pullum took this as evidence against Chomsky's analysis.

Of course, it may be that Pamela was not really concerned about the
structure dependent generalization issue and just accidentally happened to
cite this particular structure.  Perhaps she was just asking how children
can form sentences of any type without rules.  That's a reasonable
question, but hardly one that can be resolved in a few short email
messages.

--Brian MacWhinney