Rule-List Fallacy

[Martin Haspelmath]

Thanks a lot, Brian, for this very lucid explanation of the issues from 
a psycholinguistic point of view! I have long shared your view that "in 
a given usage of a particular form by a given person at a given moment, 
one seldom knows whether rules or lists applied. Only if a clear 
productive overgeneralization occurs, and this is very rare, can one 
know for sure that a rule or gang effect applied" (my view is probably 
due to your influence, however indirectly!). This also makes me quite 
skeptical of "cognitive linguistics" of any sort – the adjective 
"cognitive" sounds great, especially to linguists who don't know much 
about cognition, but it probably promises more than we can deliver as 
linguists.

Concerning your last point:
> Given this horse race view, I find it difficult to understand how one 
> can view either rules or lists as the unmarked or default case or 
> suggest that there is any null hypothesis regarding this interplay. 
> One can entertain opposing null hypotheses, of course, but their 
> half-life would be measured in seconds.
What I meant is that rote processing and rule processing do not have the 
same status: Vervet monkeys and dogs are pretty good at rote processing, 
but to what extent they can deal with rules is unclear. Clearly, 
rote/list precedes rule phylogentically and ontogenetically, and while 
rote/list without rule can be fully functional, rule without rote/list 
is incoherent – there wouldn't be anything for the rule to apply to.

Thus, one cannot cite the Rule-List Fallacy as an argument against the 
claim that rules don't exist (as Newmeyer has done in his paper and in a 
recent Funknet message). Sometimes (e.g. in vervet monkeys) they really 
don't seem to exist, and maybe someone wants to argue that human 
language is likewise fully rote/list-based, without rules.

Martin

Brian MacWhinney wrote:
> Dear Funknetters,
> This posting is not directly about the Newmeyer analysis, which seemed 
> reasonable enough to me, but rather about the issue of the rule-list 
> fallacy. Basically, my point here is that thinking of this as a 
> dichotomy is useful for a first pass, but soon becomes inadequate when 
> you think of actual mental processing.
> Within psycholinguistics, the interplay between lists and rules is the 
> centerpiece of the debate between single and dual-route models. In the 
> dual-route account, one route is rule (or rather combination with the 
> result adjusted by rule) and the other is rote (or lists). Evidence 
> for lists usually relies on the existence of exceptions to rules. 
> Evidence for rules usually relies on productivity for new forms. In 
> child language, productivity is also evidenced by overregularizations 
> and other errors. This interplay between combination and rote occurs 
> on every linguistic level.
> The most powerful model of dual-route interactions sees the two 
> processes as engaged in a horse race. Both operate all the time, but 
> the winner in a given case is determined by item strength and support.
> In 1986, Joe Stemberger and I provided evidence indicating that even 
> regular forms such as "wanted" are occasionally produced by rote (or 
> lists), since high frequency regulars are more resistant to speech 
> errors phenomena then low-frequency regulars. If all regulars were 
> produced by rule, this type of frequency effect should not obtain.
> One can also describe the rule-list interplay in a single-route 
> connectionist model. However, in my opinion, such models simply 
> involve recharacterizing rules as gang effects. And these models have 
> to enforce special procedures to guarantee that lists can survive. In 
> the end, they just recharacterize the dual route . So, I see no real 
> way out of the idea of an interplay between processes and a horse race 
> between forms.
> What does this mean for the FunkNet discussion? Basically, it means 
> that, in a given usage of a particular form by a given person at a 
> given moment, one seldom knows whether rules or lists applied. Only if 
> a clear productive overgeneralization occurs, and this is very rare, 
> can one know for sure that a rule or gang effect applied. Given this 
> inherent ambiguity of real data and the essentially competitive nature 
> of the underlying process, only models that provide a fundamental role 
> of dual-process interplay make contact with psychological reality. 
> Fortunately, by examining the numbers in large corpora, one can get an 
> idea of the overall strengths of the various horses, but that is about 
> the best one can do and doing that right takes some care.
> Given this horse race view, I find it difficult to understand how one 
> can view either rules or lists as the unmarked or default case or 
> suggest that there is any null hypothesis regarding this interplay. 
> One can entertain opposing null hypotheses, of course, but their 
> half-life would be measured in seconds.
>
> --Brian MacWhinney
>
>


-- 
Martin Haspelmath (haspelmath at eva.mpg.de)
Max-Planck-Institut fuer evolutionaere Anthropologie, Deutscher Platz 6	
D-04103 Leipzig      
Tel. (MPI) +49-341-3550 307, (priv.) +49-341-980 1616

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