synchronic and diachronic "explanation".

[Catherine Rudin/HU/AC/WSC]

At the risk of making myself unpopular on the list, I'd like to stick up
for the idea that synchrony is NOT always just frozen diachrony.  People do
certainly memorize fossilized sequences, and many things can certainly be
explained that way, but speakers do also sometimes reanalyze, reorder,
create novel combinations...   I don't have the time or the concentration
this morning to provide good examples (I've been lurking through this whole
conversation mostly for time-and-concentration reasons) -- some of John's
examples of ordering exceptions in Omaha might do, and there are
interesting cases in Romance and Slavic clitic orders etc. if only I could
remember how they go...

 Anyhow -- while it may well be true that affix sequences in Siouan are
memorized chunks, historical fossils that children learn by rote,
ridiculing the idea of even looking for possible synchronic analyses
strikes me as much too harsh.

As Shannon says, speakers don't know the history (and no, I don't consider
this a canard) -- they do learn many things that are the result of history,
but unless all orders of all possible morpheme combinations are memorized,
making all new word formation impossible, there MUST be synchronic,
psychologically "real" morphological rules as well.

Catherine