synchronic and diachronic "explanation".

[ROOD DAVID S]

Catherine has raised a voice of reason, of course -- languages do change,
and when they change it's often in predictable directions.  But to insist
that the ONLY thing children learning a language can use for tools is
universal grammar is an extreme position that does not take very much
effort to refute.  People are very good at learning lists for both
irregular paradigms and grammatical constructions.

And I would argue that naive speakers of a language DO know the history of
their language in the same sense that they "know" the grammar rules that
apply to their language: because they have learned patterns and can
generalize from them, they BEHAVE AS IF they had that knowledge, even when
they can't articulate it.  English speakers know about umlauted plurals
and demonstrate that knowledge every time they say "geese" or "feet".
I have just shown my undergraduates once again
that they know about verb raising to I in English for the copula because
they prefer "she always works hard" but "she is always on time", with
"always" on different sides of the conjugated verb depending on what the
verb is.  That's no different, to my mind, than the "knowledge" that wicha
precedes uNk and uNk precedes both ya and ni.



David S. Rood
Dept. of Linguistics
Univ. of Colorado
295 UCB
Boulder, CO 80309-0295
USA
rood at colorado.edu

On Tue, 1 Oct 2002, Catherine Rudin/HU/AC/WSC wrote:

>
> 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
>
>