Representations and Rules in Language
Representations and Rules in Language
In both traditional grammar and cognitive science, the standard view of language distinguishes sharply between words (lexicon) and rules (grammar). Here I undermine this distinction, presenting a continuum of phenomena that lie between undisputed words like cat and undisputed “rules” such as the pattern for transitive verb phrases. Mainstream linguistics makes a further distinction between productive rules “in the grammar,” such as the regular English past tense, and partially productive rules “in the lexicon,” such as forming a noun like construction by affixing –tion to a verb. I show that this distinction too has been misconceived: productive rules have all the properties of partially productive rules, but have in addition “gone viral.” These phenomena argue that rules of grammar are declarative schemas for licensing well-formed sentences, rather than either procedures for assembling sentences, as in mainstream generative grammar, or simple association and analogy, as in connectionist and exemplar-based approaches.
Keywords: language faculty, phonology, syntax, semantics, Daniel Dennett
Oxford Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs , and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us .
