Re: Why can't daddy?

In article <17505.35504.364603.878266@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Aidan Kehoe <kehoea@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Ar an naoiú lá de mí Bealtaine, scríobh Peter T. Daniels:

> The closest to similarity is that in both cases, a language is learned
> -- perfectly in the one case,

Your assertion is that all those who learned the language of the community
around them during the critical period learned it perfectly? Detective
Sergeant Maureen Watson of the Police Department of Seguin, in rural Texas,
provides an easy counterexample to that:

â??Watson told News 4 WOAI, "We believe the gate of the cattle trailer came
open, and the cow, for lack of a better phrase spilled out onto the
Interstate. It was pretty chaotic for a while."â??

Competence versus performance? I have perfect knowledge of how to
spell the word "the" (for any practical definition of perfect), but
that doesn't prevent me from misspelling it as "teh" on occasion.

Our mouths and brains will do funny things sometimes when we speak,
but that doesn't (necessary) indicate a lack of mental command of the
language, only imperfection in the physical implementation.

Nathan

--
Nathan Sanders
Linguistics Program
Williams College
http://wso.williams.edu/~nsanders/
.

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