Re: Why can't daddy?

André G. Isaak wrote:

In article <4461E552.2A18@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
"Peter T. Daniels" <grammatim@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

André G. Isaak wrote:

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

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*?

That is, she realised something wasnâ*?t right with using â*?cowâ*? as a
plural,
but she couldnâ*?t come up with â*?cattleâ*? in a comfortable amount of
time, so
she used the much marked â*?for lack of a better phraseâ*? instead.
Thatâ*?s
imperfect command of a language, if anything is.

Three points:

(1) I don't know of anyone who claims people learn language perfectly.

Didn't you read the message you replied to? That's _exactly_ what I
said, and it's the fundamental premiss of linguistics. Every native
speaker is an absolute authority about their native language(s).

Yes, I did read the message. However, I think that you and Aidan are
using 'learn perfectly' in a somewhat different sense, and it was his
usage that I was responding to.

You seem to be using it in the sense of internalising a complete and
fully-functional grammar. He seems to be using it in the sense of
internalising a grammar which is a perfect description of some external
target language. No one would seriously claim that acquisition is
perfect in the latter sense given the fuzzy nature of the target and the
fact that languages do undergo systematic change.

My teacher, Robert A. Hall, Jr., liked to say that there's no such thing
as a language -- there is only a (vast or not so vast) collection of
everyone's idiolects.
--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@xxxxxxx
.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Why cant daddy?
    ... Aidan Kehoe wrote: ... I don't know of anyone who claims people learn language perfectly. ... fully-functional grammar. ... target language. ...
    (sci.lang)
  • Re: Easy as ABG
    ... >> Aidan Kehoe wrote: ... no. Written English is English for all that. ... > language - he merely asserted that he did not learn to pronounce it. ... > You appear to be arguing against a position you have invented, Peter. ...
    (sci.lang)
  • Re: Why cant daddy?
    ... Aidan Kehoe wrote: ... > The closest to similarity is that in both cases, ... Your assertion is that all those who learned the language of the community ...
    (sci.lang)
  • Re: Orthography supporting sound changes?
    ... Herman Rubin wrote: ... >>Aidan Kehoe wrote: ... but they might want to speak a "correct" ... The notion of "correct" language was invented in the ...
    (sci.lang)
  • Re: n versioning
    ... They have code generators that will give you C, C++, Java and Ada. ... After one or two years of learning to model you will discover that you need a team maintaining the model compilers just as large as your modelling team. ... Implementing some mathematical algorithms will be a real problem and may perhaps be better to do directly in the target language and bridge into your models. ...
    (comp.lang.ada)