Re: Why can't daddy?


Ar an deichiú lá de mí Bealtaine, scríobh Nathan Sanders:

> 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:

‘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."’

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.

‘Competence’ is mostly irrelevant when one brings people learning a second
language as an adult into the equation. Chomsky explicitly disavows them as
having anything to do with his theories, and personally, while I can
produce, with a little thought, the correct German declension for any
context if I already know the gender and plural pattern of the word in
question, I routinely *** them up in actual speech. And that’s something I
need to fix. Performance is what matters, what gets noticed, what provokes,
or doesn’t provoke, listeners to re-examine what you’ve said already with a
more critical eye.

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.

You think what Detective Sergeant Maureen Watson said didn’t involve her
mental command of English in what she said? Why ever not?

--
Aidan Kehoe, http://www.parhasard.net/
.

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