Stephen M. Wechsler (wechsler@mail.utexas.edu)
Fri, 31 Jan 1997 15:23:46 -0600 (CST)
At 1:50 PM 1/29/97, Gosse Bouma wrote: > The lexicon consists of a hierarchy of (lexical) sorts, lexical rules, >and (recursive) constraints, which together denote the set of objects >which we believe correspond in some way to the set of words or lexical signs >in a given language. > Since constraints only partially describe an object, it may be >hard to determine the cardinality of the set of objects which is usually >referred >to as the lexicon. Of course, one can try to count the number of maximally >specific objects which satisfy the constraints, but I doubt whether that is of >much linguistic significance. > Alternatively, one could try to distinguish lexical entries at the description >level. ... ... >I don't think that it makes much sense to try to answer such questions. Let me give two reasons why it does make sense to ask such questions: 1. Lexical and syntactic processing apparently occur in different regions of the brain: SIMPLIFYING GREATLY, syntax in the Broca's area and lexicon in Wernicke's area. 2. The main bursts in acquisition of the lexicon and of syntax occur at different times: vocabulary rapidly expands at about 18 months, syntax explosion from late 2's to mid 3's. Crucially, these generalizations are stated in terms of the traditional informal notion of what a word is. For example, Wernicke's aphasia patients (so-called "fluent aphasia") have difficulty in retrieving words, but as far as I know they do not lose the ability to attach adverbial phrases to their VPs-- as one might expect if a lexical adverb-adding rule were impaired. (Or anyway, it is an empirical question.) Similarly, if a child learns some words but does not yet have the syntax down-- including, say, adverbial modification-- then one must ask oneself what exactly the child has acquired. This doesn't militate for or against particular LRs but it does suggest that we need some notion of a 'lexeme' or 'listeme', if we are interested in modeling human linguistic competence. Steve _/_/_/ _/_/ _/_/_/ _/_/ _/_/_/ Stephen Wechsler, Asst. Prof. of Linguistics 403 Calhoun; S'97 office hrs: Tues 1-3, Wed 3-4 Linguistics Dept., U of Texas, Austin, TX 78712-1196 (512) 471-1701 http://uts.cc.utexas.edu/~wechsler/ _/_/_/ _/_/ _/_/_/ _/_/ _/_/_/
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