Mike Maxwell wrote:
>
> Terry Murphy, quoting Robert De Beaugrande:
>
> >...the corpus highlights the improbable and unnatural
> >quality of invented data like 'John is eager to please'.
>
> Concerning the 'improbable' (and therefore rare) nature of certain data
> which has been used to argue for certain generative accounts: This is
> precisely the generativists' point. If some large group of people all have
> the same judgement about the acceptability of certain constructions, and
> those constructions are rare, then how can one explain their consensus? A
> case in point is parasitic gaps. I don't know for sure, but I would guess
> that they are vanishingly rare in corpora, and in the sort of input that
> children get. And yet the first time I heard constructed examples of
> parasitic gaps, I, and the other linguists who were hearing the report,
> immediately reacted the same way: they were "good English." It seems to me
> that there is a datum that needs explaining: you've never (or almost never)
> seen something before, but it is immediately familiar. Group deja vu.
>
I agree this needs explanation, if it occurs with linguistically naive
native speakers. Do you have any (non-anecdotal) evidence that this is
the case? Most of the references I have on empirical work on this
subject are negative results: for example Spencer (73),
Labov (72, 75), Quirk and Svartvik (66). It seems that non-native
speakers tend to disagree about the complex cases which is in conflict
with the standard generativist
assumption that children converge to the same grammar.
If you have any references, I'd be very grateful for them,
Regards
-- Alexander Clark asc@aclark.demon.co.uk Alex.Clark@issco.unige.ch ISSCO / TIM, Ecole de Traduction et d'Interprétation, University of Geneva, Boulevard du Pont-d'Arve, CH-1211 Genève 4 Tel: (+41) 022 7058682 Fax: 7058689
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