Date sent:      	Thu, 18 Nov 1999 13:39:12 +0100
Subject:        	The English Past
From:           	Joseph Hilferty <[log in to unmask]>
To:             	Word Grammar <[log in to unmask]>
Send reply to:  	[log in to unmask]

> Some time ago we had a discussion about how the English past tense
> would look in WG, and I remember saying that, on the basis of Jaeger
> et al., it looks as if irregulars are processed more slowly than
> regulars.
> 
> Steven Pinker, in his latest book (_Words and Rules: The Ingredients
> of Language_, Weidenfeld & Nicholson, London, 1999) says the following:
> 
>   When you produce an regular form, you not only have to dredge
>   it out of memory but also must rpress the "Add *-ed*" rule so
>   you don't say *breaked* or *broked*. Linguists call this
>   principle *blocking*--the irregular for blocks the rule--and
>   the experiments help us understand how the mind implements it.
>   One possibility is that when we need to utter a past-tense
>   form we first scan our list of irregular verbs to see if it
>   is there, and if it isn't, we turn on the rule. That predicts
>   that the slowest irregular verb (the one at the end of the
>   list) should be faster than the fastest regular veb. The
>   prediction is wrong. Irregular forms usually are slower to
>   produce than regular forms; they are never faster. (p. 130)
> 
> 
> Pinker bases this claim on unpublished work (Prasada, Pinker & Snyder
> 1990) and says that these results have been replicated in his lab.
> Assuming that Pinker's right, how could this situation be represented in
> WG?
> 
> Joe
> __________________________________________________________
> Home page: http://lingua.fil.ub.es/~hilferty/homepage.html
> 
In WG, there is no rule to 'suppress' or 'apply'. The past tense of a 
verb isa the lexeme and isa PAST (or whatever). I don't think past 
tense forms are produced from the bottom up (by first checking the 
list of irregulars), but from the top down: 

In regular cases, the speaker knows she wants to use something 
that is both (say) WALK and PAST, so using the properties of both 
she derives a new concept (it is an open question whether there 
needs to be a 'temporary sub lexeme', or whether she can go 
straight to the token; I favour the latter), that has the appropriate 
form, meaning etc.

In irregular cases, she goes through the same process, but 
discovers (to her surprise!) that there is a lexeme at that address, 
making itself at home and specifying its own form.

I'm just writing a long and excited email to And and Chet about 
this, so this will do for now!

Jasp


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