> I don't think exemplar structure and a presupposingly categorical (structuralist) network structure are exclusive of one another. We can show for both of them that humans behave as if they were organised according to one and not the other. Perhaps they are both at work all the time, in a cognitive dialectic.
Agreed!
But I don't want to concede something like "accommodation is evidence for exemplar theory". (The other way round, as you said, sure - ET predicts accommodation.)
I'm not saying that "the other side" has clear formal accounts of style shifting or any other accommodative situation, that I know of.
But strong ET makes predictions which, when they don't come true, should be dealt with by its practitioners. Put another way, we all should be trying to make the theory fail (while maybe hoping it doesn't), not gospelizing it.
My experience is that ET people weaken or modify the theory ad lib. - and it's not an inflexible one to modify - when challenged by actual data, mostly of the form "predicted: X, observed: Y".
Accommodation is a great venue to test phonological theories like ET, rather than evidence for ET in itself. And don't we have to favor a less powerful theory if it gets equally good or better results?
Dej
########################################################################
The Variationist List - discussion of everything related to variationist sociolinguistics.
To send messages to the VAR-L list (subscribers only), write to:
[log in to unmask]
To unsubscribe from the VAR-L list, click the following link:
http://jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?SUBED1=VAR-L&A=1
|