Discussion Details
| Title: | Review of 'Chomsky's Minimalism' |
| Submitter: | Lise Menn |
| Description: | I remind my colleagues who are hotly discussing the on-line issue of
whether thinking comes before speaking that there are several decades of empirical psycholinguistic work on this topic, e.g. by Merrill Garrett, Willem Levelt, Kay Bock, and their colleagues, showing that there is a very intricate on-line interaction between syntactic and semantic aspects of a sentence as pre-verbal messages get encoded. Bock, for example, has shown that some aspects of syntax are primed without respect to meaning, while Levelt & colleagues (as well as others) have shown that the information to be encoded affects the syntactic form chosen. These findings are not contradictory, but complementary, as the researchers themselves fully agree: it depends on what aspect of sentence production one is looking at. A little googling will introduce you to this area of research, much of which is written clearly enough so that you don't have to be a working psycholinguist to understand it. Try reading the Bock & Levelt chapter in Gernsbacher's 1994 Handbook of Psycholinguistics, for a start. Arguments about what takes place in real time and real brains cannot be decided by logical and linguistic methods alone, because the data used by 'pure' linguistics just don't deal with activities in real time. |
| Date Posted: | 12-Sep-2008 |
| Linguistic Field(s): |
Linguistic Theories
Syntax |
| LL Issue: | 19.2780 |
| Posted: | 12-Sep-2008 |
