Abstract
1. Why this volume? “The lexicon is really an appendix of the grammar, a list of basic irregularities”. These words, written a long time ago by Leonard Bloomfield (Bloomfield, 1933, p. 274), have set the stage for focusing linguistic and psycholinguistic research on the compositional nature of linguistic objects, a view that has culminated, from the mid-fifties until today, in generative linguistics as proposed and elaborated by Noam Chomsky (Chomsky, 1957; 1965). This attention for the computational nature of language over many decades of linguistic investigation has proven to be tremendously fruitful. Without it, our insight in the nature of human language would be much smaller than it is. Inevitably, the continually high level of attention for computational rules has led to some neglect of the possibility of massive storage not only of irregular but also of regular linguistic objects. The idea for this volume was inspired by the observation that a growing number of linguists and psycholinguists are dissatisfied with the traditional Bloomfieldian idea that the lexicon is a list of irregularities, and all other linguistic objects are computed by rules. So the question appeared to be: if Bloomfield’s view was wrong, or at least not the full truth, what then is stored in the lexicon, and what is computed by rule?
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Bloomfield, L. (1933). Language. London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd. 7th printing 1962.
Calvin, W.H. (1996). How brains think Evolving intelligence, then and now. New York: Basic Books.
Chomsky. N. (1957). Syntactic structures. The Hague: Mouton.
Chomsky, N. (1965). Aspects of the theory of syntax. Cambridge MA: MIT Press.
Damasio, A. (1999). The feeling of what happens Body and emotion in the making of consciousness. New York: Harcourt Brace & Company.
Damasio, H., Grabowski, T., Tranel, D., Hichwa, R., and Damasio, A. (1996). A neural basis for lexical retrieval. Nature, 380:499–505.
Deacon, T. (1997). The symbolic species. London: Allen Lane, the Penguin Press.
Dehaene, S. (1997). The number sense. London: Penguin Books.
Edelman, G. (1992). Bright air, brilliant fire On the matter of the mind. London: Penguin Books.
Elman, J. (1993). Learning and development in neural networks: the importance of starting small. Cognition, 48:71–99.
Elman, J., Bates, E., Johnson, M., Karmiloff-Smith, A., Parisi, D., and Plunkett, K. (1996). Rethinking innateness. A connectionist perspective on development. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Fodor, J. and Pylyshyn, Z. (1988). Connectionism and cognitive architecture: A critical analysis. In Pinker, S. and Mehler, J., editors, Connections and symbols. (Cognition Special Issue), pages 3–71. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press/Bradford Books.
Gazzaniga, M. (1992). Nature’s mind The biological roots of thinking, emotions, sexuality, language and, thinking. London: Penguin Books.
Gibson, E. (1998). Linguistic complexity. Locality of syntactic dependencies. Cognition, 68:1–76.
Hoekstra, T. (1984). Transitivity Grammatical relations in governmentbinding theory. PhD thesis, Rijksuniversiteit Leiden.
Just, M. and Carpenter, P. (1992). A capacity theory of comprehension: Individual differences in working memory. Psychological Review, 99:122–149.
Levelt, W. (1989). Speaking From intention to articulation. Cambridge, Ma: MIT Press.
Levelt, W. (1992). Accessing words in speech production: Stages, processes and representations. Cognition, 42:1–22.
Marcus, G. (1998). Rethinking eliminative connectionism. Cognitive Psychology, 37:243–282.
Marcus, M. (1980). A theory of syntactic recognition for natural language. MIT Press Series in Artificial Intelligence. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Nooteboom, S. (1973). The perceptual reality of some prosodic durations. Journal of Phonetics, 1:25–54.
Pinker, S. (1999). Words and rules. London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson.
Slis, I. and Cohen, A. (1969a). On the complex regulating the voicedvoiceless distinction I. Language and Speech, 12:80–102.
Slis, I. and Cohen, A. (1969b). On the complex regulating the voicedvoiceless distinction II. Language and Speech, 12:137–155.
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2002 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Nooteboom, S., Weerman, F., Wijnen, F. (2002). Minimising or Maximising Storage? An Introduction. In: Nooteboom, S., Weerman, F., Wijnen, F. (eds) Storage and Computation in the Language Faculty. Studies in Theoretical Psycholinguistics, vol 30. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-0355-1_1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-0355-1_1
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-1-4020-0527-5
Online ISBN: 978-94-010-0355-1
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive