Words and rules：（单词和规则）.pdfVIP

Words and Rules Steven Pinker Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences Massachusetts Institute of Technology I am deeply grateful to my collaborators on this project: Alan Prince, Gary Marcus, Michael Ullman, Sandeep Prasada, Harald Clahsen, Richard Wiese, Anne Senghas, Fei Xu, and Suzanne Corkin. Preparation of this paper was supported by NIH Grant HD 18381. Author’s address: E10-016, MIT, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA. 1 Abstract The vast expressive power of language is made possible by two principles: the arbitrary sound- meaning pairing underlying words, and the discrete combinatorial system underlying grammar. These principles implicate distinct cognitive mechanisms: associative memory and symbol- manipulating rules. The distinction may be seen in the difference between regular inflection (e.g., walk-walked), which is productive and open-ended and hence implicates a rule, and irregular inflection (e.g., come-came, which is idiosyncratic and closed and hence implicates individually memorized words. Nonetheless, two very different theories have attempted to collapse the distinction; generative phonology invokes minor rules to generate irregular as well as regular forms, and connectionism invokes a pattern associator memory to store and retrieve regular as well as irregular forms. I present evidence from three disciplines that supports the traditional word/rule distinction, though with an enriched conception of lexical memory with some of the properties of a pattern-associator. R