The Language Perspective by Nicholas Ostler
one has heard. It is a productive skill. We understand new messages by re-configuring memories, actively putting together fragments of past language experience. We produce new utterances likewise. Somehow we are able, not just to mimic past utterances, but to innovate. We apply patterns actively as rules. We speculate about the limits of what is possible, and then we go ahead and explore it. Clearly, memory – fed by teachers who enlarge our experience of past practice – plays a large part in what we call culture, and education. Much of our formal learning is made up essentially of Repetitions: nursery rhymes, songs and poems are learnt as complete structures to be repeated, and so are quotations, even large-scale recitations. If we think about the learning of languages, this is the kind of contribution made by dictionaries
Memory – fed by teachers who enlarge our experience of past practice – plays a large part in what we call culture, and education.
and phrase-books. But there are also items which are learnt not for use ready-made, but rather as abstract recipes, patterns which can be applied either to organize other items, or to indicate their role in larger structures. These range from phonotactic principles for the structure of words (e.g. in English, the sound written ng can only occur to end a syllable) and grammar rules (e.g., inverting subject and main verb can indicate a question) to systems of morphology, such as the principles of conjugation and declension in Latin: and even rhymes predicting the gender of nouns: “To nouns that cannot be declined | The neuter gender is assigned…” It is principles like these which may be applied dynamically to produce more of a language. Although there will be such principles in a dead language (such as old English), they will only exist historically. The corpus of a dead language is now closed – unless it should be revived. But by definition, a living language is open-ended. Its principles apply productively, even innovatively, and are known (usually only implicitly) to all those who are competent in the language. The fault in using language data as a system to implicitly define a language is that it cannot tell which principles are dynamic: and so it misses the distinction between a dead and a living language. At any one time, a corpus contains just the sentences which it does: and so it might as well be representative of a language that will never have any more data.
By definition, a living language is open-ended.
Of course, it is possible to derive rules, statistically or stochastically, which will be compatible with the set of sentences in a corpus. Such rules might be taken as a simple substitute
30