[Avery Andrews 920502.1856]
(Bruce Nevin 920501.1045)
Are you dispensing with the distinction between ungrammatical but
meaningful utterances like these and the (purportedly) meaningless but
grammatical "colorless green ideas sleep furiously."
No. I'm suggesting that normal grammatical processing is different from
the process whereby people might understand syntactically distorted
language (before they got used to it, and changed their grammar to suit).
I'd assume that unconscious correction of the input is a a consequence
of controlling for `perceive a well-formed sentence-structure', which
can to some extent be achieved by overriding/overrwriting the input
(keeping in mind that the input is frequently unstressed, garbled, etc.,
so this over-ride/write facility is perhaps very useful even when the
input is well-formed, as far as it goes.)
Avery.Andrews@anu.edu.au
(currently andrews@csli.stanford.edu)