wseiber railed Do you mean on the speaker's or on the listener's side?
and do you mean true exceptions or ad hoc violations of the rules?

And what is the criterion for failure of the pattern-matching?

And what else but a science can answer these questions?


In order:

1. Either.
2. Either or.
3. Misperceptions.
4. Nothing.

But none of your questions are only artifacts of linguistics, they are issues related to the way our brains interpret sensory information. All of your questions would be just as valid if we were talking about vision (or visionistics?), or our sense of smell (odouristics?), or our sense of touch, yadda, yadda.

Linguistics can call itself a science all it wants, but in my view it remains nothing but a post-hoc study of what was and is. Where science can materially affect the way our computers will operate in the future, it won't make the slightest bit of difference to the way we speak or write.

There are no "defining moments" out there in linguistics which would make some ancient Greek run down the street without so much as a bath towel, yelling some unintelligible word until the cops grab him up for indecent exposure and inclement discovery.

It may be a simple failure of my imagination, but I really can't conceive of something that a student of linguistics might discover that will change the way we look at or use language into the future. As far as language is concerned there is only archaeology, I'm afraid.

But that's interesting enough for me!


The idiot also known as Capfka ...