which had been served by a steward during her flight from Helsinki to Tokyo filed a paternity suit against the airline.Suppose, too, that you were asked the following questions:
(1) Did you understand what was said?
(2a) Do you think that you have ever heard of a princess who claimed that she was made pregnant by eating reindeer sukiyaki and had filed a paternity suit based on that claim? Or, more specifically, do you think you have ever experienced that particular sentence before?
(2b) Could you produce a sentence that in all likelihood no one includ- ing yourself had ever experienced before but which you and others could understand?
(3a) Is the sentence a well-formed English sentence? (Sentences like Went played waitress, The table which the purchased was expen- sive, and The triangle elapsed are not well-formed.)
(3b) If the word claimed were deleted from the sentence, would the remaining string of words provide a well-formed sentence?
(3c) If the word foreign were deleted, would the remaining string be well-formed?
(4a) The sentence is about 40 words long. Could you make it longer and still keep it well-formed?
(4b) Is there any fixed number of words beyond which you could not make the sentence longer and still keep it well-formed?
(5) In the environment where you read the sentence, were there any relevant cues that assisted you in understanding the sentence? For example, was there a foreign princess around and did she claim pregnancy?
Undoubtedly, as would most speakers, you would have given an affirmative reply to questions ( 1 ), ( 2b ), ( 3a ), ( 3c ), and ( 4a ), and a negative reply to the others. Such a highly replicable empirical phe- nomenon serves to illustrate. a number of important facts about the abi- lities of people who know a language (hereafter, speakers). It estab- lishes that speakers can produce and understand sentences which they have never experienced before, both in terms of their unique content (novelty) and length, and can assess the well-formedness (grammatical- ity) of such sentences even without the presence of any relevant en- vironmental context. The fact that speakers can make sentences longer without any preset limit as to length also implies another speaker abil- ity, the ability to produce and understand an unlimited number of sen- tences, since, with each lengthening, a new sentence occurs. Without lengthening, the potential number of sentences would be finite, for, given the finite vocabulary of the language, any fixed length would make the number of possible sentences finite (although astronomically large) even if all possible substitutions of vocabulary items were permit- ted. Of course, the number of sentences any speaker will produce or
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Publication Information: Book Title: Psycholinguistics: Language, Mind, and World. Contributors: Danny D. Steinberg - author. Publisher: Longman. Place of Publication: London. Publication Year: 1982. Page Number: 2.
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