LING 355 Lecture Notes - Lecture 26: Lexical Item, Steven Pinker
Document Summary
Overgeneralization (or overregularization) of regular morphology to irregular cases: bringed instead of brought, comed instead of came, foots instead of feet, etc. The idea is that the child knows there can only be one linguistic form. The child uses a productive rule to produce forms like "bringed" Then the child hears "brought" in the input and this "drives out" the to express the same meaning. competing form, by means of positive evidence. approach, though they give it different names. Both constructivists and generativists assume something like this. In some cases a different lexical item could serve as the positive evidence to drive out the overgeneralization: unclose = open unfreeze = thaw. They will not assume that various argument structures are possible unless they get positive evidence to that effect from the input. Problem: this predicts no errors of overgeneralization of argument structure, contrary to fact.
