1 Emergence The Emergent Lexicon Joan

In the traditional view, the lexicon is a storage area for all and only the content words or morphemes of a language. The lexicon is relatively static compared to the grammar, which contains all the moving parts of sentence generation: in the metaphor of a dictionary, lexical items are just passive items on a list which wait to be recruited into syntactic structures. In this conception also, memory for linguistic material is thought to be lodged primarily in the lexicon while the grammar is not so much a matter of memory as it is of abstract structure. Rather than arguing that a lexicon of this type does not exist, I am going to argue that if such a lexicon does exist it is because it is emergent from the storage of linguistic experience, which is of a very different nature than the traditional conception of a lexicon would suggest. The point of this paper, then, is to explore the properties of stored linguistic experience. The data examined provide support for the proposals that much of linguistic knowledge is procedural knowledge, that chunks of linguistic experience much larger than the analytic units of morphemes or even words are the usual units of storage and processing, that there is no real separation of lexicon from grammar, and that phonological alternations whose domain is larger than a word can indicate the size of processing units. This paper obviously owes a great deal to the 1987 paper of Paul Hopper's to which the title alludes: "Emergent Grammar". In fact, my basic point is the same as the one Hopper made in that paper: that the 'knowledge' underlying the fluent use of language is not grammar in the sense of abstract structure, but is rather a large store of categorized and sorted previous utterances which form the basis for the production and comprehension of new utterances. The only difference between Hopper's approach and mine is that his goal was the explication of the view of grammar that arises from such a theory and mine will be the view of the lexicon that is entailed by this theory. Since we would both argue that the grammar and lexicon are not separable, our papers are both about really about the same set of issues.