Jawsome!: Linguistic evidence for dual route models of language

Abstract

Psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic researchers (e.g. Townsend & Bever 2001; Ullman 2004) have presented evidence for dual route models of human language processing. This paper provides additional linguistic evidence. While some novel English words are straightforwardly combinatorial (e.g. un-Eddie-like), many headlines illustrate morphological memory-based operations that do not follow the standard combinatorial route. Such phenomena are not limited to the outputs of creative English-speaking subeditors. Nicknames in Polish, French, Indonesian and English demonstrate this second morphological route at work in everyday conversations. Similarly, for inflectional morphology, Pinker (1998) argues for dual routes: one route for regular forms, and a second for irregular as well as high-frequency inflectional forms. In this paper, these arguments are extended to syntactic co-ordination, demonstrating how syntactic intricacies flow from a neurolinguistically and psycholinguistically grounded model.