Don't we induce most grammar rules?  My son recently used the word "sitted" instead of the standard "sat."  This seems to be a generalization of the rule for making past tense applied to a word which doesn't make its past tense that way.  He has rarely, if ever, heard the word "sitted," and often heard the word "sat," yet the generalization from the maybe tens of thousands of instances of how the past tense should be made seems to be stronger than the probably hundreds  of examples of how the past tense of "sit" should be made.  
   
  Scott Woods

Johanna Rubba <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
  We learn most of what we know about the world from induction, if that 
is defined as extracting generalizations (rules) from experience. A 
prime example is how vocabulary is learned: the vast majority of 
words a child learns are learned inductively by observing the context 
of use. But we learn so many things this way: I recently learned by 
trial and error the "rule" of how many minutes it takes to ruin a raw 
egg in the microwave. A child learns that a tower of blocks can go 
only so high because very high ones keep toppling over.

But I have to admit the terminology confuses me. Sherlock Holmes 
"deduced" many of his conclusions regarding crimes by extracting 
information from evidence. Is this a different use of "deduce", or am 
I just hopelessly confused about the whole issue?

Dr. Johanna Rubba, Associate Professor, Linguistics
Linguistics Minor Advisor
English Department
California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo
E-mail: [log in to unmask]
Tel.: 805.756.2184
Dept. Ofc. Tel.: 805.756.2596
Dept. Fax: 805.756.6374
URL: http://www.cla.calpoly.edu/~jrubba

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