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 To join or leave this LISTSERV list, please visit the list's web interface at: http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/ateg.html and select "Join or leave the list" Visit ATEG's web site at http://ateg.org/ --------------------------------- Take the Internet to Go: Yahoo!Go puts the Internet in your pocket: mail, news, photos & more. To join or leave this LISTSERV list, please visit the list's web interface at: http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/ateg.html and select "Join or leave the list" Visit ATEG's web site at http://ateg.org/