towards an analysis of errors made by university students ... - DSpace

45
"extends beyond the level of sounds, intonation
patterns and rhythms of language to groups of
sounds or lexical words. We also store
object-hypotheses of words and perhaps groups
of words which habitually occur together". 33
Such a recognition becomes possible - linguistically
speaking
- because
"the sentence of a language can be described
in terms of a finite set of 'rules'... This
means that we must use 'rules' rather than
lists". 34
This economical way is the one by which we are able to recognize
sentences since it takes the least possible 'mental' storage
space.
The next phase concerns sampling "the incoming data
and, on the basis of our sampling, predict the structure of the
utterance and act accordingly". 35 This ability to anticipate,
or predict, is a fundamental skill in language use and language
learning, and it is said to
comprise
"a very big part of what we have called
linguistic competence... And any ability to
anticipate or predict is based on a knowledge
of rules. That is why language is often called
'rule-governed' behaviour". 36
Thus, we need to internalize the grammatical and the lexical
rules; the latter have to do with the semantic structure of the
language.
"Identification is*^therefore) the process of
recognizing utterances as grammatically and
semantically wel1-formed". 37
Understanding is the psychological process which presupposes
identification. Besides the identification of utterances as