transient enhancement of general structural procedures rather than the enhanced retrievalor use of specific stored information.If this is so, it
becomes difficult to use frequency effects as symptoms of simple retrieval processes.
Bock is assuming the standard distinction between words and rules (“general structural procedures”), espoused even
by Pinker (see discussion in section 6.2.3). She thereforefinds syntactic priming rather puzzling, since priming is
supposed to be characteristic of words.
However, recall how we ended up treating principles of phrase structure in Chapter 6). We found a cline of stored
linguistic forms, from ordinary words, through idioms (which have complex syntactic structure), through
constructions (which have syntactic structure and a meaning but contain variables), all the way to phrase structure
rules—which have syntactic structure containing variables but no meaning. That is, in terms of storage, pieces of
phrase structure are not as unlike words as Bock assumes. The onlyproceduralrule in the grammar—what Bock calls a
“general structural procedure”—is the operation UNIFY.
Our view of lexical storage thus suggests that syntactic integration involves not only integrating words into a structure
in working memory, but also building that structure by retrieving stored“treelets”of phrase structure fro mlongter m
memory. Thus perhaps within the present view the priming of syntactic structure is less of a surprise: it follows from
exactly the same principles as word priming. So here is a case where the appropriate competence theory helps make
better sense of a performance phenomenon.
7.5 Structure-constrained modularity
7.5.1 Fodor's view and an alternative
We now leave the details of processing behind and turn to one of the dominating issues in the study of language
processing: the question of itsmodularity. The most prominent exposition of modularity, of course, is Jerry Fodor'sThe
Modularity of Mind(1983); Fodor has maintained the essentials of the position as recently as Fodor (2000a). As in the
treatment of Aspects, I will concur with Fodor's overall agenda and many specifics, but I will offer a different
realization.^109
218 ARCHITECTURAL FOUNDATIONS
(^109) I should caution the reader that I will be reading Fodor very literally. My impression is that modularity is understood somewhat differently—and more reasonably—in the
lore, without anyone noticing that this is not what Fodor proposed.