Speakers predictably make errors during spontaneous speech. Listeners may identify such errors and repair the input, or their analysis of the input, accordingly. Two written questionnaire studies investigated error compensation mechanisms in sentences with doubled quantifiers such as Many students often turn in their assignments late. Results show a considerable number of undoubled interpretations for all items tested (though fewer for sentences containing doubled negation than for sentences containing many-often, every-always, or few-seldom). This evidence shows that the compositional form-meaning pairing supplied by the grammar is not the only systematic mapping between form and meaning. Implicit knowledge of the workings of the performance systems provides an additional mechanism for pairing sentence form and meaning. Alternate accounts of the data based on either a concord interpretation or an emphatic interpretation of the doubled quantifier do not explain why listeners fail to apprehend the ‘extra meaning’ added by the potentially redundant material only in limited circumstances.

In addition to providing an account of the empirical facts of language, a theory that aspires to account for language as a biologically based human faculty should seek a graceful integration of linguistic phenomena with what is known about other human cognitive capacities and about the character of brain computation. The present discussion note compares the theoretical stance of biolinguistics (Chomsky 2005, Di Sciullo & Boeckx 2011) with a constraint-based parallel architecture approach to the language faculty (Jackendoff 2002, Culicover & Jackendoff 2005). The issues considered include the necessity of redundancy in the lexicon and the rule system, the ubiquity of recursion in cognition, derivational vs. constraint-based formalisms, the relation between lexical items and grammatical rules, the roles of phonology and semantics in the grammar, the combinatorial character of thought in humans and nonhumans, the interfaces between language, thought, and vision, and the possible course of evolution of the language faculty. In each of these areas, the parallel architecture offers a superior account both of the linguistic facts and of the relation of language to the rest of the mind/brain.