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CHAPTER 1

What do these changes of molecular arrangement correspond to? Can one's brain be changed in such a way that an anecdote memorized 25 years ago and not recalled once in the last fifteen can still come back verbatim? Anyone who has ever memorized and remembered anything in any language must answer this question in the affirmative. Of course it happens. A-L makes much of it; T-C makes considerably less. Can one summon up remembered sentences and use them to solve an immediate problem in sentence construction? Again, this is a common experience of language learners, and again the schools differ in the relative weight that they give to this human ability. T-C errs only when it claims that these phenomena should be totally excluded from the methodology of language teaching.

Are there instances of speech that cannot be accounted for in this way? Certainly there are, and T-C writers never tire of furnishing examples. The assertion of T-C that 'a language is a set of principles establishing correlations between meanings and sound sequences' (Langacker, 1967, p. 35) is largely true. Indeed, A-L writers have recognized its truth in many of their grammar notes, and give lip service to it whenever they repeat after Bloch and Trager that a language is a system (and not just a set) of oral symbols. T-C, of course, is characterized by greater emphasis on this undisputed fact, and A-L by less. What we mean to emphasize here is that the neuronal molecules are inaccessible to direct control from outsiders. Because they are inaccessible, any method of must come to terms with the. This may take place in any of a number of ways, and these will be the subject of the following section.