ABSTRACT
Linguistic rules have been widely studied as a means of capturing and applying a broad range of language knowledge, from generation of phoneme strings to discourse understanding. Somewhere between these two extremes, considerable effort has been spent on understanding the role of linguistic rules in inflectional morphology, and particularly in the generation of English past tense verbs. Although an impoverished example of a rule-based system, the English past tense has provided the foundation of a debate that can either further support the traditional theory, or provide insight into perhaps a new way of accounting for linguistic knowledge; namely, a connectionist approach.
