Systematicity

     The concept of systematicity is very important to a modern theory of language learning because it helps explain not only how learners can produce and understand utterances they have never heard before, but also how they can acquire languages as rapidly as they do. A learner does not have to learn every form of a word and every possible sentence it could be used in in order to produce or understand it in all of those forms and sentences. In other words, it is systematicity that allows us to produce and comprehend an infinite number of novel utterances. For example, a learner who learns the word ‘paraphrase’ will by systematicity also be able to comprehend or produce related words such as ‘paraphrases’, ‘paraphrasing’, and ‘paraphrased’. In this way, she can also produce her own sentences such as “He told me that I must paraphrase the text, but I didn't know what ‘paraphrase’ meant.” She doesn’t have to learn all of the separate units of the entire language in order to understand them and produce them. Furthermore, she is by no means limited to just imitating or repeating the utterances she has heard or read. With systematicity, one new piece of knowledge can affect the existing system to allow that learner to do a multitude of new things. It is as if the one new thing becomes several thousand new things. Systematicity is one of the chief characteristics of the ability to communicate in a language as well as the acquisition of that very ability.