In a recent airing of methodological concerns in the analysis of spontaneous speech
samples, Lakshmanan and Selinker (2001) suggest that Lardiere (1998a) should have
carried out analyses of lexical aspect and discourse grounding in determining
obligatory contexts for past tense marking. Failure to do so, they argue, renders
the work in question susceptible to the comparative fallacy (Bley-Vroman, 1983). In
this reply I would like to briefly address some of the problems with that argument,
while showing that such analyses could themselves introduce a comparative fallacy problem.
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