by attribution to

[diamondcutter]

That is to say, we sincerely doubt that language acquisition could ever be accounted for by attribution to a single process such habit formation or rule formation.

Source: The Grammar Book--An ESL/EFL Teacher’s Course, the second edition, Marianne Celce-Murcia and Diane Larsen-Freeman

I didn’t find any example of the use of “by attribution to” in dictionaries, so I don’t quite understand this sentence.

If “attribution” was replaced with a gerund “attributing”, that would be easier to understand. What do you say?

 

[5jj]

Dictionary definitions of nouns do not list every combination of prepositions possible with it. The original sentence is fine.

 

[emsr2d2]

Did you copy the definition exactly? There's a word missing after "such".

 

[5jj]

I missed that.

 

[diamondcutter]

Sorry, I missed the word "as" after "such". I've corrected the mistake.

 

[Tdol]

It would have to have an object if you used attributing. It would make the sentence messier for me.

 

[jutfrank]

I don’t quite understand this sentence.

You cannot attribute language learning to a single process. In other words, more than one process is needed in order to learn a language.