analysis: unhappiness

[Lise Menn]

So we see an important phenomenon: Tacit knowledge really IS tacit,  
and 'intuitions' are very poor guides to what our minds are doing when  
we are using the patterns of our language as speakers/hearers.   
Introspection cannot replace observation of actual usage and  
psycholinguistic experiments; it can only act as a suggestion of where  
to dig.  After all, we can't figure out vision or digestion by  
thinking about how they feel, although we certainly have to account  
for subjective feelings of contrast and indigestion. The same is true  
for language,  mutatis mutandis.

On Sep 8, 2010, at 9:26 AM, Johanna Rubba wrote:

> One thing that consistently occurs in my intro linguistics classes  
> is that at least half of my students do not analyze complex words  
> the way a linguist would -- many would analyze "unhappiness" as "un"  
> + "happiness." They make such analyses over and over. It makes one  
> wonder, of course, about how much native-speaker intuition is in  
> agreement with some linguistic analyses. I can *feel* that the  
> analysis is [[un-happy]-ness], but, apparently, large numbers of  
> native speakers cannot.
>
> Another thing I often find is that many students cannot locate  
> either primary or (especially) secondary stress in words. This is  
> very bizarre, considering that they produce the stresses correctly  
> and hear them correctly in others' speech. So many are unsuccessful  
> at this that I have stopped requiring them to find stress in words  
> on tests. I give them tricks like singing the word and monitoring  
> for the highest-pitched syllable, but the tricks don't work. That  
> many students can't be tone-deaf.
>
> Dr. Johanna Rubba, Ph. D.
> Professor, Linguistics
> Linguistics Minor Advisor
> English Dept.
> Cal Poly State University San Luis Obispo
> San Luis Obispo, CA 93407
> Ofc. tel. : 805-756-2184
> Dept. tel.: 805-756-2596
> Dept. fax: 805-756-6374
> E-mail: jrubba at calpoly.edu
> URL: http://cla.calpoly.edu/~jrubba
>
>
>

Lise Menn                      Home Office: 303-444-4274
1625 Mariposa Ave	Fax: 303-413-0017
Boulder CO 80302
http://spot.colorado.edu/~menn/index.html	

Professor Emerita of Linguistics
Fellow, Institute of Cognitive Science
University of  Colorado

Secretary, AAAS Section Z [Linguistics]
Fellow, Linguistic Society of America

Campus Mail Address:
UCB 594, Institute for Cognitive Science

Campus Physical Address:
CINC 234
1777 Exposition Ave, Boulder