analysis: unhappiness

[Richard Hudson]

  This discussion about the role of native-speaker intuition treats all 
native speakers and all levels of language equally. And yet we all agree 
with Joanna when she says "I can *feel* that the analysis is 
[[un-happy]-ness], but, apparently, large numbers of native speakers 
cannot. " Why? Certainly not because we've got psycholinguistic evidence 
on this particular word. Isn't it something to do with maturity and 
training for the speakers, and meaningfulness for the levels?

Think of that classic 1979 experiment by the Gleitmans that found 
massive differences in sensitivity to language structure with both age 
and education, so that /eat house bird/ is interpreted as 'a house-bird 
who is very eat' by students with a PhD (but not in linguistics) but as 
'everybody is eating up their pet birds' by clerical staff. In this 
case, as in the other examples they tried, the more educated were right 
(by our standards) and the less educated were wrong. They also found big 
differences in reliability from level to level, with semantic judgements 
easiest and most reliable and phonological judgements least reliable, 
and syntax in between. That's presumably because ordinary speakers spend 
most of their time grappling with meaning ('Look after the sense and the 
sounds will look after themselves', as someone said to Alice in 
Wonderland).

We linguists can add a further layer of explanation to the judgements, 
but some judgements do seem to be more reliable than others. And if we 
have to wait for psycholinguistic evidence for every detailed analysis 
we make, our whole discipline will immediately grind to a halt. Like it 
or not, native speaker judgements are what put us linguists ahead of the 
rest in handling fine detail. Imagine writing the Cambridge Grammar of 
the English Language (or the OED) without using native speaker judgements.

Best wishes,  Dick Hudson


Richard Hudson www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/dick/home.htm

On 09/09/2010 02:20, Johanna Rubba wrote:
> The reason I make much of my students' disagreements with linguists' analyses is that, at least as I recall from my graduate education, native-speaker intuitions were routinely used in defense of analyses of sentence structure. I agree completely with Lise that introspection alone is not sufficient for defending an analysis.
>
> I never meant to suggest that my students store complex words disconnected from their component parts. Such a notion would be bizarre for a practitioner of Cognitive Grammar. Plus, the behavior I described doesn't contradict network connections; it challenges the usefulness of NS intuitions, which would, in turn, challenge analyses defended based on same. It's odd that, in some cases, students' tacit knowledge can be brought to consciousness, and in other cases not.
>
> It seems clear that context (including priming) affects a language-user's analysis. Certainly, many expressions that sound odd out of context sound perfectly fine in a suitable context.
>
> Jo
>
> On Sep 8, 2010, at 6:03 PM, Tom Givon wrote:
>
>
> Right on, Lise. And further, there is a well-known experimental technique called "semantic priming" that is admirably well suited for investigating whether when a language used hears "unhappiness", "happy" and "happiness" are activated ('come to mind'). This technique will probably not answer the question of the differential bracketing (un[happiness] vs. [unhappy]ness). And it is too rough to answer questions of directionality (does "unhappy" prime "happy" stronger than vice versa?). But it does tends to suggest that we don't store complex words in total disconnect from their parts, at least not as frequent adult users. And that phonological similarity (shared parts of words) has semantic consequences.  Cheers,  TG
>
> ==============
>
>
> Lise Menn wrote:
>> 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
>>
>>
>>
>
> Dr. Johanna Rubba, Professor, Linguistics
> Linguistics Minor Advisor
> English Department
> California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo
> E-mail: jrubba at calpoly.edu
> Tel.: 805.756.2184
> Dept. Ofc. Tel.: 805.756.2596
> Dept. Fax: 805.756.6374
> URL: http://www.cla.calpoly.edu/~jrubba
>
>
>