analysis: unhappiness

[Daniel Everett]

Dick,

I just am not so sure I share the faith in linguistic judgements across the board.

Now *that* is something to test experimentally!

Dan



On 9 Sep 2010, at 08:16, Richard Hudson wrote:

> Thanks Dan. I'm sure you're right, and I'd be the first to agree that conscious judgements are only one kind of evidence that we need to take into account. I admire Carson Schutze's work (which I reviewed in fact), and of course I've been aware of complaints about judgements by people like Labov for decades.
> 
> But you're missing my main point, which is that all judgements aren't equally reliable.  If you want to know how /unhappiness/ is structured, ask a linguist, not a five-year old. And one of the by-products of education may be increased sensitivity to syntax - which is one of the many reasons why linguists need to pay more attention to education.
> 
> Best wishes,  Dick
> 
> Richard Hudson www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/dick/home.htm
> 
> On 09/09/2010 11:39, Daniel Everett wrote:
>> Dick,
>> 
>> You raise an important issue here about methodology. I believe that intuitions are a fine way to generate hypotheses and even to test them - to a degree. But while it might not have been feasible for Huddleston, Pullum, and the other contributors to the Cambridge Grammar to conduct experiments on every point of the grammar, experiments could have only made the grammar better. The use of intuitions, corpora, and standard psycholinguistic experimentation (indeed, Standard Social Science Methodology)  is vital for taking the field forward and for providing the best support for different analyses. Ted Gibson and Ev Fedorenko have written a very useful new paper on this, showing serious shortcomings with intuitions as the sole source of evidence, in their paper: "The need for quantitative methods in syntax and semantics research".
>> 
>> Carson Schutze and Wayne Cowart, among others, have also written convincingly on this.
>> 
>> It is one reason that a team from Stanford, MIT (Brain and Cognitive Science), and researchers from Brazil are beginning a third round of experimental work among the Pirahas, since my own work on the syntax was, like almost every other field researcher's, based on native speaker intuitions and corpora.
>> 
>> The discussion of methodologies reminds me of the initial reactions to Greenberg's work on classifying the languages of the Americas. His methods were strongly (and justifiably) criticized. However, I always thought that his methods were a great way of generating hypotheses, so long as they were ultimately put to the test of standard historical linguistics methods. And the same seems true for use of native-speaker intuitions.
>> 
>> -- Dan
>> 
>>> 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
>>> 
>> 
>> 
>