analysis: phenomenological vs. cognitive

[Martin Haspelmath]

Lise Menn wrote:
> I wish we had better terminology for keeping track of whether, at a 
> given time, we are talking about the patterns that are 'out there' in 
> the language and might possibly be apprehended (subconsciously) by a 
> speaker, and when we are talking about the patterns that a particular 
> speaker actually does apprehend, as indicated by experiments, from 
> simple 'wug tests' up to brain wave and eye-gaze studies. 
I suggested two terms for these kinds of patterns in a 2004 paper 
(reference below):

– phenomenological description (for what is "out there", or "grammars 
that are based simply on the form-meaning correspondences", in Edith 
Moravcsik's terms)

– cognitive description (for what a speaker has in their head)

In the paper my main claim is that we don't really need cognitive 
description in order to explain the patterns of languages in functional 
terms (just as Darwin didn't need full descriptions of genomes to come 
up with functional explanations of the phenomenological properties of 
species).

In generative linguistics, of course, one needs a unique "analysis" for 
each structure, because explanation and description/analysis are the 
same enterprise (just two different aspects of it), whereas in 
functional linguistics, description and explanation are separate. Thus, 
the fact that the best cognitive description is somewhat elusive doesn't 
matter to this approach.

Martin


Reference:
Haspelmath, Martin. 2004. Does linguistic explanation presuppose 
linguistic description? Studies in Language 28. 554-579. 
(doi:10.1075/sl.28.3.06has)

-- 
Martin Haspelmath (haspelmath at eva.mpg.de)
Max-Planck-Institut fuer evolutionaere Anthropologie, Deutscher Platz 6	
D-04103 Leipzig      
Tel. (MPI) +49-341-3550 307, (priv.) +49-341-980 1616