analysis: unhappiness

[A. Katz]

Lise,

I like very much the terminology that you used here: "what is out there 
in a language" versus the way it is "apprehended by a speaker."

The problem is that too many of our colleagues don't agree that there is 
such a distinction-- or that language could ever possibly be out there! 
They think language exists only in the mind of speakers, and they look for 
uniformity of processing where none exists. That language is an 
abstraction and that each speaker has to crack the code individually and 
alone is not universally accepted among linguists.

Best,

  --Aya


On Thu, 9 Sep 2010, 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.  And for distinguishing among the degrees of 
> pattern apprehension that a person may have, from vague preferences 
> detectable in reaction times or other behavior all the way up through clear 
> metalinguistic insights.  Dick Hudson's note reminding us of the Gleitman and 
> Gleitman study is right on target.
>
> 	Since we don't in fact have such an agreed-on terminology, we have to 
> be quite careful in making clear what we are referring to when we talk about 
> 'the correct analysis' of a form like 'unhappiness'.  We know, but tend to 
> forget - and tend to forget to tell our students! - that it's an empirical 
> question as to whether the formal simplicity and coherence of description of 
> forms 'out there' (e.g. lovely abstract morphophonemics) is any kind of 
> approximation to the way knowledge of the same forms is organized in a 
> particular person's head.  If we remember that a very large proportion of 
> what we know about our language is 'out there' when we are infants and has to 
> be internalized through experience with the language (even if you believe in 
> innate 'core language'), the variation in internal knowledge from one person 
> to another is more understandable.
> 		We especially need to consider (and try to test) the 
> possibility that since
> the brain can make multiple cross-connections, multiple patterns are involved
> simultaneously in morphological and syntactic analyses. I suggest that that's 
> the case with 'unhappiness' - and the linguistic analyses that I know about 
> are not good at handling that kind of idea.
>
> 	Lise
>
> On Sep 9, 2010, at 8:00 AM, Matthew S. Dryer wrote:
>
>> 
>> Two comments.
>> 
>> First (elaborating perhaps on Dick Hudson's comment), I think there is an
>> important distinction between low-level linguistic intuitions (like whether 
>> a
>> word or sentence is well-formed or what it means) and higher-level 
>> intuitions
>> (like what the structure of a word or sentence is).  One can take the 
>> position
>> that we need to account for the former (while recognizing that they are not
>> always reliable) but not the latter.
>> 
>> Second, the tension here is not only between evidence from speaker 
>> intuitions
>> versus evidence from psycholinguistic experiments.  There is also a tension
>> between deciding on the correct analysis on the basis of a priori 
>> simplicity
>> arguments versus deciding on the correct analysis on the basis of
>> psycholinguistic evidence (see Derwing 1973).  The bracketing paradox that 
>> Dan
>> referred to that arises with the word <unhappier> (semantics argues for
>> [[un+happi] + er], morphology and phonology argues for [un + [happi+er]] 
>> (the
>> comparative suffix can only be attached to adjectives containing one or two
>> syllables) is only a paradox if one assumes that speakers adopt the 
>> simplest
>> analysis.  For example, if speakers adopt a more complex rule for either of 
>> these
>> (e.g. perhaps the rule for attaching -er can apply exceptionally to 
>> trisyllabic
>> words beginning with un-), then the bracketing paradox disappears.
>> 
>> Matthew
>> 
>> On Thu 09/09/10  8:16 AM , Richard Hudson dick at ling.ucl.ac.uk sent:
>>> 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
>>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>> 
>
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