analysis: unhappiness

dryer at buffalo.edu dryer at buffalo.edu
Fri Sep 10 22:33:49 UTC 2010


Aya,

I actually agree with everything you say here.  Personally, I am MORE 
interested in the communicative function of language than I am in 
psycholinguistics and how people process language.

But none of that is relevant, I believe, to the very specific question of 
what it means for an analysis to be correct.  While one might conclude from 
what I said that one ought to do psycholinguistics, that is not my 
intention.  Rather, my conclusion is that since I myself prefer not to do 
psycholinguistics, I cannot really claim that the analyses I come up with 
are "the correct" ones.  And if it is really important to someone that they 
identify "correct" analyses, then they ought to be doing psycholinguistics, 
since there is no coherent notion of correct analysis outside of what is 
inside of people's heads.

Matthew

--On Friday, September 10, 2010 12:09 PM -0700 "A. Katz" <amnfn at well.com> 
wrote:

> Matthew,
>
> Thanks for stating that, because I was almost beginning to imagine that
> there was no essential disagreement, and that all of us agree that there
> is more  -- and less -- to language than what is found in people's heads.
>
> Your position is the one I am familiar with from the functionalist point
> of view, and I was beginning to feel that it was underrepresented on
> Funknet.
>
> Those of us who disagree with your stated position -- but are very
> familiar with it -- are interested not just in psycholinguistics and how
> people process language -- but also in the communicative function of
> language as a system whereby information is transferred. Just as you and
> I may not be aware of the way our emails are encoded and then decoded by
> the computers that help us send emails back and forth, speakers may be
> compeltely unaware of what language does in order to transmit information.
>
> After speakers have finished sending forth their linguistic output, it
> matters not at all how they arrived at this output. Language processing
> is separate from language in the same way that data processing is
> separate from data.
>
> Best,
>
>        --Aya
>
>
> On Fri, 10 Sep 2010, dryer at buffalo.edu wrote:
>
>>
>> The following sentence of Lise's
>>
>> "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'"
>>
>> suggests that there are two senses in which an analysis can be "the
>> correct  analysis", one in terms of what is in people's heads, the other
>> in terms of  what is "out there".
>>
>> There are a vast number of patterns "out there".  The only distinction,
>> on my  view, amongst this vast number of patterns, is between those that
>> reflect  something inside people's heads and those that don't.  But if
>> that is the  case, then there is no coherent sense in which one can talk
>> of "the correct  analysis" of what is "out there", except in terms of
>> what is in people's  heads, and thus no second sense of "the correct
>> analysis".  The patterns that  don't correspond to things in people's
>> heads fall into (at least) two  categories.  There are those that are
>> akin to constellations of stars and, as  with constellations, there is
>> no reality to these patterns, except in the  minds of linguists.  And
>> there are those patterns which are the fossil  remains of what was in
>> the heads of speakers of an earlier stage of the  language but which no
>> longer are.  These latter patterns are real, and they  are relevant to
>> exlaining why the language is now the way it is, but they are  not
>> relevant, I think many would agree, as to what is the "correct analysis"
>> of the language today.
>>
>> For this reason, I claim that the only sense in which an analysis can be
>> "the  correct analysis" is in terms of what is inside of people's heads.
>>
>> Again, I recommend the work of Bruce Derwing for lengthy discussion of
>> these  issues.
>>
>> Matthew
>>
>> --On Thursday, September 9, 2010 5:26 PM -0600 Lise Menn
>> <Lise.Menn at Colorado.EDU> 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
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>
>>> Lise Menn                      Home Office: 303-444-4274
>>> 1625 Mariposa Ave       Fax: 303-413-0017
>>> Boulder CO 80302
>>>
>>> Professor Emerita of Linguistics
>>> Fellow, Institute of Cognitive Science
>>> University of  Colorado
>>>
>>> Secretary, AAAS Section Z [Linguistics]
>>>
>>> Campus Mail Address:
>>> UCB 594, Institute of Cognitive Science
>>>
>>> Campus Physical Address:
>>> CINC 234
>>> 1777 Exposition Ave, Boulder
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>
>



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