analysis: unhappiness
Lise Menn
Lise.Menn at Colorado.EDU
Sat Sep 11 00:40:47 UTC 2010
Matt, I have to disagree with you on the validity of describing what's
'out there' (what Dick Hudson says is his interest, in his
contribution of 5:40:06 PM MDT today). We DO have to account for it
in order to understand how 'the language in speakers' heads' gets into
those heads in the first place.
In more detail: Each of us is immersed from (before) birth in a
sampling of utterances (and if we are literate, eventually also
written forms of the language). In order to understand how we really
create our internal representations of our language, we have to know
(or be able to estimate) something about the data our brains get as
input. There are at least better and worse descriptions of the
patterns in those data, and certainly there are wrong ones, though in
many cases - for example in the 'unhappiness' case - there are
probably conflicting right ones, rather than any single correct one.
(OT offers some help in thinking about this.)
To take a concrete example, in order to account for the still-
unstable changes in English pronominal case marking in compound NP
objects of prepositions from a system based on syntactic case (He gave
the cookies to Mary and me) to a system apparently based partly on
whether the pronoun is next to the governing preposition (He gave the
cookies to Mary and I/ to me and Mary), you first have to do an
analysis of usage and figure out what the pattern is. And usage is
not in our heads (although it's the result of what's in our heads),
it's 'out there'.
Even fossils and obscure patterns contribute to the redundancy of the
language, making it more learnable and and helping to create the
resonances used by great poets and orators. (I admit to having
oversimplified in speaking as if there were always one 'correct'
analysis of the patterns 'out there' that might be (subconsciously)
discoverable by speakers. That's not true.) And because not all
speakers are equally sensitive to language patterns - again, the
Gleitman and Gleitman book is a terrific example - it's also an
oversimplification to talk about 'what is in speaker's heads' as if
the same thing is in everyone's head. (K.P. Mohanan has also published
on this.) At the lexical level, Danielle Cyr's examples (September 9,
2010 8:38:59 PM MDT) further remind us that what's inside each
person's head changes over time. So we must also be careful not to
idealize "what's in people's heads" as if it were a single coherent
construct that we are trying to discover. It's not - it's more like a
complex mosaic that does not fit together perfectly.
Lise
On Sep 10, 2010, at 12:51 PM, 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
>>
>>
>>
>>
>
>
>
>
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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