FUNKNET] analysis: unhappiness

[Chris Butler]

Dick's comment that "this discussion raises the really fundamental question of what kind of thing we think language is: social or individual" is, it seems to me, an important one, particularly for those of us who are committed functionalists. My own view is that a truly functional model of language would be one which aims to account for how human beings communicate using language, or in other words tries to answer the question which was posed by Simon Dik a long time ago now, but which was not tackled head-on in his own work: "How does the natural language user work?' In trying to answer this question we need to accept that language is BOTH social AND individual, and we need to explore both aspects to get as complete a picture as possible of how we communicate using language. We need to know BOTH how people create and respond to meanings and express those meanings in forms during social interaction AND the mechanisms which operate in the brains of individuals in order to make such interaction possible. Both are important parts of the answer to the question 'How do we communicate using language?', though this particular thread of the Funknet discussion has concentrated more on the second aspect, and so will I.

This doesn't mean that all the work linguists have done on "exploring the structure of a language so that I can understand how all the bits fit together" and "exploring the connections between items", as Dick puts it, is useless - far from it. After all, the hypotheses that psycholinguists test are based on ideas about what languages are like. But it does mean, in my view, that ultimately we need to get evidence that the constructs and analyses we propose are ones that are at least consistent with what we know of the  processes which go on when we use language. So I am with Matthew when he says that for him, "the only sense in which an analysis can be "the correct analysis" is in terms of what is inside of people's heads". Of course, this doesn't imply that linguists should just give up their jobs until such time as we know everything there is to know about language processing. But it does mean that we need to collaborate with psycholinguists, psychologists and neurologists, as has also been pointed out by linguists such as Ray Jackendoff, Asif Agha, Ewa Dabrowska and Jan Nuyts. [We also need to collaborate much more with sociolinguists and sociologists, so that we can get a better handle on the sociocultural aspects of how we communicate.]  And it also means that psycholinguists, for their part, need whenever possible to follow up tightly controlled lab experiments with studies under more naturalistic conditions, to avoid the criticism that what happens in artifical lab situations may not happen in natural communicative conditions. 

I also agree with Dick when he says that "the differences between individuals really matter", and with Lise when she points out that "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". However, there are surely processing mechanisms which are common to all language users by virtue of the evolution of the language faculty and which constitute the "general processes" which Dick says psycholinguists are interested in. 

On the issue of quantitative methodology, I'm sympathetic in general to Ted and Ev's views, though it does seem sensible to prioritise cases in terms of a hierarchy such as Brian suggests. One thing this means is that we should be giving our university students of linguistics (and some of our linguistics lecturers!) courses in quantitative aspects of linguistics that introduce them to the use of at least some of the basic statistical methods in language study, and I'm sure this is indeed going on in some enlightened places. To those who suspect this can't be done with maths-shy students who don't initially see the need for it, I offer my own experience, over quite a long period, of teaching such courses to people with little or no prior experience in quantitative techniques. For some years in the 1990s, I taught such courses to all linguistics students in an institution where we had many mature students who had come into university level studies with non-standard qualifications, and were not well equipped for courses of this kind by their previous experience. I'm glad to say that teaching the subject from their own perspective as language students rather than that of the statistician, and explaining the reasons for doing things in particular ways rather than just presenting formulae, paid off in the end, so that most students were able to appreciate the relevance of these courses and to turn in very creditable projects showing an understanding of research design and competence in the use of a range of basic statistical techniques. And I still find that bright graduate students respond well to similar courses which incorporate some of the rather more advanced techniques needed for many real research projects in various areas of linguistics. But I may well be out of date with what is now already happening in our fine institutions of higher education!

Chris Butler