analysis: unhappiness

[Daniel Everett]

Ted,

Let me clarify this: 
> 3. Dan says: "linguistics is not simply a subdiscipline of psychology"
> 
> Both linguistics and psychology are big fields.  We assume Dan is referring to cognitive psychology / cognitive science here.  (Of course, there are sub-fields of psychology  - e.g., personality psychology or abnormal psychology - which are somewhat distinct from linguistics, but those sub-fields are also distinct from cognitive psychology.)  It is true that historically linguistics is not treated as a subfield of cognitive psychology / cognitive science.  However, key research questions in linguistics (i.e., the form of the knowledge structures and algorithms underlying human language) are indeed a subset of those investigated by cognitive psychologists / cognitive scientists.  We think that the biggest factor separating linguistics from psychology is the methods used to explore the research questions, rather than the research questions themselves.   Consequently, we would like to continue to see tighter connections among the fields of psychology / cognitive science, linguistics, as well as other fields like anthropology and computer science.


Correct, I meant cognitive psychology, not, say, psychoanalysis. There are definitely overlapping concerns. But my main concern about language is less about representations and more about the cultural and sociological values that lead to sentences and expressions in the corpus, rather than the mind. I used to think that my main interest was representations in the mind. But I find the psychology less interesting than the anthropology these days. 

But this is not an excuse to avoid quantitative methods. I believe that you and Ev, and others, have made a convincing case for quantitative methods. Quantitative methods in field research on syntax and semantics is vital. 

-- dan