analysis: unhappiness

[Matthew S. Dryer]

Lise,

First, let me concede the obvious: what is inside people's heads varies from
individual to individual and, for a given individual, from one time to another. 
 And that whether a given pattern is internalized by a given speaker at a given
time is not a black and white issue, but often a matter of degree.  But while
that makes the story more complicated, it seems largely orthogonal to the
fundamental issue we are discussing.

It's not clear to me at this point whether the issue we are disagreeing about is
substantive or terminological, whether we are meaning different things when we
talk about patterns in the data.  For example, the frequency with which different
sorts of sentences occur in the data a child is exposed to has profound effects
on what the child internalizes as rules and hence is an important part of
explanations for why languages are the way they are.  In so far as such relative
frequencies in the data are "patterns in the data", we need to know what those
patterns are in order to explain why languages are the way they are.

However, that is not what I was talking about when I referred to patterns in the
data.  I was intending the sorts of patterns that distinguish two analyses of the
same set of data, and relative frequency in the data does not play a role in
distinguishing what two analyses of the same set of data say.  For example, when
we compare a more abstract analysis of some phonological phenomenon that posits
some rule based on a perceived pattern in the data with a more concrete analysis
of the same phenomenon that denies the generalization covered by the rule in the
more abstract analysis, and ask which is "the correct" analysis, my claim is that
the only sense of that question is whether the generalization corresponds to
something inside speakers' heads (admitting, again, that this can vary from
speaker to speaker, from time to time, and is a matter of degree).  There is no
second sense in which the question can be interpreted as a question about which
analysis is correct as far as what is "out there" is concerned.  As far as I can
see, everything you say in your response to me is consistent with this claim of mine.

And when you say " I have to disagree with you on the validity of describing
what's 'out there'", your wording implies that I have said that describing what's
"other there" is not a valid activity.  But, to the contrary, since I am not a
psycholinguist, that is ALL that I do.  I am currently (co-)writing a grammatical
description of a language, and that is describing what's "out there".  However,
when confronted with two analyses which are consistent with the data, which
differ in that one describes the data in terms of a rule that the other does not,
I do not believe that one of the two analyses must be the "correct" one in terms
of what is "out there".  At most, one of them may be more correct in terms of
what is inside speakers' heads (and perhaps one is correct for some speakers and
the other for other speakers), but since we are not doing psycholinguistic
research on those speakers, I can't tell.  But we have enough work to do
describing the language that I needn't worry about which analysis is correct.

Some old notions from Chomsky are useful here.  We have enough to do trying to
achieve observational adequacy in describing the language we are working on that
I really don't worry about descriptive adequacy.  When we have competing analyses
that we need to decide on, they normally differ in observational adequacy, so we
look for data that will tell us which is correct in terms of observational
adequacy.  

Now it's true that our description is full of generalizations based on patterns
in the data; after all, a listing of our raw data would achieve observational
adequacy.  But in doing so, we are not claiming that the generalizations we are
making are necessarily real.  I suspect some of them aren't.  (And by "real", I
mean psychologically real, since my whole point in this discussion is that the
only sense in which generalizations can or cannot be real is psychological.)

So why don't we just provide a listing of our raw data?  Because we want to
communicate to others what the language is like and a description that describes
it in terms of patterns in the data better serves that purpose, whether or not
the patterns are real.

Matthew


On Fri 09/10/10  8:40 PM , Lise Menn Lise.Menn at Colorado.EDU sent:
> 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,  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  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  (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  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 [4]
> 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
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> 
> Professor Emerita of Linguistics
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> 
> Secretary, AAAS Section Z [Linguistics]
> 
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> Lise Menn                      Home Office: 303-444-42741625
> 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
> 
> 
> Links:
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> 
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