FUNKNET Digest, Vol 84, Issue 10

[s.t. bischoff]

Ted & Ev write...
____________
We have encountered a claim that the reason for different kinds of
methods being used across the different fields of language study
(i.e., in linguistics vs. psycho-/neuro-linguistics) is that the
research questions are different across these fields, and some methods
may be better suited to ask some questions than others.  Although the
latter is likely true, the premise ? that the research questions are
different across the fields ? is false...

In our opinion then, the distinction between the fields of linguistics
and psycho-/neuro-linguistics is purely along the lines of the kind of
data that are used as evidence for or against theoretical hypotheses:
typically non-quantitative data in linguistics vs. typically
quantitative data in psycho-/neuro-linguistics.  Given the superficial
nature of this distinction, we think that there should be one field of
language study where a wide range of dependent measures is used to
investigate linguistic representations and computations.
_____________

I would be curious to know how many on this listserv agree with the
above...it seems to me that the assertion rests on a very narrow definition
of "linguistics"...if  language is viewed as a meso-oject and linguistics
thus as a meso-science (perhaps it is not), it doesn't seem that the
assertion necessarily holds...I'm not convinced that all linguistic inquiry
is about computations and algorithms (despite my research being primarily in
formal and computational linguistics)...nor am I convinced that the root of
all linguistic inquiry is grounded in representations and computations
(though I would be curious to know what "representations" refers to here as
I could be misreading it)...in addition it seems that the object of study in
neuro-linguistics and phsycholinguistics is the mind (possibly) and the
brain (certainly) but for many linguists that doesn't seem to be the case
and I do think this leads to different reseach questions...but then again
I'm the one that started all this by asking the naive question about
"unhappiness" in the first place.

Cheers,
Shannon




On Sat, Sep 11, 2010 at 1:00 PM, <funknet-request at mailman.rice.edu> wrote:

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> Today's Topics:
>
>   1. Re: "Relative clauses" with no relativized element
>      (Suzanne Kemmer)
>   2. Re: "Relative clauses" with no relativized element (Ron Kuzar)
>   3. Re: "Relative clauses" with no relativized element (Tom Givon)
>   4. Re: "Relative clauses" with no relativized element
>      (Giuliana Fiorentino)
>   5. Re: "Relative clauses" with no relativized ele (E.G.)
>   6. Re: "Relative clauses" with no relativized element
>      (Suzanne Kemmer)
>   7. Re: "Relative clauses" with no relativized element (E.G.)
>   8. Re: analysis: unhappiness (Richard Hudson)
>   9. Re: analysis: unhappiness (Ted Gibson)
>  10. Re: analysis: unhappiness (dryer at buffalo.edu)
>  11. Re: analysis: unhappiness (A. Katz)
>  12. Re: "Relative clauses" with no relativized ele (Ron Kuzar)
>  13. Re: analysis: unhappiness (Brian MacWhinney)
>  14. Re: analysis: unhappiness (dryer at buffalo.edu)
>  15. Re: analysis: unhappiness (Richard Hudson)
>  16. Re: analysis: unhappiness (Richard Hudson)
>  17. Re: analysis: unhappiness (Lise Menn)
>  18. Re: analysis: unhappiness (Lise Menn)
>  19. Re: analysis: unhappiness (Daniel Everett)
>  20. Re: "Relative clauses" with no relativized element
>      (Philippe De Brabanter)
>  21. Re: analysis: unhappiness (Richard Hudson)
>  22. Re: analysis: unhappiness (A. Katz)
>  23. Re: FUNKNET] analysis: unhappiness (Chris Butler)
>  24. Re: FUNKNET] analysis: unhappiness (A. Katz)
>  25. Re: "Relative clauses" with no relativized ele (E.G.)
>  26. Job Advertisement (Kristine Hildebrandt)
>  27. Re: analysis: unhappiness (Ted Gibson)
>  28. Re: analysis: unhappiness (Daniel Everett)
>
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Message: 1
> Date: Fri, 10 Sep 2010 12:16:09 -0500
> From: Suzanne Kemmer <kemmer at rice.edu>
> Subject: Re: [FUNKNET] "Relative clauses" with no relativized element
> To: FUNKNET <FUNKNET at mailman.rice.edu>
> Message-ID: <F9B43F15-1F9D-4819-81FE-18DABB8CD78C at rice.edu>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII; format=flowed; delsp=yes
>
> In Generative Syntax these clauses were viewed as complement clauses
> with an NP head, distinct
> from relative clauses but having some parallels with them.  I think it
> was Joan Bresnan that
> brought out the parallels and distinctions, maybe in her doctoral
> dissertation . As I recall (but
> my remembrance may be faulty), Bresnan named the
> THAT element a COMP for complementizer.
>
> The term 'appositive' isn't very good because in traditional grammar
> that is reserved for an  'UNrestrictive' relation of a noun and its
> complement--an incidental description of
> a head N's referent rather than a specification of which referent
> ("the tree, a live oak, survived another 100 years or so").
>
> In Cognitive Grammar  nouns like claim, statement, idea, realization,
> belief etc. are in almost all cases nominalizations of 'viewing
> predicates'
> (verbs like claim, believe,  etc.) that introduce on-stage
> predications 'viewed' by a conceptualizer (the person doing the
> claiming, etc.). (the viewing
> predicates are space builders in Fauconnier's mental spaces terminology)
>
> For the nominalizations of these predicates, the semantics of the
> nouns intrinsically has an "e-site" or elaboration site
> that allows for spelling out the content of the viewed predicate in
> the form of a complement clause.  The e-site
> inherent to the semantics of the nouns is parallel to the e-site
> inherent to the semantics of the corresponding verbs.
>
> There are a few cases I can think of  of nouns that have  'viewing
> predicate' e-sites but don't have  corresponding verbs .
> For example
> the noun _view_   "The view that global climate change is
> anthropogenic is widely held by scientists"
> ( ' X views that (proposition)' is not possible, only 'X views Y
> as ...' , with a restriction to equative or descriptive propositions).
> Also _idea_----the verb has to be changed to something like 'believe'
> to make a corresponding full predicate.
>
> I view (!) these nouns as semantically parallel in interesting ways to
> picture nouns.  The conceptualizer (viewer) in
> both cases can designate the noun in a possessive phrase, but after
> that the syntax diverges.
>
> --Suzanne
>
> On Sep 10, 2010, at 11:21 AM, Arie Verhagen wrote:
>
> > And as another addition: the clauses that can only be introduced by
> > *that* (with no role to
> > play in the subordinate clause) may be seen as (subtypes of)
> > complement clauses,
> > expressing a proposition with the noun functioning as Complement
> > Taking Predicate (CTP),
> > expressing a propostional attitude, epistemic/evaluative stance,
> > etc. (following analyses by
> > Thompson, Diessel, Langacker, myself, and others), i.e. not
> > relatives. Cf. constructions like
> > "The claim is that X" (traditionally analysed as subject clauses),
> > "I claim that X", "I put forward
> > the claim that X", in which the relationship between the verb or
> > noun and the that-clause is
> > comparable to the one in "The claim that X".
> >
> > --Arie Verhagen
> >
> > ----------------
> > Message from Rong Chen <rchen at csusb.edu>
> > 10 Sep 2010, 23:42
> > Subject: Re: [FUNKNET] "Relative clauses" with no relativi
> >
> >> To add to Joanne's comments:
> >>
> >> There are basically three ways to distinguish an appositive clause
> >> (AC) from a relative clause (RC).
> >>
> >> 1) An AC can only be led by *that* while an RC can be led by other
> >> pronouns.
> >>
> >> 2) The AC and the noun it modifies display an equative
> >> relationship--one can say X
> >> (denoted by the noun) is Y (presented by the appositive)--while an
> >> RC often doesn't
> >> (except, perhaps, when the relative clause is sentential).
> >
> >> 3)--which Tom noted--*that* is not part of the clause in an AC; but
> >> a relative pronoun
> >> is always part of the clause in an RC.
> >>
> >> Rong Chen
> >>
> >
> >
>
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 2
> Date: Fri, 10 Sep 2010 20:42:24 +0300
> From: Ron Kuzar <kuzar at research.haifa.ac.il>
> Subject: Re: [FUNKNET] "Relative clauses" with no relativized element
> To: FUNKNET <FUNKNET at mailman.rice.edu>
> Message-ID:
>        <AANLkTikrWjKix8wSKouKB1hXVX918j-3bhzBu9-Usg1L at mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
>
> A thorough discussion of the head nouns and their relation with their
> complement clauses may be found in Hans-Joerg Schmid's book on Shell
> Nouns (this is his term for the head nouns).
> Ron Kuzar
> ---------
> On Fri, Sep 10, 2010 at 8:16 PM, Suzanne Kemmer <kemmer at rice.edu> wrote:
>
> > In Generative Syntax these clauses were viewed as complement clauses with
> > an NP head, distinct
> > from relative clauses but having some parallels with them.  I think it
> was
> > Joan Bresnan that
> > brought out the parallels and distinctions, maybe in her doctoral
> > dissertation . As I recall (but
> > my remembrance may be faulty), Bresnan named the
> > THAT element a COMP for complementizer.
> >
> > The term 'appositive' isn't very good because in traditional grammar
> > that is reserved for an  'UNrestrictive' relation of a noun and its
> > complement--an incidental description of
> > a head N's referent rather than a specification of which referent ("the
> > tree, a live oak, survived another 100 years or so").
> >
> > In Cognitive Grammar  nouns like claim, statement, idea, realization,
> > belief etc. are in almost all cases nominalizations of 'viewing
> predicates'
> > (verbs like claim, believe,  etc.) that introduce on-stage predications
> > 'viewed' by a conceptualizer (the person doing the claiming, etc.). (the
> > viewing
> > predicates are space builders in Fauconnier's mental spaces terminology)
> >
> > For the nominalizations of these predicates, the semantics of the nouns
> > intrinsically has an "e-site" or elaboration site
> > that allows for spelling out the content of the viewed predicate in the
> > form of a complement clause.  The e-site
> > inherent to the semantics of the nouns is parallel to the e-site inherent
> > to the semantics of the corresponding verbs.
> >
> > There are a few cases I can think of  of nouns that have  'viewing
> > predicate' e-sites but don't have  corresponding verbs .
> > For example
> > the noun _view_   "The view that global climate change is anthropogenic
> is
> > widely held by scientists"
> > ( ' X views that (proposition)' is not possible, only 'X views Y as ...'
> ,
> > with a restriction to equative or descriptive propositions).
> > Also _idea_----the verb has to be changed to something like 'believe'  to
> > make a corresponding full predicate.
> >
> > I view (!) these nouns as semantically parallel in interesting ways to
> > picture nouns.  The conceptualizer (viewer) in
> > both cases can designate the noun in a possessive phrase, but after that
> > the syntax diverges.
> >
> > --Suzanne
> >
> > On Sep 10, 2010, at 11:21 AM, Arie Verhagen wrote:
> >
> > And as another addition: the clauses that can only be introduced by
> *that*
> >> (with no role to
> >> play in the subordinate clause) may be seen as (subtypes of) complement
> >> clauses,
> >> expressing a proposition with the noun functioning as Complement Taking
> >> Predicate (CTP),
> >> expressing a propostional attitude, epistemic/evaluative stance, etc.
> >> (following analyses by
> >> Thompson, Diessel, Langacker, myself, and others), i.e. not relatives.
> Cf.
> >> constructions like
> >> "The claim is that X" (traditionally analysed as subject clauses), "I
> >> claim that X", "I put forward
> >> the claim that X", in which the relationship between the verb or noun
> and
> >> the that-clause is
> >> comparable to the one in "The claim that X".
> >>
> >> --Arie Verhagen
> >>
> >> ----------------
> >> Message from Rong Chen <rchen at csusb.edu>
> >> 10 Sep 2010, 23:42
> >>
> >> Subject: Re: [FUNKNET] "Relative clauses" with no relativi
> >>
> >>  To add to Joanne's comments:
> >>>
> >>> There are basically three ways to distinguish an appositive clause
> >>> (AC) from a relative clause (RC).
> >>>
> >>> 1) An AC can only be led by *that* while an RC can be led by other
> >>> pronouns.
> >>>
> >>> 2) The AC and the noun it modifies display an equative
> relationship--one
> >>> can say X
> >>> (denoted by the noun) is Y (presented by the appositive)--while an RC
> >>> often doesn't
> >>> (except, perhaps, when the relative clause is sentential).
> >>>
> >>
> >> 3)--which Tom noted--*that* is not part of the clause in an AC; but a
> >>> relative pronoun
> >>> is always part of the clause in an RC.
> >>>
> >>> Rong Chen
> >>>
> >>>
> >>
> >>
> >
>
>
> --
> ===============================================
>                    Dr. Ron Kuzar
> Address:       Department of English Language and Literature
>                    University of Haifa
>                    IL-31905 Haifa, Israel
> Office:          +972-4-824-9826, Fax: +972-4-824-9711
> Home:          +972-77-481-9676, Mobile: +972-54-481-9676
> Home fax:     153-77-481-9676 (only from Israel)
> Email:           kuzar at research.haifa.ac.il
> Homepage:   http://research.haifa.ac.il/~kuzar<http://research.haifa.ac.il/%7Ekuzar>
> ===============================================
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 3
> Date: Fri, 10 Sep 2010 11:43:34 -0600
> From: Tom Givon <tgivon at uoregon.edu>
> Subject: Re: [FUNKNET] "Relative clauses" with no relativized element
> To: "Thomas E. Payne" <tpayne at uoregon.edu>
> Cc: FUNKNET <FUNKNET at mailman.rice.edu>
> Message-ID: <4C8A6E46.3040301 at uoregon.edu>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed
>
>
>
> Looking through my "English Grammar (Amsterdam: J. Benjamins, 1993),
> vol. I, ch. 6, section 6.6.4. "Noun complements",  p. 298, I find this
> construction described and analyzed as the product of nominalization of
> clauses with verbs that take verbal complements ('know', 'think', 'say'
> etc. The preceding section (6.6.3. "Complex NP's arising through
> nominalization", p. 287) deals more generally with nominalizations. The
> term "noun complements" was used in syntax classes at UCLA in the mid
> 1960s, so certainly Joan Bresnan did not invent it.  Best,  TG
>
> ===========
>
> Thomas E. Payne wrote:
> > Can anyone help me name the following structure in English, and maybe
> point
> > me to some references? I do not find reference to this in the Cambridge
> > Grammar of the English Language or any other of my English grammar books.
> > But then, maybe I just don't know where to look.
> >
> >   Here are two examples from a play:
> >
> > His protestations of devotion in the trial scene are, in our opinion,
> > genuine, as is his confession [that his affair with the Countess is
> > platonic].
> >
> > The bracketed clause seems to modify "confession", though there is no
> > position for a confession in the clause itself.
> >
> > . . . forced hither with an impious black design [to have my innocence
> and
> > youth become the sacrifice of brutal violence].
> >
> >   Here the bracketed non-finite clause seems to modify "design."
> >
> >   These are not all that rare. I'm reminded of examples like:
> >
> > "The claim [that my client is a murderer] is totally false."
> >
> >   Are these relative clauses? If so what kind? Thanks for any help.
> >
> > Tom Payne
> >
> >
>
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 4
> Date: Fri, 10 Sep 2010 19:53:15 +0200
> From: "Giuliana Fiorentino" <giuliana.fiorentino at unimol.it>
> Subject: Re: [FUNKNET] "Relative clauses" with no relativized element
> To: "Thomas E. Payne" <tpayne at uoregon.edu>,     "FUNKNET"
>        <FUNKNET at mailman.rice.edu>
> Message-ID: <036386D3933D4CB99389FFB2576ADBE8 at giuliana>
> Content-Type: text/plain;       charset="iso-8859-1"
>
> Hi Tom,
> clauses like:
>
> The importance of being Earnest
> the fact of being late
> the fact that you are late
> the idea that world is round
> etcetera
>
> are not relative clauses but can be considered among syntactic strategies
> in order to nominalise events after a generic noun (working as a classifier
> for nominalised events).
>
> Giuliana
>
>  ----- Original Message -----
>  From: Thomas E. Payne
>  To: FUNKNET
>  Sent: Friday, September 10, 2010 4:16 PM
>  Subject: [FUNKNET] "Relative clauses" with no relativized element
>
>
>  Can anyone help me name the following structure in English, and maybe
> point
>  me to some references? I do not find reference to this in the Cambridge
>  Grammar of the English Language or any other of my English grammar books.
>  But then, maybe I just don't know where to look.
>
>    Here are two examples from a play:
>
>  His protestations of devotion in the trial scene are, in our opinion,
>  genuine, as is his confession [that his affair with the Countess is
>  platonic].
>
>  The bracketed clause seems to modify "confession", though there is no
>  position for a confession in the clause itself.
>
>  . . . forced hither with an impious black design [to have my innocence and
>  youth become the sacrifice of brutal violence].
>
>    Here the bracketed non-finite clause seems to modify "design."
>
>    These are not all that rare. I'm reminded of examples like:
>
>  "The claim [that my client is a murderer] is totally false."
>
>    Are these relative clauses? If so what kind? Thanks for any help.
>
>  Tom Payne
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 5
> Date: Fri, 10 Sep 2010 20:54:06 +0300
> From: "E.G." <eitan.eg at gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: [FUNKNET] "Relative clauses" with no relativized ele
> To: Arie Verhagen <Arie.Verhagen at hum.leidenuniv.nl>,
>        funknet at mailman.rice.edu
> Message-ID:
>        <AANLkTinjX8OtBqFFaeGTDMHJqB=kD11XV+oygAm8D-oP at mail.gmail.com<kD11XV%2BoygAm8D-oP at mail.gmail.com>
> >
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
>
> Hi all,
>
> I'd agree with Arie Verhagen. But there's a way that cross-linguistic
> comparison can help what seems to be a purely theoretical question based on
> a single language. The problem here is that English uses the same element
> to
> mark regular relatives and these "appositional" relatives. But if at least
> one language encodes them by different means, then there's at least a good
> case for seeing them as distinct functions. It's basically the same
> principle that's used to decide whether to put a meaning on a semantic map.
> So here are two languages that I know that encode them differently.
>
> In Modern Hebrew, these clauses can be encoded as a dedicated complement
> clause (ki), which differs from the relative clause marker (Se-), e.g.
>
> ha-hoda'a Se-kibalnu
> the-announcment rel-we_got
> "The announcement that we got."
>
> ha-hoda'a ki hitbatel ha-mifgaS
> the-message CMP was_cancelled the-meeting
> "The announcement that the meeting was cancelled."
>
> In Coptic, these clauses are marked by ce-, which marks complement clauses,
> *inter alia*, but not relative clauses:
>
> ph-mewi ce- (complement clause)
> 'the-thought that (we are angry)'
>
> ph-mewi ete- (relative clause)
> 'the thought that (we used to think)'
>
> This seems to be a pretty clear indication that these are complement
> clauses
> rather than relatives. Even if one doesn't like the notion of nouns taking
> complement clauses (and why not? nominalizations in some languages can take
> accusative modifiers as well as genitives), it still probably isn't
> incidental that the nominalizations are of verbs that take complement
> clauses when finite.
>
> As usual, the perspective in Talmy Giv?n's *Syntax* (vol. 2) is worth
> looking at.
>
> Best,
> Eitan
>
>
> On 10 September 2010 19:21, Arie Verhagen
> <Arie.Verhagen at hum.leidenuniv.nl>wrote:
>
> > And as another addition: the clauses that can only be introduced by
> *that*
> > (with no role to
> > play in the subordinate clause) may be seen as (subtypes of) complement
> > clauses,
> > expressing a proposition with the noun functioning as Complement Taking
> > Predicate (CTP),
> > expressing a propostional attitude, epistemic/evaluative stance, etc.
> > (following analyses by
> > Thompson, Diessel, Langacker, myself, and others), i.e. not relatives.
> Cf.
> > constructions like
> > "The claim is that X" (traditionally analysed as subject clauses), "I
> claim
> > that X", "I put forward
> > the claim that X", in which the relationship between the verb or noun and
> > the that-clause is
> > comparable to the one in "The claim that X".
> >
> > --Arie Verhagen
> >
> > ----------------
> > Message from Rong Chen <rchen at csusb.edu>
> > 10 Sep 2010, 23:42
> > Subject: Re: [FUNKNET] "Relative clauses" with no relativi
> >
> > > To add to Joanne's comments:
> > >
> > > There are basically three ways to distinguish an appositive clause
> > > (AC) from a relative clause (RC).
> > >
> > > 1) An AC can only be led by *that* while an RC can be led by other
> > > pronouns.
> > >
> > > 2) The AC and the noun it modifies display an equative
> relationship--one
> > can say X
> > > (denoted by the noun) is Y (presented by the appositive)--while an RC
> > often doesn't
> > > (except, perhaps, when the relative clause is sentential).
> >
> > > 3)--which Tom noted--*that* is not part of the clause in an AC; but a
> > relative pronoun
> > > is always part of the clause in an RC.
> > >
> > > Rong Chen
> > >
> >
> >
>
>
> --
> Eitan Grossman
> Martin Buber Society of Fellows
> Hebrew University of Jerusalem
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 6
> Date: Fri, 10 Sep 2010 12:55:30 -0500
> From: Suzanne Kemmer <kemmer at rice.edu>
> Subject: Re: [FUNKNET] "Relative clauses" with no relativized element
> To: Funknet <funknet at mailman.rice.edu>
> Message-ID: <D51A4D63-815F-4528-916F-34E9E73E5F1C at rice.edu>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
>
>
>
> Talmy, yes Joan B did not invent noun complements nor
> the term for them; but my recollection, in passing, was that she
> named 'that' in such structures as "complementizer" (and I also
> recall that she referred to 'that' relativizers  with the same term,
> while recognizing other differences between the two structures.)
>
> I may be wrong on that, but it's a different recollection, claim, or
> whatever,
> than the one you refer to.
>
> Not all the head nouns are nominalizations, but most are.
> S.
>
> On Sep 10, 2010, at 12:43 PM, Tom Givon wrote:
>
> >
> >
> > Looking through my "English Grammar (Amsterdam: J. Benjamins, 1993), vol.
> I, ch. 6, section 6.6.4. "Noun complements",  p. 298, I find this
> construction described and analyzed as the product of nominalization of
> clauses with verbs that take verbal complements ('know', 'think', 'say' etc.
> The preceding section (6.6.3. "Complex NP's arising through nominalization",
> p. 287) deals more generally with nominalizations. The term "noun
> complements" was used in syntax classes at UCLA in the mid 1960s, so
> certainly Joan Bresnan did not invent it.  Best,  TG
> >
> > ===========
> >
> > Thomas E. Payne wrote:
> >> Can anyone help me name the following structure in English, and maybe
> point
> >> me to some references? I do not find reference to this in the Cambridge
> >> Grammar of the English Language or any other of my English grammar
> books.
> >> But then, maybe I just don't know where to look.
> >>
> >>  Here are two examples from a play:
> >>
> >> His protestations of devotion in the trial scene are, in our opinion,
> >> genuine, as is his confession [that his affair with the Countess is
> >> platonic].
> >>
> >> The bracketed clause seems to modify "confession", though there is no
> >> position for a confession in the clause itself.
> >>
> >> . . . forced hither with an impious black design [to have my innocence
> and
> >> youth become the sacrifice of brutal violence].
> >>
> >>  Here the bracketed non-finite clause seems to modify "design."
> >>
> >>  These are not all that rare. I'm reminded of examples like:
> >>
> >> "The claim [that my client is a murderer] is totally false."
> >>
> >>  Are these relative clauses? If so what kind? Thanks for any help.
> >>
> >> Tom Payne
> >>
> >>
> >
> >
>
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 7
> Date: Fri, 10 Sep 2010 20:56:23 +0300
> From: "E.G." <eitan.eg at gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: [FUNKNET] "Relative clauses" with no relativized element
> To: funknet at mailman.rice.edu
> Message-ID:
>        <AANLkTi=zqvtPfDFg58AkDWArAJRWW7SSBD0bJZhtVBBo at mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
>
> Jespersen and his nexus-substantives should be mentioned (Philosophy of
> Grammar, 1924). Also in his MEG and Analytic Syntax one could find
> interesting discussions.
>
> Eitan
>
>
> On 10 September 2010 20:53, Giuliana Fiorentino <
> giuliana.fiorentino at unimol.it> wrote:
>
> > Hi Tom,
> > clauses like:
> >
> > The importance of being Earnest
> > the fact of being late
> > the fact that you are late
> > the idea that world is round
> > etcetera
> >
> > are not relative clauses but can be considered among syntactic strategies
> > in order to nominalise events after a generic noun (working as a
> classifier
> > for nominalised events).
> >
> > Giuliana
> >
> >  ----- Original Message -----
> >  From: Thomas E. Payne
> >  To: FUNKNET
> >  Sent: Friday, September 10, 2010 4:16 PM
> >  Subject: [FUNKNET] "Relative clauses" with no relativized element
> >
> >
> >  Can anyone help me name the following structure in English, and maybe
> > point
> >  me to some references? I do not find reference to this in the Cambridge
> >  Grammar of the English Language or any other of my English grammar
> books.
> >  But then, maybe I just don't know where to look.
> >
> >    Here are two examples from a play:
> >
> >  His protestations of devotion in the trial scene are, in our opinion,
> >  genuine, as is his confession [that his affair with the Countess is
> >  platonic].
> >
> >  The bracketed clause seems to modify "confession", though there is no
> >  position for a confession in the clause itself.
> >
> >  . . . forced hither with an impious black design [to have my innocence
> and
> >  youth become the sacrifice of brutal violence].
> >
> >    Here the bracketed non-finite clause seems to modify "design."
> >
> >    These are not all that rare. I'm reminded of examples like:
> >
> >  "The claim [that my client is a murderer] is totally false."
> >
> >    Are these relative clauses? If so what kind? Thanks for any help.
> >
> >  Tom Payne
> >
>
>
>
> --
> Eitan Grossman
> Martin Buber Society of Fellows
> Hebrew University of Jerusalem
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 8
> Date: Fri, 10 Sep 2010 18:59:12 +0100
> From: Richard Hudson <dick at ling.ucl.ac.uk>
> Subject: Re: [FUNKNET] analysis: unhappiness
> To: funknet <funknet at mailman.rice.edu>
> Message-ID: <4C8A71F0.4050507 at ling.ucl.ac.uk>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=windows-1252; format=flowed
>
>  Dear Ted,
> Thanks for the very interesting comment, but are you REALLY saying that
> I shouldn't claim, for example, that the past tense of GO is "went"
> without first cross-checking with 50 native speakers?
>
> Isn't there a danger of missing the point that we all, as native
> speakers, spend our whole lives scanning other people's linguistic
> behaviour (language 'out there', E-language) and trying to explain it to
> ourselves in terms of a language system (language 'in here',
> I-language)? So every judgement we make is based on thousands or
> millions of observed exemplars, and reflects a unique experience of
> E-language filtered through a unique I-language.
>
> Given that view of language development, I don't see how quantitative
> data will help. Let's take a real uncertainty, such as the past tense of
> BID. If I want to say I did it, do I say "I bidded" or "I bid"? My
> judgement: I don't know. Ok, you get 50 people to oblige on Mechanical
> Turk, and 20 of them give "bidded" and 30 "bid". So what? Does that mean
> that the correct answer is "bidded"? Surely not. How is it better than
> my judgement? I agree you could record my speech and find how often I
> use each alternative; but the reason I don't know is precisely because
> it's a rare word, so in a sense quantitative data are irrelevant even
> there. What would solve the problem of subjectivity, of course, would be
> a machine for probing the bit of my mind (or even brain) that holds BID
> and its details; but I suspect that even that wouldn't move us much
> further forward than my original "don't know". (Incidentally I write as
> a fan of quantitative sociolinguistics, so I do accept that quantitative
> data are relevant to linguistic analysis in some areas, where the
> I-language phenomenon is frequent enough to produce usable data.)
>
> It seems to me that this discussion raises the really fundamental
> question of what kind of thing we think language is: social or
> individual. The problem isn't unique to linguistics of course; it's the
> same throughout the social sciences. But what's special about
> linguistics is that we deal in very fine details of culture (e.g.
> details of how a particular word is used or pronounced) so the
> differences between individuals really matter. I don't see that we're
> ever going to have anything better than judgements to go on, so what we
> need is a way to ensure that judgements are accurate reports of
> individual I-language. A rotten situation for a science, but I don't see
> how it can get better.
>
> Dick
>
> Richard Hudson www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/dick/home.htm
>
> On 10/09/2010 14:03, Ted Gibson wrote:
> > Dear Dan, Dick:
> >
> > I would like to clarify some points that Dan Everett makes, in
> > response to Dick Hudson.
> >
> > Ev Fedorenko and I have written a couple of papers recently (Gibson &
> > Fedorenko, 2010, in press, see references and links below) on what we
> > think are weak methodological standards in syntax and semantics
> > research over the past many years. The issue that we address is the
> > prevalent method in syntax and semantics research, which involves
> > obtaining a judgment of the acceptability of a sentence / meaning
> > pair, typically by just the author of the paper, sometimes with
> > feedback from colleagues. As we address in our papers, this
> > methodology does not allow proper testing of scientific hypotheses
> > because of (a) the small number of experimental participants
> > (typically one); (b) the small number of experimental stimuli
> > (typically one); (c) cognitive biases on the part of the researcher
> > and participants; and (d) the effect of the preceding context (e.g.,
> > other constructions the researcher may have been recently
> > considering). (As Dan said, see Schutze, 1996; Cowart, 1997; and
> > several others cited in Gibson & Fedorenko, in press; for similar
> > points, but with not as strong a conclusion as ours).
> >
> > Three issues need to be separated here: (1) the use of intuitive
> > judgments as a dependent measure in a language experiment; (2)
> > potential cognitive biases on the part of experimental subjects and
> > experimenters in language experiments; and (3) the need for obtaining
> > quantitative evidence, whatever the dependent measure might be. The
> > paper that Ev and I wrote addresses the last two issues, but does not
> > go into depth on the first issue (the use of intuitions as a dependent
> > measure in language experiments). Regarding this issue, we don't think
> > that there is anything wrong with gathering intuitive judgments as a
> > dependent measure, as long as the task is clear to the experimental
> > participants.
> >
> > In the longer paper (Gibson & Fedorenko, in press) we respond to some
> > arguments that have been given in support of continuing to use the
> > traditional non-quantitative method in syntax / semantics research.
> > One recent defense of the traditional method comes from Phillips
> > (2008), who argues that no harm has come from the non-quantitative
> > approach in syntax research thus far. Phillips argues that there are
> > no cases in the literature where an incorrect intuitive judgment has
> > become the basis for a widely accepted generalization or an important
> > theoretical claim. He therefore concludes that there is no reason to
> > adopt more rigorous data collection standards. We challenge Philips?
> > conclusion by presenting three cases from the literature where a
> > faulty intuition has led to incorrect generalizations and mistaken
> > theorizing, plausibly due to cognitive biases on the part of the
> > researchers.
> >
> > A second argument that is sometimes presented for the continued use of
> > the traditional non-quantitative method is that it would be too
> > inefficient to evaluate every syntactic / semantic hypothesis or
> > phenomenon quantitatively. For example, Culicover & Jackendoff (2010)
> > make this argument explicitly in their response to Gibson & Fedorenko
> > (2010): ?It would cripple linguistic investigation if it were required
> > that all judgments of ambiguity and grammaticality be subject to
> > statistically rigorous experiments on naive subjects, especially when
> > investigating languages whose speakers are hard to access? (Culicover
> > & Jackendoff, 2010, p. 234). (Dick Hudson makes a similar point
> > earlier in the discussion here.) Whereas we agree that in
> > circumstances where gathering data is difficult, some evidence is
> > better than no evidence, we do not agree that research would be slowed
> > with respect to languages where experimental participants are easy to
> > access, such as English. In contrast, we think that the opposite is
> > true: the field?s progress is probably slowed by not doing
> > quantitative research.
> > Suppose that a typical syntax / semantics paper that lacks
> > quantitative evidence includes judgments for 50 or more sentences /
> > meaning pairs, corresponding to 50 or more empirical claims. Even if
> > most of the judgments from such a paper are correct or are on the
> > right track, the problem is in knowing which judgments are correct.
> > For example, suppose that 90% of the judgments from an arbitrary paper
> > are correct (which is probably a high estimate). (Colin Phillips and
> > some of his former students / postdocs have commented to us that, in
> > their experience, quantitative acceptability judgment studies almost
> > always validate the claim(s) in the literature. This is not our
> > experience, however. Most experiments that we have run which attempt
> > to test some syntactic / semantic hypothesis in the literature end up
> > providing us with a pattern of data that had not been known before the
> > experiment (e.g., Breen et al., in press; Fedorenko & Gibson, in
> > press; Patel et al., 2009; Scontras & Gibson, submitted).) This means
> > that in a paper with 50 empirical claims 45/50 are correct. But which
> > 45? There are 2,118, 760 ways to choose 45 items from 50. That?s over
> > two million different theories. By quantitatively evaluating the
> > empirical claims, we reduce the uncertainty a great deal. To make
> > progress, it is better to have theoretical claims supported by solid
> > quantitative evidence, so that even if the interpretation of the data
> > changes over time as new evidence becomes available ? as is often the
> > case in any field of science ? the empirical pattern can be used as a
> > basis for further theorizing.
> >
> > Furthermore, it is no longer expensive to run behavioral experiments,
> > at least in English and other widely spoken languages. There now
> > exists a marketplace interface ? Amazon.com?s Mechanical Turk ? which
> > can be used for collecting behavioral data over the internet quickly
> > and inexpensively. The cost of using an interface like this is
> > minimal, and the time that it takes for the results to be returned is
> > short. For example, currently on Mechanical Turk, a survey of
> > approximately 50 items will be answered by 50 or more participants
> > within a couple of hours, at a cost of approximately $1 per
> > participant. Thus a survey can be completed within a day, at a cost of
> > less than $50. (The hard work of designing the experiment, and
> > constructing controlled materials remains of course.)
> >
> > Sorry to be so verbose. But I think that these methodological points
> > are very important.
> >
> > Best wishes,
> >
> > Ted Gibson
> >
> > Gibson, E. & Fedorenko, E. (In press). The need for quantitative
> > methods in syntax and semantics research. Language and Cognitive
> > Processes. http://tedlab.mit.edu/tedlab_website/researchpapers/Gibson
> > & Fedorenko InPress LCP.pdf
> >
> > Gibson, E. & Fedorenko, E. (2010). Weak quantitative standards in
> > linguistics research. Trends in Cognitive Science, 14, 233-234.
> > http://tedlab.mit.edu/tedlab_website/researchpapers/Gibson & Fedorenko
> > 2010 TICS.pdf
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >> 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
> >
> >
> >
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 9
> Date: Fri, 10 Sep 2010 14:30:16 -0400
> From: Ted Gibson <egibson at MIT.EDU>
> Subject: Re: [FUNKNET] analysis: unhappiness
> To: Richard Hudson <dick at ling.ucl.ac.uk>
> Cc: Evelina Fedorenko <evelina9 at mit.edu>, funknet
>        <funknet at mailman.rice.edu>
> Message-ID: <B880B6B7-544F-45AF-8A52-FFC9BCFA1E08 at mit.edu>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=WINDOWS-1252; format=flowed;
>        delsp=yes
>
> Dear Dick:
>
> Perhaps we are talking at cross purposes.  I don't understand what is
> confusing about what Ev Fedorenko and I are claiming.  All we are
> saying is that if you have some testable claim involving a general
> hypothesis about a language, then you need to get quantitative data
> from unbiased sources to evaluate that claim.   If you are interested
> in English past tense morphology, then depending on the claims that
> you might want to investigate, there are lots of ways to get relevant
> quantitative evidence.  Corpus data will probably be useful.  For very
> low frequency words, you can run experiments to test behavior with
> respect to such words.
>
> Your example of the past tense of "bid" is a fine such example.  You
> can run an experiment like the one you suggested to find out what
> people think the past tense is.  If you then found that 20/50 people
> responded "bidded" and 30/50 respond "bid", that is a lot of useful
> information.  As you suggest in your discussion, this result wouldn't
> answer the question of how past tense is stored in each individual.
> This result would be ambiguous among several possible explanations.
> One possibility is that the probability distribution that is being
> discovered reflects different dialects, such that 2/5 of the
> population has one past tense, and 3/5 has another.  Another
> possibility is that each person has a similar probability distribution
> in their heads, such that 2/5 of the time I respond one way, and 3/5
> of the time I respond another.  Further experiments would be necessary
> to answer between these and other possible theories (e.g., with
> repeated trials from the same person, carefully planned so that the
> participants don't notice that they are being asked multiple times).
> Without the quantitative evidence in the first place, there is no way
> to answer these kinds of questions.
>
> Regarding the past tense of "go", this would be useful as a baseline
> in an experiment involving the less frequent ones.  So, yes, it would
> useful to gather quantitative evidence in such a case also, as
> baselines with respect to the more interesting cases for theories.
>
> The bottom line: if you have a generalization about a language that
> you wish to evaluate (such that you hypothesize that it is true across
> the speakers of the language), then you need quantitative evidence
> from multiple individuals, using an unbiased data collection method,
> to evaluate such a claim.  The point about Mechanical Turk is that it
> is really *easy* to do this now, at least for languages like English.
>
> Best wishes,
>
> Ted Gibson & Ev Fedorenko
>
> On Sep 10, 2010, at 1:59 PM, Richard Hudson wrote:
>
> > Dear Ted,
> > Thanks for the very interesting comment, but are you REALLY saying
> > that I shouldn't claim, for example, that the past tense of GO is
> > "went" without first cross-checking with 50 native speakers?
> >
> > Isn't there a danger of missing the point that we all, as native
> > speakers, spend our whole lives scanning other people's linguistic
> > behaviour (language 'out there', E-language) and trying to explain
> > it to ourselves in terms of a language system (language 'in here', I-
> > language)? So every judgement we make is based on thousands or
> > millions of observed exemplars, and reflects a unique experience of
> > E-language filtered through a unique I-language.
> >
> > Given that view of language development, I don't see how
> > quantitative data will help. Let's take a real uncertainty, such as
> > the past tense of BID. If I want to say I did it, do I say "I
> > bidded" or "I bid"? My judgement: I don't know. Ok, you get 50
> > people to oblige on Mechanical Turk, and 20 of them give "bidded"
> > and 30 "bid". So what? Does that mean that the correct answer is
> > "bidded"? Surely not. How is it better than my judgement? I agree
> > you could record my speech and find how often I use each
> > alternative; but the reason I don't know is precisely because it's a
> > rare word, so in a sense quantitative data are irrelevant even
> > there. What would solve the problem of subjectivity, of course,
> > would be a machine for probing the bit of my mind (or even brain)
> > that holds BID and its details; but I suspect that even that
> > wouldn't move us much further forward than my original "don't know".
> > (Incidentally I write as a fan of quantitative sociolinguistics, so
> > I do accept that quantitative data are relevant to linguistic
> > analysis in some areas, where the I-language phenomenon is frequent
> > enough to produce usable data.)
> >
> > It seems to me that this discussion raises the really fundamental
> > question of what kind of thing we think language is: social or
> > individual. The problem isn't unique to linguistics of course; it's
> > the same throughout the social sciences. But what's special about
> > linguistics is that we deal in very fine details of culture (e.g.
> > details of how a particular word is used or pronounced) so the
> > differences between individuals really matter. I don't see that
> > we're ever going to have anything better than judgements to go on,
> > so what we need is a way to ensure that judgements are accurate
> > reports of individual I-language. A rotten situation for a science,
> > but I don't see how it can get better.
> >
> > Dick
> >
> > Richard Hudson www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/dick/home.htm
> >
> > On 10/09/2010 14:03, Ted Gibson wrote:
> >> Dear Dan, Dick:
> >>
> >> I would like to clarify some points that Dan Everett makes, in
> >> response to Dick Hudson.
> >>
> >> Ev Fedorenko and I have written a couple of papers recently (Gibson &
> >> Fedorenko, 2010, in press, see references and links below) on what we
> >> think are weak methodological standards in syntax and semantics
> >> research over the past many years. The issue that we address is the
> >> prevalent method in syntax and semantics research, which involves
> >> obtaining a judgment of the acceptability of a sentence / meaning
> >> pair, typically by just the author of the paper, sometimes with
> >> feedback from colleagues. As we address in our papers, this
> >> methodology does not allow proper testing of scientific hypotheses
> >> because of (a) the small number of experimental participants
> >> (typically one); (b) the small number of experimental stimuli
> >> (typically one); (c) cognitive biases on the part of the researcher
> >> and participants; and (d) the effect of the preceding context (e.g.,
> >> other constructions the researcher may have been recently
> >> considering). (As Dan said, see Schutze, 1996; Cowart, 1997; and
> >> several others cited in Gibson & Fedorenko, in press; for similar
> >> points, but with not as strong a conclusion as ours).
> >>
> >> Three issues need to be separated here: (1) the use of intuitive
> >> judgments as a dependent measure in a language experiment; (2)
> >> potential cognitive biases on the part of experimental subjects and
> >> experimenters in language experiments; and (3) the need for obtaining
> >> quantitative evidence, whatever the dependent measure might be. The
> >> paper that Ev and I wrote addresses the last two issues, but does not
> >> go into depth on the first issue (the use of intuitions as a
> >> dependent
> >> measure in language experiments). Regarding this issue, we don't
> >> think
> >> that there is anything wrong with gathering intuitive judgments as a
> >> dependent measure, as long as the task is clear to the experimental
> >> participants.
> >>
> >> In the longer paper (Gibson & Fedorenko, in press) we respond to some
> >> arguments that have been given in support of continuing to use the
> >> traditional non-quantitative method in syntax / semantics research.
> >> One recent defense of the traditional method comes from Phillips
> >> (2008), who argues that no harm has come from the non-quantitative
> >> approach in syntax research thus far. Phillips argues that there are
> >> no cases in the literature where an incorrect intuitive judgment has
> >> become the basis for a widely accepted generalization or an important
> >> theoretical claim. He therefore concludes that there is no reason to
> >> adopt more rigorous data collection standards. We challenge Philips?
> >> conclusion by presenting three cases from the literature where a
> >> faulty intuition has led to incorrect generalizations and mistaken
> >> theorizing, plausibly due to cognitive biases on the part of the
> >> researchers.
> >>
> >> A second argument that is sometimes presented for the continued use
> >> of
> >> the traditional non-quantitative method is that it would be too
> >> inefficient to evaluate every syntactic / semantic hypothesis or
> >> phenomenon quantitatively. For example, Culicover & Jackendoff (2010)
> >> make this argument explicitly in their response to Gibson & Fedorenko
> >> (2010): ?It would cripple linguistic investigation if it were
> >> required
> >> that all judgments of ambiguity and grammaticality be subject to
> >> statistically rigorous experiments on naive subjects, especially when
> >> investigating languages whose speakers are hard to access? (Culicover
> >> & Jackendoff, 2010, p. 234). (Dick Hudson makes a similar point
> >> earlier in the discussion here.) Whereas we agree that in
> >> circumstances where gathering data is difficult, some evidence is
> >> better than no evidence, we do not agree that research would be
> >> slowed
> >> with respect to languages where experimental participants are easy to
> >> access, such as English. In contrast, we think that the opposite is
> >> true: the field?s progress is probably slowed by not doing
> >> quantitative research.
> >> Suppose that a typical syntax / semantics paper that lacks
> >> quantitative evidence includes judgments for 50 or more sentences /
> >> meaning pairs, corresponding to 50 or more empirical claims. Even if
> >> most of the judgments from such a paper are correct or are on the
> >> right track, the problem is in knowing which judgments are correct.
> >> For example, suppose that 90% of the judgments from an arbitrary
> >> paper
> >> are correct (which is probably a high estimate). (Colin Phillips and
> >> some of his former students / postdocs have commented to us that, in
> >> their experience, quantitative acceptability judgment studies almost
> >> always validate the claim(s) in the literature. This is not our
> >> experience, however. Most experiments that we have run which attempt
> >> to test some syntactic / semantic hypothesis in the literature end up
> >> providing us with a pattern of data that had not been known before
> >> the
> >> experiment (e.g., Breen et al., in press; Fedorenko & Gibson, in
> >> press; Patel et al., 2009; Scontras & Gibson, submitted).) This means
> >> that in a paper with 50 empirical claims 45/50 are correct. But which
> >> 45? There are 2,118, 760 ways to choose 45 items from 50. That?s over
> >> two million different theories. By quantitatively evaluating the
> >> empirical claims, we reduce the uncertainty a great deal. To make
> >> progress, it is better to have theoretical claims supported by solid
> >> quantitative evidence, so that even if the interpretation of the data
> >> changes over time as new evidence becomes available ? as is often the
> >> case in any field of science ? the empirical pattern can be used as a
> >> basis for further theorizing.
> >>
> >> Furthermore, it is no longer expensive to run behavioral experiments,
> >> at least in English and other widely spoken languages. There now
> >> exists a marketplace interface ? Amazon.com?s Mechanical Turk ? which
> >> can be used for collecting behavioral data over the internet quickly
> >> and inexpensively. The cost of using an interface like this is
> >> minimal, and the time that it takes for the results to be returned is
> >> short. For example, currently on Mechanical Turk, a survey of
> >> approximately 50 items will be answered by 50 or more participants
> >> within a couple of hours, at a cost of approximately $1 per
> >> participant. Thus a survey can be completed within a day, at a cost
> >> of
> >> less than $50. (The hard work of designing the experiment, and
> >> constructing controlled materials remains of course.)
> >>
> >> Sorry to be so verbose. But I think that these methodological points
> >> are very important.
> >>
> >> Best wishes,
> >>
> >> Ted Gibson
> >>
> >> Gibson, E. & Fedorenko, E. (In press). The need for quantitative
> >> methods in syntax and semantics research. Language and Cognitive
> >> Processes. http://tedlab.mit.edu/tedlab_website/researchpapers/Gibson
> >> & Fedorenko InPress LCP.pdf
> >>
> >> Gibson, E. & Fedorenko, E. (2010). Weak quantitative standards in
> >> linguistics research. Trends in Cognitive Science, 14, 233-234.
> >> http://tedlab.mit.edu/tedlab_website/researchpapers/Gibson &
> >> Fedorenko
> >> 2010 TICS.pdf
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >>> 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
> >>
> >>
> >>
>
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 10
> Date: Fri, 10 Sep 2010 14:51:45 -0400
> From: dryer at buffalo.edu
> Subject: Re: [FUNKNET] analysis: unhappiness
> To: Lise Menn <Lise.Menn at Colorado.EDU>, Funknet
>        <funknet at mailman.rice.edu>
> Cc: Richard Hudson <dick at ling.ucl.ac.uk>
> Message-ID: <2147483647.1284130304 at cast-dryerm2.caset.buffalo.edu>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed
>
>
> 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
> >
> >
> >
> >
>
>
>
>
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 11
> Date: Fri, 10 Sep 2010 12:09:07 -0700 (PDT)
> From: "A. Katz" <amnfn at well.com>
> Subject: Re: [FUNKNET] analysis: unhappiness
> To: dryer at buffalo.edu
> Cc: Lise Menn <Lise.Menn at Colorado.EDU>, Richard Hudson
>        <dick at ling.ucl.ac.uk>,  Funknet <funknet at mailman.rice.edu>
> Message-ID: <Pine.GSO.4.64.1009101158580.4833 at well.com>
> Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII; format=flowed
>
> 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
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 12
> Date: Fri, 10 Sep 2010 23:26:18 +0300
> From: Ron Kuzar <kuzar at research.haifa.ac.il>
> Subject: Re: [FUNKNET] "Relative clauses" with no relativized ele
> To: FUNKNET <FUNKNET at mailman.rice.edu>
> Message-ID:
>        <AANLkTikSZ5RFn--Uo0bDJMtPPV9P0goJLXkEjZg2T_2G at mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
>
> The Modern Hebrew data supplied by Eitan are incomplete.
> Hebrew distinguishes between locution (say, hear, think, etc.) and
> situation (action, event, state, etc.).
> What Eitan describes is only true with regard to nouns (and clauses)
> expressing locution. 'Announcement' is indeed such a noun.
> Words such as ba'ya 'problem', macav 'situation', or cara 'trouble',
> etc., whose denotatum is a situation, cannot be followed by ki, but only
> by Se-, e.g.:
>
> margiz oti ha-macav Se-kulam halxu (*ki kulam halxu)
> annoys me the-situation that-all went
> 'I am upset about the situation that all have gone'
>
> On the other hand, the relative Se- may be replaced by the more
> elegant and classical aSer, while the Se- of situation clauses may not.
> Sorry about the invented example. I am overseas now.
> All this has been described (with corpus data) in:
>
> Kuzar, Ron. 1993. Nominalization Clauses in Israeli Hebrew. Balshanut Ivrit
> [Hebrew
> Linguistics] 36: 71-89 [unfortunately available only in Hebrew].
>
> The article is somewhat outdated and contains some inaccuracies I would
> formulate differently today, but the basic distinction is valid in my
> opinion.
> Best,
> Ron Kuzar
> ---------------
> On Fri, Sep 10, 2010 at 8:54 PM, E.G. <eitan.eg at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > Hi all,
> >
> > I'd agree with Arie Verhagen. But there's a way that cross-linguistic
> > comparison can help what seems to be a purely theoretical question based
> on
> > a single language. The problem here is that English uses the same element
> > to
> > mark regular relatives and these "appositional" relatives. But if at
> least
> > one language encodes them by different means, then there's at least a
> good
> > case for seeing them as distinct functions. It's basically the same
> > principle that's used to decide whether to put a meaning on a semantic
> map.
> > So here are two languages that I know that encode them differently.
> >
> > In Modern Hebrew, these clauses can be encoded as a dedicated complement
> > clause (ki), which differs from the relative clause marker (Se-), e.g.
> >
> > ha-hoda'a Se-kibalnu
> > the-announcment rel-we_got
> > "The announcement that we got."
> >
> > ha-hoda'a ki hitbatel ha-mifgaS
> > the-message CMP was_cancelled the-meeting
> > "The announcement that the meeting was cancelled."
> >
> > In Coptic, these clauses are marked by ce-, which marks complement
> clauses,
> > *inter alia*, but not relative clauses:
> >
> > ph-mewi ce- (complement clause)
> > 'the-thought that (we are angry)'
> >
> > ph-mewi ete- (relative clause)
> > 'the thought that (we used to think)'
> >
> > This seems to be a pretty clear indication that these are complement
> > clauses
> > rather than relatives. Even if one doesn't like the notion of nouns
> taking
> > complement clauses (and why not? nominalizations in some languages can
> take
> > accusative modifiers as well as genitives), it still probably isn't
> > incidental that the nominalizations are of verbs that take complement
> > clauses when finite.
> >
> > As usual, the perspective in Talmy Giv?n's *Syntax* (vol. 2) is worth
> > looking at.
> >
> > Best,
> > Eitan
> >
> >
> > On 10 September 2010 19:21, Arie Verhagen
> > <Arie.Verhagen at hum.leidenuniv.nl>wrote:
> >
> > > And as another addition: the clauses that can only be introduced by
> > *that*
> > > (with no role to
> > > play in the subordinate clause) may be seen as (subtypes of) complement
> > > clauses,
> > > expressing a proposition with the noun functioning as Complement Taking
> > > Predicate (CTP),
> > > expressing a propostional attitude, epistemic/evaluative stance, etc.
> > > (following analyses by
> > > Thompson, Diessel, Langacker, myself, and others), i.e. not relatives.
> > Cf.
> > > constructions like
> > > "The claim is that X" (traditionally analysed as subject clauses), "I
> > claim
> > > that X", "I put forward
> > > the claim that X", in which the relationship between the verb or noun
> and
> > > the that-clause is
> > > comparable to the one in "The claim that X".
> > >
> > > --Arie Verhagen
> > >
> > > ----------------
> > > Message from Rong Chen <rchen at csusb.edu>
> > > 10 Sep 2010, 23:42
> > > Subject: Re: [FUNKNET] "Relative clauses" with no relativi
> > >
> > > > To add to Joanne's comments:
> > > >
> > > > There are basically three ways to distinguish an appositive clause
> > > > (AC) from a relative clause (RC).
> > > >
> > > > 1) An AC can only be led by *that* while an RC can be led by other
> > > > pronouns.
> > > >
> > > > 2) The AC and the noun it modifies display an equative
> > relationship--one
> > > can say X
> > > > (denoted by the noun) is Y (presented by the appositive)--while an RC
> > > often doesn't
> > > > (except, perhaps, when the relative clause is sentential).
> > >
> > > > 3)--which Tom noted--*that* is not part of the clause in an AC; but a
> > > relative pronoun
> > > > is always part of the clause in an RC.
> > > >
> > > > Rong Chen
> > > >
> > >
> > >
> >
> >
> > --
> > Eitan Grossman
> > Martin Buber Society of Fellows
> > Hebrew University of Jerusalem
> >
>
>
>
> --
> ===============================================
>                    Dr. Ron Kuzar
> Address:       Department of English Language and Literature
>                    University of Haifa
>                    IL-31905 Haifa, Israel
> Office:          +972-4-824-9826, Fax: +972-4-824-9711
> Home:          +972-77-481-9676, Mobile: +972-54-481-9676
> Home fax:     153-77-481-9676 (only from Israel)
> Email:           kuzar at research.haifa.ac.il
> Homepage:   http://research.haifa.ac.il/~kuzar<http://research.haifa.ac.il/%7Ekuzar>
> ===============================================
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 13
> Date: Fri, 10 Sep 2010 18:23:54 -0400
> From: Brian MacWhinney <macw at cmu.edu>
> Subject: Re: [FUNKNET] analysis: unhappiness
> To: Funknet <funknet at mailman.rice.edu>
> Message-ID: <C1067ECC-C7B3-48E7-AB06-25661774B571 at cmu.edu>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=windows-1252
>
> Dick and Ted,
>   I agree with parts of what each of you are saying.  Which means that I
> also disagree with other parts.   In practice,, Gibson and Fedorenko, in
> press,  (which I downloaded and scanned) deals with no more than two or
> three constructions.  They mention the fact that people don't have problems
> with sentences such as "Susan muttered him the news" despite claims that
> verbs such as "mutter" cannot take the double object construction.  They
> also note that the claims from Jackendoff and Culicover about the
> differences between the two sentences below are not supported by results
> from the Mechanical Turk:
> 1.  Peter was trying to remember who carried what.
> 2.  Peter was trying to remember who carried what when.
> These are interesting facts.  If these sentences are supposed to be
> different and people judge them to be similarly grammatical, then theories
> based on the supposed differences should be reexamined.  There are big
> chunks of syntactic theory resting on shaky judgments about complex
> sentences of this type.  Getting some of this straight would be a big win, I
> would say, particularly if linguists would pay attention to the results.
>     But I understand Dick's worry about how far Gibson and Fedorenko are
> trying to push this.  Neither their email nor their paper sets clear limits
> on what we should be testing and we certainly don't want to waste time
> checking out  go-goed-went.  So, Gibson and Fedorenko owe us those
> clarifications.
>    But, Dick, you then move on to questioning data on bid-bidded.  Here we
> have a case of true variation in the population.  I would love to know its
> distribution.  As a "fan of quantitative sociolinguistics" shouldn't you
> too?
>    My take on this is that constructions are not created equal.  The three
> types mentioned here are probably just a start on an inventory of
> evidentiary types.  We need to correctly pair up appropriate methods with
> each of the types.  And we to make sure that people pay attention to the
> results, once they are in
>
> --Brian MacWhinney
>
> On Sep 10, 2010, at 1:59 PM, Richard Hudson wrote:
>
> > Dear Ted,
> > Thanks for the very interesting comment, but are you REALLY saying that I
> shouldn't claim, for example, that the past tense of GO is "went" without
> first cross-checking with 50 native speakers?
> >
> > Isn't there a danger of missing the point that we all, as native
> speakers, spend our whole lives scanning other people's linguistic behaviour
> (language 'out there', E-language) and trying to explain it to ourselves in
> terms of a language system (language 'in here', I-language)? So every
> judgement we make is based on thousands or millions of observed exemplars,
> and reflects a unique experience of E-language filtered through a unique
> I-language.
> >
> > Given that view of language development, I don't see how quantitative
> data will help. Let's take a real uncertainty, such as the past tense of
> BID. If I want to say I did it, do I say "I bidded" or "I bid"? My
> judgement: I don't know. Ok, you get 50 people to oblige on Mechanical Turk,
> and 20 of them give "bidded" and 30 "bid". So what? Does that mean that the
> correct answer is "bidded"? Surely not. How is it better than my judgement?
> I agree you could record my speech and find how often I use each
> alternative; but the reason I don't know is precisely because it's a rare
> word, so in a sense quantitative data are irrelevant even there. What would
> solve the problem of subjectivity, of course, would be a machine for probing
> the bit of my mind (or even brain) that holds BID and its details; but I
> suspect that even that wouldn't move us much further forward than my
> original "don't know". (Incidentally I write as a fan of quantitative
> sociolinguistics, so I do accept that quantit
>  ative data are relevant to linguistic analysis in some areas, where the
> I-language phenomenon is frequent enough to produce usable data.)
> >
> > It seems to me that this discussion raises the really fundamental
> question of what kind of thing we think language is: social or individual.
> The problem isn't unique to linguistics of course; it's the same throughout
> the social sciences. But what's special about linguistics is that we deal in
> very fine details of culture (e.g. details of how a particular word is used
> or pronounced) so the differences between individuals really matter. I don't
> see that we're ever going to have anything better than judgements to go on,
> so what we need is a way to ensure that judgements are accurate reports of
> individual I-language. A rotten situation for a science, but I don't see how
> it can get better.
> >
> > Dick
> >
> > Richard Hudson www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/dick/home.htm
> >
> > On 10/09/2010 14:03, Ted Gibson wrote:
> >> Dear Dan, Dick:
> >>
> >> I would like to clarify some points that Dan Everett makes, in
> >> response to Dick Hudson.
> >>
> >> Ev Fedorenko and I have written a couple of papers recently (Gibson &
> >> Fedorenko, 2010, in press, see references and links below) on what we
> >> think are weak methodological standards in syntax and semantics
> >> research over the past many years. The issue that we address is the
> >> prevalent method in syntax and semantics research, which involves
> >> obtaining a judgment of the acceptability of a sentence / meaning
> >> pair, typically by just the author of the paper, sometimes with
> >> feedback from colleagues. As we address in our papers, this
> >> methodology does not allow proper testing of scientific hypotheses
> >> because of (a) the small number of experimental participants
> >> (typically one); (b) the small number of experimental stimuli
> >> (typically one); (c) cognitive biases on the part of the researcher
> >> and participants; and (d) the effect of the preceding context (e.g.,
> >> other constructions the researcher may have been recently
> >> considering). (As Dan said, see Schutze, 1996; Cowart, 1997; and
> >> several others cited in Gibson & Fedorenko, in press; for similar
> >> points, but with not as strong a conclusion as ours).
> >>
> >> Three issues need to be separated here: (1) the use of intuitive
> >> judgments as a dependent measure in a language experiment; (2)
> >> potential cognitive biases on the part of experimental subjects and
> >> experimenters in language experiments; and (3) the need for obtaining
> >> quantitative evidence, whatever the dependent measure might be. The
> >> paper that Ev and I wrote addresses the last two issues, but does not
> >> go into depth on the first issue (the use of intuitions as a dependent
> >> measure in language experiments). Regarding this issue, we don't think
> >> that there is anything wrong with gathering intuitive judgments as a
> >> dependent measure, as long as the task is clear to the experimental
> >> participants.
> >>
> >> In the longer paper (Gibson & Fedorenko, in press) we respond to some
> >> arguments that have been given in support of continuing to use the
> >> traditional non-quantitative method in syntax / semantics research.
> >> One recent defense of the traditional method comes from Phillips
> >> (2008), who argues that no harm has come from the non-quantitative
> >> approach in syntax research thus far. Phillips argues that there are
> >> no cases in the literature where an incorrect intuitive judgment has
> >> become the basis for a widely accepted generalization or an important
> >> theoretical claim. He therefore concludes that there is no reason to
> >> adopt more rigorous data collection standards. We challenge Philips?
> >> conclusion by presenting three cases from the literature where a
> >> faulty intuition has led to incorrect generalizations and mistaken
> >> theorizing, plausibly due to cognitive biases on the part of the
> >> researchers.
> >>
> >> A second argument that is sometimes presented for the continued use of
> >> the traditional non-quantitative method is that it would be too
> >> inefficient to evaluate every syntactic / semantic hypothesis or
> >> phenomenon quantitatively. For example, Culicover & Jackendoff (2010)
> >> make this argument explicitly in their response to Gibson & Fedorenko
> >> (2010): ?It would cripple linguistic investigation if it were required
> >> that all judgments of ambiguity and grammaticality be subject to
> >> statistically rigorous experiments on naive subjects, especially when
> >> investigating languages whose speakers are hard to access? (Culicover
> >> & Jackendoff, 2010, p. 234). (Dick Hudson makes a similar point
> >> earlier in the discussion here.) Whereas we agree that in
> >> circumstances where gathering data is difficult, some evidence is
> >> better than no evidence, we do not agree that research would be slowed
> >> with respect to languages where experimental participants are easy to
> >> access, such as English. In contrast, we think that the opposite is
> >> true: the field?s progress is probably slowed by not doing
> >> quantitative research.
> >> Suppose that a typical syntax / semantics paper that lacks
> >> quantitative evidence includes judgments for 50 or more sentences /
> >> meaning pairs, corresponding to 50 or more empirical claims. Even if
> >> most of the judgments from such a paper are correct or are on the
> >> right track, the problem is in knowing which judgments are correct.
> >> For example, suppose that 90% of the judgments from an arbitrary paper
> >> are correct (which is probably a high estimate). (Colin Phillips and
> >> some of his former students / postdocs have commented to us that, in
> >> their experience, quantitative acceptability judgment studies almost
> >> always validate the claim(s) in the literature. This is not our
> >> experience, however. Most experiments that we have run which attempt
> >> to test some syntactic / semantic hypothesis in the literature end up
> >> providing us with a pattern of data that had not been known before the
> >> experiment (e.g., Breen et al., in press; Fedorenko & Gibson, in
> >> press; Patel et al., 2009; Scontras & Gibson, submitted).) This means
> >> that in a paper with 50 empirical claims 45/50 are correct. But which
> >> 45? There are 2,118, 760 ways to choose 45 items from 50. That?s over
> >> two million different theories. By quantitatively evaluating the
> >> empirical claims, we reduce the uncertainty a great deal. To make
> >> progress, it is better to have theoretical claims supported by solid
> >> quantitative evidence, so that even if the interpretation of the data
> >> changes over time as new evidence becomes available ? as is often the
> >> case in any field of science ? the empirical pattern can be used as a
> >> basis for further theorizing.
> >>
> >> Furthermore, it is no longer expensive to run behavioral experiments,
> >> at least in English and other widely spoken languages. There now
> >> exists a marketplace interface ? Amazon.com?s Mechanical Turk ? which
> >> can be used for collecting behavioral data over the internet quickly
> >> and inexpensively. The cost of using an interface like this is
> >> minimal, and the time that it takes for the results to be returned is
> >> short. For example, currently on Mechanical Turk, a survey of
> >> approximately 50 items will be answered by 50 or more participants
> >> within a couple of hours, at a cost of approximately $1 per
> >> participant. Thus a survey can be completed within a day, at a cost of
> >> less than $50. (The hard work of designing the experiment, and
> >> constructing controlled materials remains of course.)
> >>
> >> Sorry to be so verbose. But I think that these methodological points
> >> are very important.
> >>
> >> Best wishes,
> >>
> >> Ted Gibson
> >>
> >> Gibson, E. & Fedorenko, E. (In press). The need for quantitative
> >> methods in syntax and semantics research. Language and Cognitive
> >> Processes. http://tedlab.mit.edu/tedlab_website/researchpapers/Gibson
> >> & Fedorenko InPress LCP.pdf
> >>
> >> Gibson, E. & Fedorenko, E. (2010). Weak quantitative standards in
> >> linguistics research. Trends in Cognitive Science, 14, 233-234.
> >> http://tedlab.mit.edu/tedlab_website/researchpapers/Gibson & Fedorenko
> >> 2010 TICS.pdf
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >>> 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
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >
>
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 14
> Date: Fri, 10 Sep 2010 18:33:49 -0400
> From: dryer at buffalo.edu
> Subject: Re: [FUNKNET] analysis: unhappiness
> To: "A. Katz" <amnfn at well.com>
> Cc: Lise Menn <Lise.Menn at Colorado.EDU>, Richard Hudson
>        <dick at ling.ucl.ac.uk>,  Funknet <funknet at mailman.rice.edu>
> Message-ID: <2147483647.1284143629 at cast-dryerm2.caset.buffalo.edu>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed
>
>
> 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
> >>>
> >>>
> >>>
> >>>
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >
> >
>
>
>
>
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 15
> Date: Sat, 11 Sep 2010 00:20:15 +0100
> From: Richard Hudson <dick at ling.ucl.ac.uk>
> Subject: Re: [FUNKNET] analysis: unhappiness
> To: funknet at mailman.rice.edu
> Message-ID: <4C8ABD2F.8070902 at ling.ucl.ac.uk>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=windows-1252; format=flowed
>
>  Dear Brian,
> What a helpful message! I think you're right: we need a typology of
> cases, each needing a different range of methods, ranging from the
> linguist's own judgements for really easy cases to more complicated
> quantitative methods for more complicated ones.
>
> The trouble with our discipline is that for any community of N speakers,
> and a language consisting of M 'items' (however you may choose to define
> 'community' and 'item'), we have N*M datapoints that, in principle, all
> need to be validated somehow. We might reduce the number by focusing on
> one speaker, but then you can't use data from other speakers as evidence
> for that speaker's language; or we might try to construct a 'typical'
> speaker, but we don't know how to do that; or we might reduce the size
> of the community by trying to find a 'dialect' (but dialects don't
> really exist); or we might ignore most of the linguistic items and focus
> on, say, the modal verbs - but then we miss their links to all the other
> items.
>
> It's different for psycholinguists because they're only interested in
> general processes, for which linguistic items are just evidence, not the
> thing under investigation; but for us linguists, the fine detail is
> everything because we're the people who explore the connections between
> items.
>
> So I look forward to the day when your typology of cases will guide us
> through a range of different methods to the appropriate ones for any
> given item.
>
> Best wishes, Dick
>
>
> Richard Hudson www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/dick/home.htm
>
> On 10/09/2010 23:23, Brian MacWhinney wrote:
> > Dick and Ted,
> >     I agree with parts of what each of you are saying.  Which means that
> I also disagree with other parts.   In practice,, Gibson and Fedorenko, in
> press,  (which I downloaded and scanned) deals with no more than two or
> three constructions.  They mention the fact that people don't have problems
> with sentences such as "Susan muttered him the news" despite claims that
> verbs such as "mutter" cannot take the double object construction.  They
> also note that the claims from Jackendoff and Culicover about the
> differences between the two sentences below are not supported by results
> from the Mechanical Turk:
> > 1.  Peter was trying to remember who carried what.
> > 2.  Peter was trying to remember who carried what when.
> > These are interesting facts.  If these sentences are supposed to be
> different and people judge them to be similarly grammatical, then theories
> based on the supposed differences should be reexamined.  There are big
> chunks of syntactic theory resting on shaky judgments about complex
> sentences of this type.  Getting some of this straight would be a big win, I
> would say, particularly if linguists would pay attention to the results.
> >       But I understand Dick's worry about how far Gibson and Fedorenko
> are trying to push this.  Neither their email nor their paper sets clear
> limits on what we should be testing and we certainly don't want to waste
> time checking out  go-goed-went.  So, Gibson and Fedorenko owe us those
> clarifications.
> >      But, Dick, you then move on to questioning data on bid-bidded.  Here
> we have a case of true variation in the population.  I would love to know
> its distribution.  As a "fan of quantitative sociolinguistics" shouldn't you
> too?
> >      My take on this is that constructions are not created equal.  The
> three types mentioned here are probably just a start on an inventory of
> evidentiary types.  We need to correctly pair up appropriate methods with
> each of the types.  And we to make sure that people pay attention to the
> results, once they are in
> >
> > --Brian MacWhinney
> >
> > On Sep 10, 2010, at 1:59 PM, Richard Hudson wrote:
> >
> >> Dear Ted,
> >> Thanks for the very interesting comment, but are you REALLY saying that
> I shouldn't claim, for example, that the past tense of GO is "went" without
> first cross-checking with 50 native speakers?
> >>
> >> Isn't there a danger of missing the point that we all, as native
> speakers, spend our whole lives scanning other people's linguistic behaviour
> (language 'out there', E-language) and trying to explain it to ourselves in
> terms of a language system (language 'in here', I-language)? So every
> judgement we make is based on thousands or millions of observed exemplars,
> and reflects a unique experience of E-language filtered through a unique
> I-language.
> >>
> >> Given that view of language development, I don't see how quantitative
> data will help. Let's take a real uncertainty, such as the past tense of
> BID. If I want to say I did it, do I say "I bidded" or "I bid"? My
> judgement: I don't know. Ok, you get 50 people to oblige on Mechanical Turk,
> and 20 of them give "bidded" and 30 "bid". So what? Does that mean that the
> correct answer is "bidded"? Surely not. How is it better than my judgement?
> I agree you could record my speech and find how often I use each
> alternative; but the reason I don't know is precisely because it's a rare
> word, so in a sense quantitative data are irrelevant even there. What would
> solve the problem of subjectivity, of course, would be a machine for probing
> the bit of my mind (or even brain) that holds BID and its details; but I
> suspect that even that wouldn't move us much further forward than my
> original "don't know". (Incidentally I write as a fan of quantitative
> sociolinguistics, so I do accept that quanti
>  tative data are relevant to linguistic analysis in some areas, where the
> I-language phenomenon is frequent enough to produce usable data.)
> >>
> >> It seems to me that this discussion raises the really fundamental
> question of what kind of thing we think language is: social or individual.
> The problem isn't unique to linguistics of course; it's the same throughout
> the social sciences. But what's special about linguistics is that we deal in
> very fine details of culture (e.g. details of how a particular word is used
> or pronounced) so the differences between individuals really matter. I don't
> see that we're ever going to have anything better than judgements to go on,
> so what we need is a way to ensure that judgements are accurate reports of
> individual I-language. A rotten situation for a science, but I don't see how
> it can get better.
> >>
> >> Dick
> >>
> >> Richard Hudson www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/dick/home.htm
> >>
> >> On 10/09/2010 14:03, Ted Gibson wrote:
> >>> Dear Dan, Dick:
> >>>
> >>> I would like to clarify some points that Dan Everett makes, in
> >>> response to Dick Hudson.
> >>>
> >>> Ev Fedorenko and I have written a couple of papers recently (Gibson&
> >>> Fedorenko, 2010, in press, see references and links below) on what we
> >>> think are weak methodological standards in syntax and semantics
> >>> research over the past many years. The issue that we address is the
> >>> prevalent method in syntax and semantics research, which involves
> >>> obtaining a judgment of the acceptability of a sentence / meaning
> >>> pair, typically by just the author of the paper, sometimes with
> >>> feedback from colleagues. As we address in our papers, this
> >>> methodology does not allow proper testing of scientific hypotheses
> >>> because of (a) the small number of experimental participants
> >>> (typically one); (b) the small number of experimental stimuli
> >>> (typically one); (c) cognitive biases on the part of the researcher
> >>> and participants; and (d) the effect of the preceding context (e.g.,
> >>> other constructions the researcher may have been recently
> >>> considering). (As Dan said, see Schutze, 1996; Cowart, 1997; and
> >>> several others cited in Gibson&  Fedorenko, in press; for similar
> >>> points, but with not as strong a conclusion as ours).
> >>>
> >>> Three issues need to be separated here: (1) the use of intuitive
> >>> judgments as a dependent measure in a language experiment; (2)
> >>> potential cognitive biases on the part of experimental subjects and
> >>> experimenters in language experiments; and (3) the need for obtaining
> >>> quantitative evidence, whatever the dependent measure might be. The
> >>> paper that Ev and I wrote addresses the last two issues, but does not
> >>> go into depth on the first issue (the use of intuitions as a dependent
> >>> measure in language experiments). Regarding this issue, we don't think
> >>> that there is anything wrong with gathering intuitive judgments as a
> >>> dependent measure, as long as the task is clear to the experimental
> >>> participants.
> >>>
> >>> In the longer paper (Gibson&  Fedorenko, in press) we respond to some
> >>> arguments that have been given in support of continuing to use the
> >>> traditional non-quantitative method in syntax / semantics research.
> >>> One recent defense of the traditional method comes from Phillips
> >>> (2008), who argues that no harm has come from the non-quantitative
> >>> approach in syntax research thus far. Phillips argues that there are
> >>> no cases in the literature where an incorrect intuitive judgment has
> >>> become the basis for a widely accepted generalization or an important
> >>> theoretical claim. He therefore concludes that there is no reason to
> >>> adopt more rigorous data collection standards. We challenge Philips?
> >>> conclusion by presenting three cases from the literature where a
> >>> faulty intuition has led to incorrect generalizations and mistaken
> >>> theorizing, plausibly due to cognitive biases on the part of the
> >>> researchers.
> >>>
> >>> A second argument that is sometimes presented for the continued use of
> >>> the traditional non-quantitative method is that it would be too
> >>> inefficient to evaluate every syntactic / semantic hypothesis or
> >>> phenomenon quantitatively. For example, Culicover&  Jackendoff (2010)
> >>> make this argument explicitly in their response to Gibson&  Fedorenko
> >>> (2010): ?It would cripple linguistic investigation if it were required
> >>> that all judgments of ambiguity and grammaticality be subject to
> >>> statistically rigorous experiments on naive subjects, especially when
> >>> investigating languages whose speakers are hard to access? (Culicover
> >>> &  Jackendoff, 2010, p. 234). (Dick Hudson makes a similar point
> >>> earlier in the discussion here.) Whereas we agree that in
> >>> circumstances where gathering data is difficult, some evidence is
> >>> better than no evidence, we do not agree that research would be slowed
> >>> with respect to languages where experimental participants are easy to
> >>> access, such as English. In contrast, we think that the opposite is
> >>> true: the field?s progress is probably slowed by not doing
> >>> quantitative research.
> >>> Suppose that a typical syntax / semantics paper that lacks
> >>> quantitative evidence includes judgments for 50 or more sentences /
> >>> meaning pairs, corresponding to 50 or more empirical claims. Even if
> >>> most of the judgments from such a paper are correct or are on the
> >>> right track, the problem is in knowing which judgments are correct.
> >>> For example, suppose that 90% of the judgments from an arbitrary paper
> >>> are correct (which is probably a high estimate). (Colin Phillips and
> >>> some of his former students / postdocs have commented to us that, in
> >>> their experience, quantitative acceptability judgment studies almost
> >>> always validate the claim(s) in the literature. This is not our
> >>> experience, however. Most experiments that we have run which attempt
> >>> to test some syntactic / semantic hypothesis in the literature end up
> >>> providing us with a pattern of data that had not been known before the
> >>> experiment (e.g., Breen et al., in press; Fedorenko&  Gibson, in
> >>> press; Patel et al., 2009; Scontras&  Gibson, submitted).) This means
> >>> that in a paper with 50 empirical claims 45/50 are correct. But which
> >>> 45? There are 2,118, 760 ways to choose 45 items from 50. That?s over
> >>> two million different theories. By quantitatively evaluating the
> >>> empirical claims, we reduce the uncertainty a great deal. To make
> >>> progress, it is better to have theoretical claims supported by solid
> >>> quantitative evidence, so that even if the interpretation of the data
> >>> changes over time as new evidence becomes available ? as is often the
> >>> case in any field of science ? the empirical pattern can be used as a
> >>> basis for further theorizing.
> >>>
> >>> Furthermore, it is no longer expensive to run behavioral experiments,
> >>> at least in English and other widely spoken languages. There now
> >>> exists a marketplace interface ? Amazon.com?s Mechanical Turk ? which
> >>> can be used for collecting behavioral data over the internet quickly
> >>> and inexpensively. The cost of using an interface like this is
> >>> minimal, and the time that it takes for the results to be returned is
> >>> short. For example, currently on Mechanical Turk, a survey of
> >>> approximately 50 items will be answered by 50 or more participants
> >>> within a couple of hours, at a cost of approximately $1 per
> >>> participant. Thus a survey can be completed within a day, at a cost of
> >>> less than $50. (The hard work of designing the experiment, and
> >>> constructing controlled materials remains of course.)
> >>>
> >>> Sorry to be so verbose. But I think that these methodological points
> >>> are very important.
> >>>
> >>> Best wishes,
> >>>
> >>> Ted Gibson
> >>>
> >>> Gibson, E.&  Fedorenko, E. (In press). The need for quantitative
> >>> methods in syntax and semantics research. Language and Cognitive
> >>> Processes. http://tedlab.mit.edu/tedlab_website/researchpapers/Gibson
> >>> &  Fedorenko InPress LCP.pdf
> >>>
> >>> Gibson, E.&  Fedorenko, E. (2010). Weak quantitative standards in
> >>> linguistics research. Trends in Cognitive Science, 14, 233-234.
> >>> http://tedlab.mit.edu/tedlab_website/researchpapers/Gibson&  Fedorenko
> >>> 2010 TICS.pdf
> >>>
> >>>
> >>>
> >>>
> >>>> 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
> >>>
> >>>
> >
> >
>
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 16
> Date: Sat, 11 Sep 2010 00:40:06 +0100
> From: Richard Hudson <dick at ling.ucl.ac.uk>
> Subject: Re: [FUNKNET] analysis: unhappiness
> To: Ted Gibson <egibson at MIT.EDU>
> Cc: Richard Hudson <dick at linguistics.ucl.ac.uk>,        Evelina Fedorenko
>        <evelina9 at mit.edu>, funknet <funknet at mailman.rice.edu>
> Message-ID: <4C8AC1D6.3010203 at ling.ucl.ac.uk>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=windows-1252; format=flowed
>
>  Dear Ted and Ev,
> Yes, I understand your view, but I think it's a psycholinguist's view.
> Your goal is to find general processes and principles that apply
> uniformly across individuals, so you have to use methods to check for
> generality. And (as you know) I admire the way you pursue that goal. But
> my goal, as a linguist, is different. I want to explore the structure of
> a language so that I can understand how all the bits fit together. Like
> you, I'm aiming to model cognition, but my focus is on items and
> structures, and I start from the assumption that these can and do vary
> across speakers.
>
> However, having said all that I do agree with you that linguists should
> all get used to collecting and using quantitative data; and with the
> help of Brian MacWhinney's typology we'd know what methods to use when.
> And I do agree with your points about bid/bidded: in cases like that,
> quantitative data would be at least a very good starting point for a
> proper investigation.
>
> Best wishes, Dick
>
> Richard Hudson www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/dick/home.htm
>
> On 10/09/2010 19:30, Ted Gibson wrote:
> > Dear Dick:
> >
> > Perhaps we are talking at cross purposes. I don't understand what is
> > confusing about what Ev Fedorenko and I are claiming. All we are
> > saying is that if you have some testable claim involving a general
> > hypothesis about a language, then you need to get quantitative data
> > from unbiased sources to evaluate that claim. If you are interested in
> > English past tense morphology, then depending on the claims that you
> > might want to investigate, there are lots of ways to get relevant
> > quantitative evidence. Corpus data will probably be useful. For very
> > low frequency words, you can run experiments to test behavior with
> > respect to such words.
> >
> > Your example of the past tense of "bid" is a fine such example. You
> > can run an experiment like the one you suggested to find out what
> > people think the past tense is. If you then found that 20/50 people
> > responded "bidded" and 30/50 respond "bid", that is a lot of useful
> > information. As you suggest in your discussion, this result wouldn't
> > answer the question of how past tense is stored in each individual.
> > This result would be ambiguous among several possible explanations.
> > One possibility is that the probability distribution that is being
> > discovered reflects different dialects, such that 2/5 of the
> > population has one past tense, and 3/5 has another. Another
> > possibility is that each person has a similar probability distribution
> > in their heads, such that 2/5 of the time I respond one way, and 3/5
> > of the time I respond another. Further experiments would be necessary
> > to answer between these and other possible theories (e.g., with
> > repeated trials from the same person, carefully planned so that the
> > participants don't notice that they are being asked multiple times).
> > Without the quantitative evidence in the first place, there is no way
> > to answer these kinds of questions.
> >
> > Regarding the past tense of "go", this would be useful as a baseline
> > in an experiment involving the less frequent ones. So, yes, it would
> > useful to gather quantitative evidence in such a case also, as
> > baselines with respect to the more interesting cases for theories.
> >
> > The bottom line: if you have a generalization about a language that
> > you wish to evaluate (such that you hypothesize that it is true across
> > the speakers of the language), then you need quantitative evidence
> > from multiple individuals, using an unbiased data collection method,
> > to evaluate such a claim. The point about Mechanical Turk is that it
> > is really *easy* to do this now, at least for languages like English.
> >
> > Best wishes,
> >
> > Ted Gibson & Ev Fedorenko
> >
> > On Sep 10, 2010, at 1:59 PM, Richard Hudson wrote:
> >
> >> Dear Ted,
> >> Thanks for the very interesting comment, but are you REALLY saying
> >> that I shouldn't claim, for example, that the past tense of GO is
> >> "went" without first cross-checking with 50 native speakers?
> >>
> >> Isn't there a danger of missing the point that we all, as native
> >> speakers, spend our whole lives scanning other people's linguistic
> >> behaviour (language 'out there', E-language) and trying to explain it
> >> to ourselves in terms of a language system (language 'in here',
> >> I-language)? So every judgement we make is based on thousands or
> >> millions of observed exemplars, and reflects a unique experience of
> >> E-language filtered through a unique I-language.
> >>
> >> Given that view of language development, I don't see how quantitative
> >> data will help. Let's take a real uncertainty, such as the past tense
> >> of BID. If I want to say I did it, do I say "I bidded" or "I bid"? My
> >> judgement: I don't know. Ok, you get 50 people to oblige on
> >> Mechanical Turk, and 20 of them give "bidded" and 30 "bid". So what?
> >> Does that mean that the correct answer is "bidded"? Surely not. How
> >> is it better than my judgement? I agree you could record my speech
> >> and find how often I use each alternative; but the reason I don't
> >> know is precisely because it's a rare word, so in a sense
> >> quantitative data are irrelevant even there. What would solve the
> >> problem of subjectivity, of course, would be a machine for probing
> >> the bit of my mind (or even brain) that holds BID and its details;
> >> but I suspect that even that wouldn't move us much further forward
> >> than my original "don't know". (Incidentally I write as a fan of
> >> quantitative sociolinguistics, so I do accept that quantitative data
> >> are relevant to linguistic analysis in some areas, where the
> >> I-language phenomenon is frequent enough to produce usable data.)
> >>
> >> It seems to me that this discussion raises the really fundamental
> >> question of what kind of thing we think language is: social or
> >> individual. The problem isn't unique to linguistics of course; it's
> >> the same throughout the social sciences. But what's special about
> >> linguistics is that we deal in very fine details of culture (e.g.
> >> details of how a particular word is used or pronounced) so the
> >> differences between individuals really matter. I don't see that we're
> >> ever going to have anything better than judgements to go on, so what
> >> we need is a way to ensure that judgements are accurate reports of
> >> individual I-language. A rotten situation for a science, but I don't
> >> see how it can get better.
> >>
> >> Dick
> >>
> >> Richard Hudson www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/dick/home.htm
> >>
> >> On 10/09/2010 14:03, Ted Gibson wrote:
> >>> Dear Dan, Dick:
> >>>
> >>> I would like to clarify some points that Dan Everett makes, in
> >>> response to Dick Hudson.
> >>>
> >>> Ev Fedorenko and I have written a couple of papers recently (Gibson &
> >>> Fedorenko, 2010, in press, see references and links below) on what we
> >>> think are weak methodological standards in syntax and semantics
> >>> research over the past many years. The issue that we address is the
> >>> prevalent method in syntax and semantics research, which involves
> >>> obtaining a judgment of the acceptability of a sentence / meaning
> >>> pair, typically by just the author of the paper, sometimes with
> >>> feedback from colleagues. As we address in our papers, this
> >>> methodology does not allow proper testing of scientific hypotheses
> >>> because of (a) the small number of experimental participants
> >>> (typically one); (b) the small number of experimental stimuli
> >>> (typically one); (c) cognitive biases on the part of the researcher
> >>> and participants; and (d) the effect of the preceding context (e.g.,
> >>> other constructions the researcher may have been recently
> >>> considering). (As Dan said, see Schutze, 1996; Cowart, 1997; and
> >>> several others cited in Gibson & Fedorenko, in press; for similar
> >>> points, but with not as strong a conclusion as ours).
> >>>
> >>> Three issues need to be separated here: (1) the use of intuitive
> >>> judgments as a dependent measure in a language experiment; (2)
> >>> potential cognitive biases on the part of experimental subjects and
> >>> experimenters in language experiments; and (3) the need for obtaining
> >>> quantitative evidence, whatever the dependent measure might be. The
> >>> paper that Ev and I wrote addresses the last two issues, but does not
> >>> go into depth on the first issue (the use of intuitions as a dependent
> >>> measure in language experiments). Regarding this issue, we don't think
> >>> that there is anything wrong with gathering intuitive judgments as a
> >>> dependent measure, as long as the task is clear to the experimental
> >>> participants.
> >>>
> >>> In the longer paper (Gibson & Fedorenko, in press) we respond to some
> >>> arguments that have been given in support of continuing to use the
> >>> traditional non-quantitative method in syntax / semantics research.
> >>> One recent defense of the traditional method comes from Phillips
> >>> (2008), who argues that no harm has come from the non-quantitative
> >>> approach in syntax research thus far. Phillips argues that there are
> >>> no cases in the literature where an incorrect intuitive judgment has
> >>> become the basis for a widely accepted generalization or an important
> >>> theoretical claim. He therefore concludes that there is no reason to
> >>> adopt more rigorous data collection standards. We challenge Philips?
> >>> conclusion by presenting three cases from the literature where a
> >>> faulty intuition has led to incorrect generalizations and mistaken
> >>> theorizing, plausibly due to cognitive biases on the part of the
> >>> researchers.
> >>>
> >>> A second argument that is sometimes presented for the continued use of
> >>> the traditional non-quantitative method is that it would be too
> >>> inefficient to evaluate every syntactic / semantic hypothesis or
> >>> phenomenon quantitatively. For example, Culicover & Jackendoff (2010)
> >>> make this argument explicitly in their response to Gibson & Fedorenko
> >>> (2010): ?It would cripple linguistic investigation if it were required
> >>> that all judgments of ambiguity and grammaticality be subject to
> >>> statistically rigorous experiments on naive subjects, especially when
> >>> investigating languages whose speakers are hard to access? (Culicover
> >>> & Jackendoff, 2010, p. 234). (Dick Hudson makes a similar point
> >>> earlier in the discussion here.) Whereas we agree that in
> >>> circumstances where gathering data is difficult, some evidence is
> >>> better than no evidence, we do not agree that research would be slowed
> >>> with respect to languages where experimental participants are easy to
> >>> access, such as English. In contrast, we think that the opposite is
> >>> true: the field?s progress is probably slowed by not doing
> >>> quantitative research.
> >>> Suppose that a typical syntax / semantics paper that lacks
> >>> quantitative evidence includes judgments for 50 or more sentences /
> >>> meaning pairs, corresponding to 50 or more empirical claims. Even if
> >>> most of the judgments from such a paper are correct or are on the
> >>> right track, the problem is in knowing which judgments are correct.
> >>> For example, suppose that 90% of the judgments from an arbitrary paper
> >>> are correct (which is probably a high estimate). (Colin Phillips and
> >>> some of his former students / postdocs have commented to us that, in
> >>> their experience, quantitative acceptability judgment studies almost
> >>> always validate the claim(s) in the literature. This is not our
> >>> experience, however. Most experiments that we have run which attempt
> >>> to test some syntactic / semantic hypothesis in the literature end up
> >>> providing us with a pattern of data that had not been known before the
> >>> experiment (e.g., Breen et al., in press; Fedorenko & Gibson, in
> >>> press; Patel et al., 2009; Scontras & Gibson, submitted).) This means
> >>> that in a paper with 50 empirical claims 45/50 are correct. But which
> >>> 45? There are 2,118, 760 ways to choose 45 items from 50. That?s over
> >>> two million different theories. By quantitatively evaluating the
> >>> empirical claims, we reduce the uncertainty a great deal. To make
> >>> progress, it is better to have theoretical claims supported by solid
> >>> quantitative evidence, so that even if the interpretation of the data
> >>> changes over time as new evidence becomes available ? as is often the
> >>> case in any field of science ? the empirical pattern can be used as a
> >>> basis for further theorizing.
> >>>
> >>> Furthermore, it is no longer expensive to run behavioral experiments,
> >>> at least in English and other widely spoken languages. There now
> >>> exists a marketplace interface ? Amazon.com?s Mechanical Turk ? which
> >>> can be used for collecting behavioral data over the internet quickly
> >>> and inexpensively. The cost of using an interface like this is
> >>> minimal, and the time that it takes for the results to be returned is
> >>> short. For example, currently on Mechanical Turk, a survey of
> >>> approximately 50 items will be answered by 50 or more participants
> >>> within a couple of hours, at a cost of approximately $1 per
> >>> participant. Thus a survey can be completed within a day, at a cost of
> >>> less than $50. (The hard work of designing the experiment, and
> >>> constructing controlled materials remains of course.)
> >>>
> >>> Sorry to be so verbose. But I think that these methodological points
> >>> are very important.
> >>>
> >>> Best wishes,
> >>>
> >>> Ted Gibson
> >>>
> >>> Gibson, E. & Fedorenko, E. (In press). The need for quantitative
> >>> methods in syntax and semantics research. Language and Cognitive
> >>> Processes. http://tedlab.mit.edu/tedlab_website/researchpapers/Gibson
> >>> & Fedorenko InPress LCP.pdf
> >>>
> >>> Gibson, E. & Fedorenko, E. (2010). Weak quantitative standards in
> >>> linguistics research. Trends in Cognitive Science, 14, 233-234.
> >>> http://tedlab.mit.edu/tedlab_website/researchpapers/Gibson & Fedorenko
> >>> 2010 TICS.pdf
> >>>
> >>>
> >>>
> >>>
> >>>> 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
> >>>
> >>>
> >>>
> >
> >
> >
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 17
> Date: Fri, 10 Sep 2010 18:40:47 -0600
> From: Lise Menn <Lise.Menn at Colorado.EDU>
> Subject: Re: [FUNKNET] analysis: unhappiness
> To: dryer at buffalo.edu
> Cc: Richard Hudson <dick at ling.ucl.ac.uk>, Funknet
>        <funknet at mailman.rice.edu>
> Message-ID: <91F0DEA7-53BE-405B-8087-88B7F1672447 at Colorado.EDU>
> Content-Type: text/plain;       charset=US-ASCII;       format=flowed;
>  delsp=yes
>
> 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
>
>
>
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 18
> Date: Fri, 10 Sep 2010 19:03:41 -0600
> From: Lise Menn <Lise.Menn at Colorado.EDU>
> Subject: Re: [FUNKNET] analysis: unhappiness
> To: Richard Hudson <dick at ling.ucl.ac.uk>
> Cc: Ted Gibson <egibson at MIT.EDU>, Richard Hudson
>        <dick at linguistics.ucl.ac.uk>,   Evelina Fedorenko <evelina9 at mit.edu
> >,
>        funknet <funknet at mailman.rice.edu>
> Message-ID: <10638E94-DC8F-4181-8135-CE74F045079E at colorado.edu>
> Content-Type: text/plain;       charset=WINDOWS-1252;   format=flowed;
>        delsp=yes
>
> Dick, I think that what you say is true, but it is only (I hope) a
> temporary description of the state of the art of psycholinguistics.
> At least some of us would like our methods to become sensitive enough
> to individual differences so that we can look at  how 'the general
> processes and principles' interact with the level of an individual
> person's knowledge of particular constructions, to find out how much
> each person knows of the patterns 'out there' in the language.  Some
> experimental methods are almost at that point already; they can
> distinguish degrees of mastery of particular constructions of a
> language among groups of second-language learners.
>        Have a look at
>        Au, Terry Kit-fong, Leah M. Knightly, Sun-Ah Jun, and Janet S. Oh.
> 2002. Overhearing a language during childhood. Psychological Science
> 13.3, 238-243.
>
>        Oh, J. S., Jun, S.-A., Knightly, L. M., & Au, T. K.  2003.  Holding
> on to childhood language memory.  Cognition, 86(3), B53-B64.
>
>        Lise
>
> On Sep 10, 2010, at 5:40 PM, Richard Hudson wrote:
>
> > Dear Ted and Ev,
> > Yes, I understand your view, but I think it's a psycholinguist's
> > view. Your goal is to find general processes and principles that
> > apply uniformly across individuals, so you have to use methods to
> > check for generality. And (as you know) I admire the way you pursue
> > that goal. But my goal, as a linguist, is different. I want to
> > explore the structure of a language so that I can understand how all
> > the bits fit together. Like you, I'm aiming to model cognition, but
> > my focus is on items and structures, and I start from the assumption
> > that these can and do vary across speakers.
> >
> > However, having said all that I do agree with you that linguists
> > should all get used to collecting and using quantitative data; and
> > with the help of Brian MacWhinney's typology we'd know what methods
> > to use when. And I do agree with your points about bid/bidded: in
> > cases like that, quantitative data would be at least a very good
> > starting point for a proper investigation.
> >
> > Best wishes, Dick
> >
> > Richard Hudson www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/dick/home.htm
> >
> > On 10/09/2010 19:30, Ted Gibson wrote:
> >> Dear Dick:
> >>
> >> Perhaps we are talking at cross purposes. I don't understand what
> >> is confusing about what Ev Fedorenko and I are claiming. All we are
> >> saying is that if you have some testable claim involving a general
> >> hypothesis about a language, then you need to get quantitative data
> >> from unbiased sources to evaluate that claim. If you are interested
> >> in English past tense morphology, then depending on the claims that
> >> you might want to investigate, there are lots of ways to get
> >> relevant quantitative evidence. Corpus data will probably be
> >> useful. For very low frequency words, you can run experiments to
> >> test behavior with respect to such words.
> >>
> >> Your example of the past tense of "bid" is a fine such example. You
> >> can run an experiment like the one you suggested to find out what
> >> people think the past tense is. If you then found that 20/50 people
> >> responded "bidded" and 30/50 respond "bid", that is a lot of useful
> >> information. As you suggest in your discussion, this result
> >> wouldn't answer the question of how past tense is stored in each
> >> individual. This result would be ambiguous among several possible
> >> explanations. One possibility is that the probability distribution
> >> that is being discovered reflects different dialects, such that 2/5
> >> of the population has one past tense, and 3/5 has another. Another
> >> possibility is that each person has a similar probability
> >> distribution in their heads, such that 2/5 of the time I respond
> >> one way, and 3/5 of the time I respond another. Further experiments
> >> would be necessary to answer between these and other possible
> >> theories (e.g., with repeated trials from the same person,
> >> carefully planned so that the participants don't notice that they
> >> are being asked multiple times). Without the quantitative evidence
> >> in the first place, there is no way to answer these kinds of
> >> questions.
> >>
> >> Regarding the past tense of "go", this would be useful as a
> >> baseline in an experiment involving the less frequent ones. So,
> >> yes, it would useful to gather quantitative evidence in such a case
> >> also, as baselines with respect to the more interesting cases for
> >> theories.
> >>
> >> The bottom line: if you have a generalization about a language that
> >> you wish to evaluate (such that you hypothesize that it is true
> >> across the speakers of the language), then you need quantitative
> >> evidence from multiple individuals, using an unbiased data
> >> collection method, to evaluate such a claim. The point about
> >> Mechanical Turk is that it is really *easy* to do this now, at
> >> least for languages like English.
> >>
> >> Best wishes,
> >>
> >> Ted Gibson & Ev Fedorenko
> >>
> >> On Sep 10, 2010, at 1:59 PM, Richard Hudson wrote:
> >>
> >>> Dear Ted,
> >>> Thanks for the very interesting comment, but are you REALLY saying
> >>> that I shouldn't claim, for example, that the past tense of GO is
> >>> "went" without first cross-checking with 50 native speakers?
> >>>
> >>> Isn't there a danger of missing the point that we all, as native
> >>> speakers, spend our whole lives scanning other people's linguistic
> >>> behaviour (language 'out there', E-language) and trying to explain
> >>> it to ourselves in terms of a language system (language 'in here',
> >>> I-language)? So every judgement we make is based on thousands or
> >>> millions of observed exemplars, and reflects a unique experience
> >>> of E-language filtered through a unique I-language.
> >>>
> >>> Given that view of language development, I don't see how
> >>> quantitative data will help. Let's take a real uncertainty, such
> >>> as the past tense of BID. If I want to say I did it, do I say "I
> >>> bidded" or "I bid"? My judgement: I don't know. Ok, you get 50
> >>> people to oblige on Mechanical Turk, and 20 of them give "bidded"
> >>> and 30 "bid". So what? Does that mean that the correct answer is
> >>> "bidded"? Surely not. How is it better than my judgement? I agree
> >>> you could record my speech and find how often I use each
> >>> alternative; but the reason I don't know is precisely because it's
> >>> a rare word, so in a sense quantitative data are irrelevant even
> >>> there. What would solve the problem of subjectivity, of course,
> >>> would be a machine for probing the bit of my mind (or even brain)
> >>> that holds BID and its details; but I suspect that even that
> >>> wouldn't move us much further forward than my original "don't
> >>> know". (Incidentally I write as a fan of quantitative
> >>> sociolinguistics, so I do accept that quantitative data are
> >>> relevant to linguistic analysis in some areas, where the I-
> >>> language phenomenon is frequent enough to produce usable data.)
> >>>
> >>> It seems to me that this discussion raises the really fundamental
> >>> question of what kind of thing we think language is: social or
> >>> individual. The problem isn't unique to linguistics of course;
> >>> it's the same throughout the social sciences. But what's special
> >>> about linguistics is that we deal in very fine details of culture
> >>> (e.g. details of how a particular word is used or pronounced) so
> >>> the differences between individuals really matter. I don't see
> >>> that we're ever going to have anything better than judgements to
> >>> go on, so what we need is a way to ensure that judgements are
> >>> accurate reports of individual I-language. A rotten situation for
> >>> a science, but I don't see how it can get better.
> >>>
> >>> Dick
> >>>
> >>> Richard Hudson www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/dick/home.htm
> >>>
> >>> On 10/09/2010 14:03, Ted Gibson wrote:
> >>>> Dear Dan, Dick:
> >>>>
> >>>> I would like to clarify some points that Dan Everett makes, in
> >>>> response to Dick Hudson.
> >>>>
> >>>> Ev Fedorenko and I have written a couple of papers recently
> >>>> (Gibson &
> >>>> Fedorenko, 2010, in press, see references and links below) on
> >>>> what we
> >>>> think are weak methodological standards in syntax and semantics
> >>>> research over the past many years. The issue that we address is the
> >>>> prevalent method in syntax and semantics research, which involves
> >>>> obtaining a judgment of the acceptability of a sentence / meaning
> >>>> pair, typically by just the author of the paper, sometimes with
> >>>> feedback from colleagues. As we address in our papers, this
> >>>> methodology does not allow proper testing of scientific hypotheses
> >>>> because of (a) the small number of experimental participants
> >>>> (typically one); (b) the small number of experimental stimuli
> >>>> (typically one); (c) cognitive biases on the part of the researcher
> >>>> and participants; and (d) the effect of the preceding context
> >>>> (e.g.,
> >>>> other constructions the researcher may have been recently
> >>>> considering). (As Dan said, see Schutze, 1996; Cowart, 1997; and
> >>>> several others cited in Gibson & Fedorenko, in press; for similar
> >>>> points, but with not as strong a conclusion as ours).
> >>>>
> >>>> Three issues need to be separated here: (1) the use of intuitive
> >>>> judgments as a dependent measure in a language experiment; (2)
> >>>> potential cognitive biases on the part of experimental subjects and
> >>>> experimenters in language experiments; and (3) the need for
> >>>> obtaining
> >>>> quantitative evidence, whatever the dependent measure might be. The
> >>>> paper that Ev and I wrote addresses the last two issues, but does
> >>>> not
> >>>> go into depth on the first issue (the use of intuitions as a
> >>>> dependent
> >>>> measure in language experiments). Regarding this issue, we don't
> >>>> think
> >>>> that there is anything wrong with gathering intuitive judgments
> >>>> as a
> >>>> dependent measure, as long as the task is clear to the experimental
> >>>> participants.
> >>>>
> >>>> In the longer paper (Gibson & Fedorenko, in press) we respond to
> >>>> some
> >>>> arguments that have been given in support of continuing to use the
> >>>> traditional non-quantitative method in syntax / semantics research.
> >>>> One recent defense of the traditional method comes from Phillips
> >>>> (2008), who argues that no harm has come from the non-quantitative
> >>>> approach in syntax research thus far. Phillips argues that there
> >>>> are
> >>>> no cases in the literature where an incorrect intuitive judgment
> >>>> has
> >>>> become the basis for a widely accepted generalization or an
> >>>> important
> >>>> theoretical claim. He therefore concludes that there is no reason
> >>>> to
> >>>> adopt more rigorous data collection standards. We challenge
> >>>> Philips?
> >>>> conclusion by presenting three cases from the literature where a
> >>>> faulty intuition has led to incorrect generalizations and mistaken
> >>>> theorizing, plausibly due to cognitive biases on the part of the
> >>>> researchers.
> >>>>
> >>>> A second argument that is sometimes presented for the continued
> >>>> use of
> >>>> the traditional non-quantitative method is that it would be too
> >>>> inefficient to evaluate every syntactic / semantic hypothesis or
> >>>> phenomenon quantitatively. For example, Culicover & Jackendoff
> >>>> (2010)
> >>>> make this argument explicitly in their response to Gibson &
> >>>> Fedorenko
> >>>> (2010): ?It would cripple linguistic investigation if it were
> >>>> required
> >>>> that all judgments of ambiguity and grammaticality be subject to
> >>>> statistically rigorous experiments on naive subjects, especially
> >>>> when
> >>>> investigating languages whose speakers are hard to
> >>>> access? (Culicover
> >>>> & Jackendoff, 2010, p. 234). (Dick Hudson makes a similar point
> >>>> earlier in the discussion here.) Whereas we agree that in
> >>>> circumstances where gathering data is difficult, some evidence is
> >>>> better than no evidence, we do not agree that research would be
> >>>> slowed
> >>>> with respect to languages where experimental participants are
> >>>> easy to
> >>>> access, such as English. In contrast, we think that the opposite is
> >>>> true: the field?s progress is probably slowed by not doing
> >>>> quantitative research.
> >>>> Suppose that a typical syntax / semantics paper that lacks
> >>>> quantitative evidence includes judgments for 50 or more sentences /
> >>>> meaning pairs, corresponding to 50 or more empirical claims. Even
> >>>> if
> >>>> most of the judgments from such a paper are correct or are on the
> >>>> right track, the problem is in knowing which judgments are correct.
> >>>> For example, suppose that 90% of the judgments from an arbitrary
> >>>> paper
> >>>> are correct (which is probably a high estimate). (Colin Phillips
> >>>> and
> >>>> some of his former students / postdocs have commented to us that,
> >>>> in
> >>>> their experience, quantitative acceptability judgment studies
> >>>> almost
> >>>> always validate the claim(s) in the literature. This is not our
> >>>> experience, however. Most experiments that we have run which
> >>>> attempt
> >>>> to test some syntactic / semantic hypothesis in the literature
> >>>> end up
> >>>> providing us with a pattern of data that had not been known
> >>>> before the
> >>>> experiment (e.g., Breen et al., in press; Fedorenko & Gibson, in
> >>>> press; Patel et al., 2009; Scontras & Gibson, submitted).) This
> >>>> means
> >>>> that in a paper with 50 empirical claims 45/50 are correct. But
> >>>> which
> >>>> 45? There are 2,118, 760 ways to choose 45 items from 50. That?s
> >>>> over
> >>>> two million different theories. By quantitatively evaluating the
> >>>> empirical claims, we reduce the uncertainty a great deal. To make
> >>>> progress, it is better to have theoretical claims supported by
> >>>> solid
> >>>> quantitative evidence, so that even if the interpretation of the
> >>>> data
> >>>> changes over time as new evidence becomes available ? as is often
> >>>> the
> >>>> case in any field of science ? the empirical pattern can be used
> >>>> as a
> >>>> basis for further theorizing.
> >>>>
> >>>> Furthermore, it is no longer expensive to run behavioral
> >>>> experiments,
> >>>> at least in English and other widely spoken languages. There now
> >>>> exists a marketplace interface ? Amazon.com?s Mechanical Turk ?
> >>>> which
> >>>> can be used for collecting behavioral data over the internet
> >>>> quickly
> >>>> and inexpensively. The cost of using an interface like this is
> >>>> minimal, and the time that it takes for the results to be
> >>>> returned is
> >>>> short. For example, currently on Mechanical Turk, a survey of
> >>>> approximately 50 items will be answered by 50 or more participants
> >>>> within a couple of hours, at a cost of approximately $1 per
> >>>> participant. Thus a survey can be completed within a day, at a
> >>>> cost of
> >>>> less than $50. (The hard work of designing the experiment, and
> >>>> constructing controlled materials remains of course.)
> >>>>
> >>>> Sorry to be so verbose. But I think that these methodological
> >>>> points
> >>>> are very important.
> >>>>
> >>>> Best wishes,
> >>>>
> >>>> Ted Gibson
> >>>>
> >>>> Gibson, E. & Fedorenko, E. (In press). The need for quantitative
> >>>> methods in syntax and semantics research. Language and Cognitive
> >>>> Processes. http://tedlab.mit.edu/tedlab_website/researchpapers/Gibson
> >>>> & Fedorenko InPress LCP.pdf
> >>>>
> >>>> Gibson, E. & Fedorenko, E. (2010). Weak quantitative standards in
> >>>> linguistics research. Trends in Cognitive Science, 14, 233-234.
> >>>> http://tedlab.mit.edu/tedlab_website/researchpapers/Gibson &
> >>>> Fedorenko
> >>>> 2010 TICS.pdf
> >>>>
> >>>>
> >>>>
> >>>>
> >>>>> 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
>
>
>
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 19
> Date: Fri, 10 Sep 2010 21:05:18 -0400
> From: Daniel Everett <dan at daneverett.org>
> Subject: Re: [FUNKNET] analysis: unhappiness
> To: Richard Hudson <dick at ling.ucl.ac.uk>
> Cc: Ted Gibson <egibson at MIT.EDU>, Richard Hudson
>        <dick at linguistics.ucl.ac.uk>,   Daniel Everett <dan at daneverett.org
> >,
>        Evelina Fedorenko <evelina9 at mit.edu>,   funknet
>        <funknet at mailman.rice.edu>
> Message-ID: <A161C922-F21E-4DE7-B41E-C1639A903E99 at daneverett.org>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=windows-1252
>
> I think that Brian and Dick make excellent points. There are very good
> grammars written that could be improved by psycholinguistic experimentation
> and more quantitative approaches. But large sections of those grammars
> aren't going to change one bit (go-went) with quantitative tests and such
> tests would be completely counterproductive given the shortness of life and
> the vastness of the field linguist's tasks.
>
> Part of the problem is that linguistics is not simply a subdiscipline of
> psychology. Linguistics has its own objectives and those only occasionally
> overlap with psychology. The same for methods.
>
> On another note, I don't buy the 'in my head' 'out of my head' distinction
> either (that Matt seems to be urging upon us). We study different things and
> have different reasons for being satisfied with the results we achieve.
>
> I believe that  we linguists are often complacent and fail to apply better
> methods. But of course that applies to all disciplines.
>
> In the meantime, checking corpora, collecting data as a result of careful
> interviews with native speakers, and the other aspects of the field
> linguist's task are vital parts of the linguist's task and much of this
> won't be improved by quantitative methods as we currently understand them.
> Maybe sometime.
>
> Dan
>
> P.S. In my original reference to Ted and Ev's paper, I said that they
> showed the danger of using intuitions. What I meant to say of using
> intuitions as standardly used by linguists. They convinced me that there is
> a lot to learn from quantitative methods.
>
> On 10 Sep 2010, at 19:40, Richard Hudson wrote:
>
> > Dear Ted and Ev,
> > Yes, I understand your view, but I think it's a psycholinguist's view.
> Your goal is to find general processes and principles that apply uniformly
> across individuals, so you have to use methods to check for generality. And
> (as you know) I admire the way you pursue that goal. But my goal, as a
> linguist, is different. I want to explore the structure of a language so
> that I can understand how all the bits fit together. Like you, I'm aiming to
> model cognition, but my focus is on items and structures, and I start from
> the assumption that these can and do vary across speakers.
> >
> > However, having said all that I do agree with you that linguists should
> all get used to collecting and using quantitative data; and with the help of
> Brian MacWhinney's typology we'd know what methods to use when. And I do
> agree with your points about bid/bidded: in cases like that, quantitative
> data would be at least a very good starting point for a proper
> investigation.
> >
> > Best wishes, Dick
> >
> > Richard Hudson www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/dick/home.htm
> >
> > On 10/09/2010 19:30, Ted Gibson wrote:
> >> Dear Dick:
> >>
> >> Perhaps we are talking at cross purposes. I don't understand what is
> confusing about what Ev Fedorenko and I are claiming. All we are saying is
> that if you have some testable claim involving a general hypothesis about a
> language, then you need to get quantitative data from unbiased sources to
> evaluate that claim. If you are interested in English past tense morphology,
> then depending on the claims that you might want to investigate, there are
> lots of ways to get relevant quantitative evidence. Corpus data will
> probably be useful. For very low frequency words, you can run experiments to
> test behavior with respect to such words.
> >>
> >> Your example of the past tense of "bid" is a fine such example. You can
> run an experiment like the one you suggested to find out what people think
> the past tense is. If you then found that 20/50 people responded "bidded"
> and 30/50 respond "bid", that is a lot of useful information. As you suggest
> in your discussion, this result wouldn't answer the question of how past
> tense is stored in each individual. This result would be ambiguous among
> several possible explanations. One possibility is that the probability
> distribution that is being discovered reflects different dialects, such that
> 2/5 of the population has one past tense, and 3/5 has another. Another
> possibility is that each person has a similar probability distribution in
> their heads, such that 2/5 of the time I respond one way, and 3/5 of the
> time I respond another. Further experiments would be necessary to answer
> between these and other possible theories (e.g., with repeated trials from
> the same person, carefully pl
>  anned so that the participants don't notice that they are being asked
> multiple times). Without the quantitative evidence in the first place, there
> is no way to answer these kinds of questions.
> >>
> >> Regarding the past tense of "go", this would be useful as a baseline in
> an experiment involving the less frequent ones. So, yes, it would useful to
> gather quantitative evidence in such a case also, as baselines with respect
> to the more interesting cases for theories.
> >>
> >> The bottom line: if you have a generalization about a language that you
> wish to evaluate (such that you hypothesize that it is true across the
> speakers of the language), then you need quantitative evidence from multiple
> individuals, using an unbiased data collection method, to evaluate such a
> claim. The point about Mechanical Turk is that it is really *easy* to do
> this now, at least for languages like English.
> >>
> >> Best wishes,
> >>
> >> Ted Gibson & Ev Fedorenko
> >>
> >> On Sep 10, 2010, at 1:59 PM, Richard Hudson wrote:
> >>
> >>> Dear Ted,
> >>> Thanks for the very interesting comment, but are you REALLY saying that
> I shouldn't claim, for example, that the past tense of GO is "went" without
> first cross-checking with 50 native speakers?
> >>>
> >>> Isn't there a danger of missing the point that we all, as native
> speakers, spend our whole lives scanning other people's linguistic behaviour
> (language 'out there', E-language) and trying to explain it to ourselves in
> terms of a language system (language 'in here', I-language)? So every
> judgement we make is based on thousands or millions of observed exemplars,
> and reflects a unique experience of E-language filtered through a unique
> I-language.
> >>>
> >>> Given that view of language development, I don't see how quantitative
> data will help. Let's take a real uncertainty, such as the past tense of
> BID. If I want to say I did it, do I say "I bidded" or "I bid"? My
> judgement: I don't know. Ok, you get 50 people to oblige on Mechanical Turk,
> and 20 of them give "bidded" and 30 "bid". So what? Does that mean that the
> correct answer is "bidded"? Surely not. How is it better than my judgement?
> I agree you could record my speech and find how often I use each
> alternative; but the reason I don't know is precisely because it's a rare
> word, so in a sense quantitative data are irrelevant even there. What would
> solve the problem of subjectivity, of course, would be a machine for probing
> the bit of my mind (or even brain) that holds BID and its details; but I
> suspect that even that wouldn't move us much further forward than my
> original "don't know". (Incidentally I write as a fan of quantitative
> sociolinguistics, so I do accept that quant
>  itative data are relevant to linguistic analysis in some areas, where the
> I-language phenomenon is frequent enough to produce usable data.)
> >>>
> >>> It seems to me that this discussion raises the really fundamental
> question of what kind of thing we think language is: social or individual.
> The problem isn't unique to linguistics of course; it's the same throughout
> the social sciences. But what's special about linguistics is that we deal in
> very fine details of culture (e.g. details of how a particular word is used
> or pronounced) so the differences between individuals really matter. I don't
> see that we're ever going to have anything better than judgements to go on,
> so what we need is a way to ensure that judgements are accurate reports of
> individual I-language. A rotten situation for a science, but I don't see how
> it can get better.
> >>>
> >>> Dick
> >>>
> >>> Richard Hudson www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/dick/home.htm
> >>>
> >>> On 10/09/2010 14:03, Ted Gibson wrote:
> >>>> Dear Dan, Dick:
> >>>>
> >>>> I would like to clarify some points that Dan Everett makes, in
> >>>> response to Dick Hudson.
> >>>>
> >>>> Ev Fedorenko and I have written a couple of papers recently (Gibson &
> >>>> Fedorenko, 2010, in press, see references and links below) on what we
> >>>> think are weak methodological standards in syntax and semantics
> >>>> research over the past many years. The issue that we address is the
> >>>> prevalent method in syntax and semantics research, which involves
> >>>> obtaining a judgment of the acceptability of a sentence / meaning
> >>>> pair, typically by just the author of the paper, sometimes with
> >>>> feedback from colleagues. As we address in our papers, this
> >>>> methodology does not allow proper testing of scientific hypotheses
> >>>> because of (a) the small number of experimental participants
> >>>> (typically one); (b) the small number of experimental stimuli
> >>>> (typically one); (c) cognitive biases on the part of the researcher
> >>>> and participants; and (d) the effect of the preceding context (e.g.,
> >>>> other constructions the researcher may have been recently
> >>>> considering). (As Dan said, see Schutze, 1996; Cowart, 1997; and
> >>>> several others cited in Gibson & Fedorenko, in press; for similar
> >>>> points, but with not as strong a conclusion as ours).
> >>>>
> >>>> Three issues need to be separated here: (1) the use of intuitive
> >>>> judgments as a dependent measure in a language experiment; (2)
> >>>> potential cognitive biases on the part of experimental subjects and
> >>>> experimenters in language experiments; and (3) the need for obtaining
> >>>> quantitative evidence, whatever the dependent measure might be. The
> >>>> paper that Ev and I wrote addresses the last two issues, but does not
> >>>> go into depth on the first issue (the use of intuitions as a dependent
> >>>> measure in language experiments). Regarding this issue, we don't think
> >>>> that there is anything wrong with gathering intuitive judgments as a
> >>>> dependent measure, as long as the task is clear to the experimental
> >>>> participants.
> >>>>
> >>>> In the longer paper (Gibson & Fedorenko, in press) we respond to some
> >>>> arguments that have been given in support of continuing to use the
> >>>> traditional non-quantitative method in syntax / semantics research.
> >>>> One recent defense of the traditional method comes from Phillips
> >>>> (2008), who argues that no harm has come from the non-quantitative
> >>>> approach in syntax research thus far. Phillips argues that there are
> >>>> no cases in the literature where an incorrect intuitive judgment has
> >>>> become the basis for a widely accepted generalization or an important
> >>>> theoretical claim. He therefore concludes that there is no reason to
> >>>> adopt more rigorous data collection standards. We challenge Philips?
> >>>> conclusion by presenting three cases from the literature where a
> >>>> faulty intuition has led to incorrect generalizations and mistaken
> >>>> theorizing, plausibly due to cognitive biases on the part of the
> >>>> researchers.
> >>>>
> >>>> A second argument that is sometimes presented for the continued use of
> >>>> the traditional non-quantitative method is that it would be too
> >>>> inefficient to evaluate every syntactic / semantic hypothesis or
> >>>> phenomenon quantitatively. For example, Culicover & Jackendoff (2010)
> >>>> make this argument explicitly in their response to Gibson & Fedorenko
> >>>> (2010): ?It would cripple linguistic investigation if it were required
> >>>> that all judgments of ambiguity and grammaticality be subject to
> >>>> statistically rigorous experiments on naive subjects, especially when
> >>>> investigating languages whose speakers are hard to access? (Culicover
> >>>> & Jackendoff, 2010, p. 234). (Dick Hudson makes a similar point
> >>>> earlier in the discussion here.) Whereas we agree that in
> >>>> circumstances where gathering data is difficult, some evidence is
> >>>> better than no evidence, we do not agree that research would be slowed
> >>>> with respect to languages where experimental participants are easy to
> >>>> access, such as English. In contrast, we think that the opposite is
> >>>> true: the field?s progress is probably slowed by not doing
> >>>> quantitative research.
> >>>> Suppose that a typical syntax / semantics paper that lacks
> >>>> quantitative evidence includes judgments for 50 or more sentences /
> >>>> meaning pairs, corresponding to 50 or more empirical claims. Even if
> >>>> most of the judgments from such a paper are correct or are on the
> >>>> right track, the problem is in knowing which judgments are correct.
> >>>> For example, suppose that 90% of the judgments from an arbitrary paper
> >>>> are correct (which is probably a high estimate). (Colin Phillips and
> >>>> some of his former students / postdocs have commented to us that, in
> >>>> their experience, quantitative acceptability judgment studies almost
> >>>> always validate the claim(s) in the literature. This is not our
> >>>> experience, however. Most experiments that we have run which attempt
> >>>> to test some syntactic / semantic hypothesis in the literature end up
> >>>> providing us with a pattern of data that had not been known before the
> >>>> experiment (e.g., Breen et al., in press; Fedorenko & Gibson, in
> >>>> press; Patel et al., 2009; Scontras & Gibson, submitted).) This means
> >>>> that in a paper with 50 empirical claims 45/50 are correct. But which
> >>>> 45? There are 2,118, 760 ways to choose 45 items from 50. That?s over
> >>>> two million different theories. By quantitatively evaluating the
> >>>> empirical claims, we reduce the uncertainty a great deal. To make
> >>>> progress, it is better to have theoretical claims supported by solid
> >>>> quantitative evidence, so that even if the interpretation of the data
> >>>> changes over time as new evidence becomes available ? as is often the
> >>>> case in any field of science ? the empirical pattern can be used as a
> >>>> basis for further theorizing.
> >>>>
> >>>> Furthermore, it is no longer expensive to run behavioral experiments,
> >>>> at least in English and other widely spoken languages. There now
> >>>> exists a marketplace interface ? Amazon.com?s Mechanical Turk ? which
> >>>> can be used for collecting behavioral data over the internet quickly
> >>>> and inexpensively. The cost of using an interface like this is
> >>>> minimal, and the time that it takes for the results to be returned is
> >>>> short. For example, currently on Mechanical Turk, a survey of
> >>>> approximately 50 items will be answered by 50 or more participants
> >>>> within a couple of hours, at a cost of approximately $1 per
> >>>> participant. Thus a survey can be completed within a day, at a cost of
> >>>> less than $50. (The hard work of designing the experiment, and
> >>>> constructing controlled materials remains of course.)
> >>>>
> >>>> Sorry to be so verbose. But I think that these methodological points
> >>>> are very important.
> >>>>
> >>>> Best wishes,
> >>>>
> >>>> Ted Gibson
> >>>>
> >>>> Gibson, E. & Fedorenko, E. (In press). The need for quantitative
> >>>> methods in syntax and semantics research. Language and Cognitive
> >>>> Processes. http://tedlab.mit.edu/tedlab_website/researchpapers/Gibson
> >>>> & Fedorenko InPress LCP.pdf
> >>>>
> >>>> Gibson, E. & Fedorenko, E. (2010). Weak quantitative standards in
> >>>> linguistics research. Trends in Cognitive Science, 14, 233-234.
> >>>> http://tedlab.mit.edu/tedlab_website/researchpapers/Gibson &
> Fedorenko
> >>>> 2010 TICS.pdf
> >>>>
> >>>>
> >>>>
> >>>>
> >>>>> 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
> >>>>
> >>>>
> >>>>
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >
>
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 20
> Date: Sat, 11 Sep 2010 10:03:35 +0000 (GMT)
> From: Philippe De Brabanter <phdebrab at yahoo.co.uk>
> Subject: Re: [FUNKNET] "Relative clauses" with no relativized element
> To: funknet at mailman.rice.edu
> Message-ID: <650247.87750.qm at web25504.mail.ukl.yahoo.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8
>
> Dear all,
>
> this is just to say that the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language,
> like
> several other grammars I'm aware of, does mention the sorts of
> constructions Tom
> is wondering about (esp. pp. 964-67). They're treated as noun complements,
> whereas relative clauses usually function as modifiers of nouns.
> H&P give a useful list of nouns licensing these complements (a list which
> confirms Suzanne Kemmerer's point that these nouns do not always have a
> verbal
> counterpart taking a content clause as its complement ? H&P suggest that
> the
> most frequent of those licensing nouns is fact).
> They also point out that content clauses can also sometimes function as
> supplements (i.e. appositives), as in
>
> I'm inclined to favour your first suggestion, that we shelve the proposal
> until
> after the election.
>
> This confirms Suzanne's suggestion that we shouldn't say that the clausal
> noun
> complements are appositives.
>
> One last interesting point. On p. 967, H&P show that the licensor may
> sometimes
> be more than just a noun, with certain constructions like have + licensing
> NP or
> existential there + be facilitating (or being conditions for) the clausal
> noun
> complement:
>
> The present system has the disadvantage that it is inordinately
> complicated.
> vs. ? The disadvantage that it is inordinately complicated has been
> overlooked.
>
> Probably an example like
>
> This principle may ground some optimism that the account can be usefully
> pursued. (M. Sainsbury 2002: "Reference and anaphora", Mind & Language)
>
> also derives its acceptability from a construction rather than from just
> optimism.
>
> Best,
>
> Philippe De Brabanter
> Paris 4 - Sorbonne
>
>
>
> ________________________________
> From: E.G. <eitan.eg at gmail.com>
> To: funknet at mailman.rice.edu
> Sent: Fri, 10 September, 2010 19:56:23
> Subject: Re: [FUNKNET] "Relative clauses" with no relativized element
>
> Jespersen and his nexus-substantives should be mentioned (Philosophy of
> Grammar, 1924). Also in his MEG and Analytic Syntax one could find
> interesting discussions.
>
> Eitan
>
>
> On 10 September 2010 20:53, Giuliana Fiorentino <
> giuliana.fiorentino at unimol.it> wrote:
>
> > Hi Tom,
> > clauses like:
> >
> > The importance of being Earnest
> > the fact of being late
> > the fact that you are late
> > the idea that world is round
> > etcetera
> >
> > are not relative clauses but can be considered among syntactic strategies
> > in order to nominalise events after a generic noun (working as a
> classifier
> > for nominalised events).
> >
> > Giuliana
> >
> >  ----- Original Message -----
> >  From: Thomas E. Payne
> >  To: FUNKNET
> >  Sent: Friday, September 10, 2010 4:16 PM
> >  Subject: [FUNKNET] "Relative clauses" with no relativized element
> >
> >
> >  Can anyone help me name the following structure in English, and maybe
> > point
> >  me to some references? I do not find reference to this in the Cambridge
> >  Grammar of the English Language or any other of my English grammar
> books.
> >  But then, maybe I just don't know where to look.
> >
> >    Here are two examples from a play:
> >
> >  His protestations of devotion in the trial scene are, in our opinion,
> >  genuine, as is his confession [that his affair with the Countess is
> >  platonic].
> >
> >  The bracketed clause seems to modify "confession", though there is no
> >  position for a confession in the clause itself.
> >
> >  . . . forced hither with an impious black design [to have my innocence
> and
> >  youth become the sacrifice of brutal violence].
> >
> >    Here the bracketed non-finite clause seems to modify "design."
> >
> >    These are not all that rare. I'm reminded of examples like:
> >
> >  "The claim [that my client is a murderer] is totally false."
> >
> >    Are these relative clauses? If so what kind? Thanks for any help.
> >
> >  Tom Payne
> >
>
>
>
> --
> Eitan Grossman
> Martin Buber Society of Fellows
> Hebrew University of Jerusalem
>
>
>
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 21
> Date: Sat, 11 Sep 2010 12:03:56 +0100
> From: Richard Hudson <dick at ling.ucl.ac.uk>
> Subject: Re: [FUNKNET] analysis: unhappiness
> To: funknet <funknet at mailman.rice.edu>
> Cc: Jennifer Smith <jennifer.smith at englang.arts.gla.ac.uk>
> Message-ID: <4C8B621C.6090609 at ling.ucl.ac.uk>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed
>
>  Dear Lise,
> Many thanks for these references, which I've just looked at. As you say,
> they do offer hope that we can apply the methods of psycholinguists to
> the questions of linguists (e.g. how do individuals categorise Korean or
> Spanish consonants?), and at the same time build a clearer understanding
> of how these individuals' I-language is related to their E-language
> (i.e. the language they've heard). That is encouraging, not least
> because it breaks down what I see as a gulf between linguists and
> psycholinguists.
>
> But even better, it complements very nicely some work in
> sociolinguistics which I think you'd enjoy reading. It's by  a young
> Scottish sociolinguist called Jennifer Smith, who did a very careful
> quantitative study (with two colleagues) of 24 3-year olds in a small
> fishing town in the north of Scotland. She recorded each of them with
> their mother, and then analysed two sociolinguistic variables that she'd
> also analysed in adult speech: a phonological variable (pronunciation of
> the /au/ vowel in "cow", and a morphosyntactic one, the use of -s on a
> verb with a plural subject, e.g. "My trousers is falling doon." In both
> cases usage is variable, so the analysis produces a percentage score for
> each speaker (e.g. 5% of words with the /au/ vowel have a monophthong).
> She then compared the children's scores with those of their mothers, and
> found an astonishingly close match for the phonological variable but no
> match at all for the morphosyntactic one. The reference is
>
>    Jennifer Smith, Mercedes Durham & Liane Fortune, 2007. 'Mam, my
>    trousers is fa'in doon!' Community, caregiver and child in the
>    acquisition of variation in a Scottish dialect. (Language, Variation
>    and Change 19. 63-99)
>
> Once again we have evidence that output can be closely linked to input,
> we have a nice quantitative method, and we see an example of the
> 'global' analysis of language that we should all be striving for: one
> which embraces both E-language (directly observable to the learner as
> well as to the linguist) and I-language (only indirectly accessible to
> both), and which tries to both describe and explain the relation between
> the two. Neither E-language nor I-language is the 'real' language -
> they're both part of it. And this global enterprise needs all the
> methods we can muster.
>
> Best wishes, Dick
>
> Richard Hudson www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/dick/home.htm
>
> On 11/09/2010 02:03, Lise Menn wrote:
> > Dick, I think that what you say is true, but it is only (I hope) a
> > temporary description of the state of the art of psycholinguistics.
> >  At least some of us would like our methods to become sensitive enough
> > to individual differences so that we can look at  how 'the general
> > processes and principles' interact with the level of an individual
> > person's knowledge of particular constructions, to find out how much
> > each person knows of the patterns 'out there' in the language.  Some
> > experimental methods are almost at that point already; they can
> > distinguish degrees of mastery of particular constructions of a
> > language among groups of second-language learners.
> > Have a look at
> > Au, Terry Kit-fong, Leah M. Knightly, Sun-Ah Jun, and Janet S. Oh.
> > 2002. Overhearing a language during childhood. /Psychological Science/
> > 13.3, 238-243.
> >
> > Oh, J. S., Jun, S.-A., Knightly, L. M., & Au, T. K.  2003.  Holding on
> > to childhood language memory. /Cognition, 86/(3), B53-B64.
> >
> > Lise
> >
> > On Sep 10, 2010, at 5:40 PM, Richard Hudson wrote:
> >
> >> Dear Ted and Ev,
> >> Yes, I understand your view, but I think it's a psycholinguist's
> >> view. Your goal is to find general processes and principles that
> >> apply uniformly across individuals, so you have to use methods to
> >> check for generality. And (as you know) I admire the way you pursue
> >> that goal. But my goal, as a linguist, is different. I want to
> >> explore the structure of a language so that I can understand how all
> >> the bits fit together. Like you, I'm aiming to model cognition, but
> >> my focus is on items and structures, and I start from the assumption
> >> that these can and do vary across speakers.
> >>
> >> However, having said all that I do agree with you that linguists
> >> should all get used to collecting and using quantitative data; and
> >> with the help of Brian MacWhinney's typology we'd know what methods
> >> to use when. And I do agree with your points about bid/bidded: in
> >> cases like that, quantitative data would be at least a very good
> >> starting point for a proper investigation.
> >>
> >> Best wishes, Dick
> >>
> >> Richard Hudson www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/dick/home.htm
> >> <http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/dick/home.htm>
> >>
> >> On 10/09/2010 19:30, Ted Gibson wrote:
> >>> Dear Dick:
> >>>
> >>> Perhaps we are talking at cross purposes. I don't understand what is
> >>> confusing about what Ev Fedorenko and I are claiming. All we are
> >>> saying is that if you have some testable claim involving a general
> >>> hypothesis about a language, then you need to get quantitative data
> >>> from unbiased sources to evaluate that claim. If you are interested
> >>> in English past tense morphology, then depending on the claims that
> >>> you might want to investigate, there are lots of ways to get
> >>> relevant quantitative evidence. Corpus data will probably be useful.
> >>> For very low frequency words, you can run experiments to test
> >>> behavior with respect to such words.
> >>>
> >>> Your example of the past tense of "bid" is a fine such example. You
> >>> can run an experiment like the one you suggested to find out what
> >>> people think the past tense is. If you then found that 20/50 people
> >>> responded "bidded" and 30/50 respond "bid", that is a lot of useful
> >>> information. As you suggest in your discussion, this result wouldn't
> >>> answer the question of how past tense is stored in each individual.
> >>> This result would be ambiguous among several possible explanations.
> >>> One possibility is that the probability distribution that is being
> >>> discovered reflects different dialects, such that 2/5 of the
> >>> population has one past tense, and 3/5 has another. Another
> >>> possibility is that each person has a similar probability
> >>> distribution in their heads, such that 2/5 of the time I respond one
> >>> way, and 3/5 of the time I respond another. Further experiments
> >>> would be necessary to answer between these and other possible
> >>> theories (e.g., with repeated trials from the same person, carefully
> >>> planned so that the participants don't notice that they are being
> >>> asked multiple times). Without the quantitative evidence in the
> >>> first place, there is no way to answer these kinds of questions.
> >>>
> >>> Regarding the past tense of "go", this would be useful as a baseline
> >>> in an experiment involving the less frequent ones. So, yes, it would
> >>> useful to gather quantitative evidence in such a case also, as
> >>> baselines with respect to the more interesting cases for theories.
> >>>
> >>> The bottom line: if you have a generalization about a language that
> >>> you wish to evaluate (such that you hypothesize that it is true
> >>> across the speakers of the language), then you need quantitative
> >>> evidence from multiple individuals, using an unbiased data
> >>> collection method, to evaluate such a claim. The point about
> >>> Mechanical Turk is that it is really *easy* to do this now, at least
> >>> for languages like English.
> >>>
> >>> Best wishes,
> >>>
> >>> Ted Gibson & Ev Fedorenko
> >>>
> >>> On Sep 10, 2010, at 1:59 PM, Richard Hudson wrote:
> >>>
> >>>> Dear Ted,
> >>>> Thanks for the very interesting comment, but are you REALLY saying
> >>>> that I shouldn't claim, for example, that the past tense of GO is
> >>>> "went" without first cross-checking with 50 native speakers?
> >>>>
> >>>> Isn't there a danger of missing the point that we all, as native
> >>>> speakers, spend our whole lives scanning other people's linguistic
> >>>> behaviour (language 'out there', E-language) and trying to explain
> >>>> it to ourselves in terms of a language system (language 'in here',
> >>>> I-language)? So every judgement we make is based on thousands or
> >>>> millions of observed exemplars, and reflects a unique experience of
> >>>> E-language filtered through a unique I-language.
> >>>>
> >>>> Given that view of language development, I don't see how
> >>>> quantitative data will help. Let's take a real uncertainty, such as
> >>>> the past tense of BID. If I want to say I did it, do I say "I
> >>>> bidded" or "I bid"? My judgement: I don't know. Ok, you get 50
> >>>> people to oblige on Mechanical Turk, and 20 of them give "bidded"
> >>>> and 30 "bid". So what? Does that mean that the correct answer is
> >>>> "bidded"? Surely not. How is it better than my judgement? I agree
> >>>> you could record my speech and find how often I use each
> >>>> alternative; but the reason I don't know is precisely because it's
> >>>> a rare word, so in a sense quantitative data are irrelevant even
> >>>> there. What would solve the problem of subjectivity, of course,
> >>>> would be a machine for probing the bit of my mind (or even brain)
> >>>> that holds BID and its details; but I suspect that even that
> >>>> wouldn't move us much further forward than my original "don't
> >>>> know". (Incidentally I write as a fan of quantitative
> >>>> sociolinguistics, so I do accept that quantitative data are
> >>>> relevant to linguistic analysis in some areas, where the I-language
> >>>> phenomenon is frequent enough to produce usable data.)
> >>>>
> >>>> It seems to me that this discussion raises the really fundamental
> >>>> question of what kind of thing we think language is: social or
> >>>> individual. The problem isn't unique to linguistics of course; it's
> >>>> the same throughout the social sciences. But what's special about
> >>>> linguistics is that we deal in very fine details of culture (e.g.
> >>>> details of how a particular word is used or pronounced) so the
> >>>> differences between individuals really matter. I don't see that
> >>>> we're ever going to have anything better than judgements to go on,
> >>>> so what we need is a way to ensure that judgements are accurate
> >>>> reports of individual I-language. A rotten situation for a science,
> >>>> but I don't see how it can get better.
> >>>>
> >>>> Dick
> >>>>
> >>>> Richard Hudson www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/dick/home.htm
> >>>> <http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/dick/home.htm>
> >>>>
> >>>> On 10/09/2010 14:03, Ted Gibson wrote:
> >>>>> Dear Dan, Dick:
> >>>>>
> >>>>> I would like to clarify some points that Dan Everett makes, in
> >>>>> response to Dick Hudson.
> >>>>>
> >>>>> Ev Fedorenko and I have written a couple of papers recently (Gibson &
> >>>>> Fedorenko, 2010, in press, see references and links below) on what we
> >>>>> think are weak methodological standards in syntax and semantics
> >>>>> research over the past many years. The issue that we address is the
> >>>>> prevalent method in syntax and semantics research, which involves
> >>>>> obtaining a judgment of the acceptability of a sentence / meaning
> >>>>> pair, typically by just the author of the paper, sometimes with
> >>>>> feedback from colleagues. As we address in our papers, this
> >>>>> methodology does not allow proper testing of scientific hypotheses
> >>>>> because of (a) the small number of experimental participants
> >>>>> (typically one); (b) the small number of experimental stimuli
> >>>>> (typically one); (c) cognitive biases on the part of the researcher
> >>>>> and participants; and (d) the effect of the preceding context (e.g.,
> >>>>> other constructions the researcher may have been recently
> >>>>> considering). (As Dan said, see Schutze, 1996; Cowart, 1997; and
> >>>>> several others cited in Gibson & Fedorenko, in press; for similar
> >>>>> points, but with not as strong a conclusion as ours).
> >>>>>
> >>>>> Three issues need to be separated here: (1) the use of intuitive
> >>>>> judgments as a dependent measure in a language experiment; (2)
> >>>>> potential cognitive biases on the part of experimental subjects and
> >>>>> experimenters in language experiments; and (3) the need for obtaining
> >>>>> quantitative evidence, whatever the dependent measure might be. The
> >>>>> paper that Ev and I wrote addresses the last two issues, but does not
> >>>>> go into depth on the first issue (the use of intuitions as a
> dependent
> >>>>> measure in language experiments). Regarding this issue, we don't
> think
> >>>>> that there is anything wrong with gathering intuitive judgments as a
> >>>>> dependent measure, as long as the task is clear to the experimental
> >>>>> participants.
> >>>>>
> >>>>> In the longer paper (Gibson & Fedorenko, in press) we respond to some
> >>>>> arguments that have been given in support of continuing to use the
> >>>>> traditional non-quantitative method in syntax / semantics research.
> >>>>> One recent defense of the traditional method comes from Phillips
> >>>>> (2008), who argues that no harm has come from the non-quantitative
> >>>>> approach in syntax research thus far. Phillips argues that there are
> >>>>> no cases in the literature where an incorrect intuitive judgment has
> >>>>> become the basis for a widely accepted generalization or an important
> >>>>> theoretical claim. He therefore concludes that there is no reason to
> >>>>> adopt more rigorous data collection standards. We challenge Philips'
> >>>>> conclusion by presenting three cases from the literature where a
> >>>>> faulty intuition has led to incorrect generalizations and mistaken
> >>>>> theorizing, plausibly due to cognitive biases on the part of the
> >>>>> researchers.
> >>>>>
> >>>>> A second argument that is sometimes presented for the continued use
> of
> >>>>> the traditional non-quantitative method is that it would be too
> >>>>> inefficient to evaluate every syntactic / semantic hypothesis or
> >>>>> phenomenon quantitatively. For example, Culicover & Jackendoff (2010)
> >>>>> make this argument explicitly in their response to Gibson & Fedorenko
> >>>>> (2010): "It would cripple linguistic investigation if it were
> required
> >>>>> that all judgments of ambiguity and grammaticality be subject to
> >>>>> statistically rigorous experiments on naive subjects, especially when
> >>>>> investigating languages whose speakers are hard to access" (Culicover
> >>>>> & Jackendoff, 2010, p. 234). (Dick Hudson makes a similar point
> >>>>> earlier in the discussion here.) Whereas we agree that in
> >>>>> circumstances where gathering data is difficult, some evidence is
> >>>>> better than no evidence, we do not agree that research would be
> slowed
> >>>>> with respect to languages where experimental participants are easy to
> >>>>> access, such as English. In contrast, we think that the opposite is
> >>>>> true: the field's progress is probably slowed by not doing
> >>>>> quantitative research.
> >>>>> Suppose that a typical syntax / semantics paper that lacks
> >>>>> quantitative evidence includes judgments for 50 or more sentences /
> >>>>> meaning pairs, corresponding to 50 or more empirical claims. Even if
> >>>>> most of the judgments from such a paper are correct or are on the
> >>>>> right track, the problem is in knowing which judgments are correct.
> >>>>> For example, suppose that 90% of the judgments from an arbitrary
> paper
> >>>>> are correct (which is probably a high estimate). (Colin Phillips and
> >>>>> some of his former students / postdocs have commented to us that, in
> >>>>> their experience, quantitative acceptability judgment studies almost
> >>>>> always validate the claim(s) in the literature. This is not our
> >>>>> experience, however. Most experiments that we have run which attempt
> >>>>> to test some syntactic / semantic hypothesis in the literature end up
> >>>>> providing us with a pattern of data that had not been known before
> the
> >>>>> experiment (e.g., Breen et al., in press; Fedorenko & Gibson, in
> >>>>> press; Patel et al., 2009; Scontras & Gibson, submitted).) This means
> >>>>> that in a paper with 50 empirical claims 45/50 are correct. But which
> >>>>> 45? There are 2,118, 760 ways to choose 45 items from 50. That's over
> >>>>> two million different theories. By quantitatively evaluating the
> >>>>> empirical claims, we reduce the uncertainty a great deal. To make
> >>>>> progress, it is better to have theoretical claims supported by solid
> >>>>> quantitative evidence, so that even if the interpretation of the data
> >>>>> changes over time as new evidence becomes available -- as is often
> the
> >>>>> case in any field of science -- the empirical pattern can be used as
> a
> >>>>> basis for further theorizing.
> >>>>>
> >>>>> Furthermore, it is no longer expensive to run behavioral experiments,
> >>>>> at least in English and other widely spoken languages. There now
> >>>>> exists a marketplace interface -- Amazon.com's Mechanical Turk --
> >>>>> which
> >>>>> can be used for collecting behavioral data over the internet quickly
> >>>>> and inexpensively. The cost of using an interface like this is
> >>>>> minimal, and the time that it takes for the results to be returned is
> >>>>> short. For example, currently on Mechanical Turk, a survey of
> >>>>> approximately 50 items will be answered by 50 or more participants
> >>>>> within a couple of hours, at a cost of approximately $1 per
> >>>>> participant. Thus a survey can be completed within a day, at a cost
> of
> >>>>> less than $50. (The hard work of designing the experiment, and
> >>>>> constructing controlled materials remains of course.)
> >>>>>
> >>>>> Sorry to be so verbose. But I think that these methodological points
> >>>>> are very important.
> >>>>>
> >>>>> Best wishes,
> >>>>>
> >>>>> Ted Gibson
> >>>>>
> >>>>> Gibson, E. & Fedorenko, E. (In press). The need for quantitative
> >>>>> methods in syntax and semantics research. Language and Cognitive
> >>>>> Processes.
> http://tedlab.mit.edu/tedlab_website/researchpapers/Gibson
> >>>>> & Fedorenko InPress LCP.pdf
> >>>>>
> >>>>> Gibson, E. & Fedorenko, E. (2010). Weak quantitative standards in
> >>>>> linguistics research. Trends in Cognitive Science, 14, 233-234.
> >>>>> http://tedlab.mit.edu/tedlab_website/researchpapers/Gibson &
> Fedorenko
> >>>>> 2010 TICS.pdf
> >>>>>
> >>>>>
> >>>>>
> >>>>>
> >>>>>> 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
> >
> >
> >
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 22
> Date: Sat, 11 Sep 2010 06:00:08 -0700 (PDT)
> From: "A. Katz" <amnfn at well.com>
> Subject: Re: [FUNKNET] analysis: unhappiness
> To: dryer at buffalo.edu
> Cc: Lise Menn <Lise.Menn at Colorado.EDU>, Richard Hudson
>        <dick at ling.ucl.ac.uk>,  Funknet <funknet at mailman.rice.edu>
> Message-ID: <Pine.GSO.4.64.1009110547260.16154 at well.com>
> Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII; format=flowed
>
> Matt,
>
> We appear to be fairly close in our approach, but I would have to add that
> sometimes there isn't a unique "correct" analysis, because the language
> allows equally for several different ones, and how any particular speaker
> analyzes a phrase out of context says more about how their individual
> brain is wired and less about the language.
>
> As an example, take the slogan the Coca-Cola company is currently using:
>
> "Open happiness".
>
> I first saw it on a cocktail napkin in flight. Reading the English slogan,
> my first analysis was that "open" was an adjective  modifying the noun
> happiness, as opposed to say "closed happiness."
>
> That seemed weird, so I considered a few other possiblities. Maybe "open"
> is a verb in the imperative, and "happiness" is a proper noun in the
> vocative, as in "Open Sesame!"
>
> Then again, it could be that "Happiness" was just a proper noun in
> objective case: as in "open America (to tourism)."
>
> Then I read the French translation on the napkin: "Ouvrez du bonheur."
>
> "Oh! So this means "open some happiness"!" I said to myself.
>
> English lexemes are underspecified for category, which is why we need
> little words like "some" to disamnbiguate. That's how the language works.
> But... all those different analyses could have been correct, given the
> proper context, and experimenting even with a large population as to which
> one they thought of first would tell you less about the language and more
> about the people.
>
> The only analysis that seems a bit doubtful is the one suggested by the
> translation.
>
> Best,
>
>    --Aya
>
>
> On Fri, 10 Sep 2010, dryer at buffalo.edu wrote:
>
> >
> > 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
> >>>>
> >>>>
> >>>>
> >>>>
> >>>
> >>>
> >>>
> >>>
> >>>
> >>
> >>
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 23
> Date: Sat, 11 Sep 2010 12:17:29 +0100
> From: "Chris Butler" <cbutler at ntlworld.com>
> Subject: Re: [FUNKNET] FUNKNET] analysis: unhappiness
> To: "FUNKNET" <funknet at mailman.rice.edu>
> Message-ID: <24693E13135D4D6AAD5A098FAA952480 at OwnerPC>
> Content-Type: text/plain;       charset="iso-8859-1"
>
> 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
> qualificatio
>  ns, 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
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 24
> Date: Sat, 11 Sep 2010 07:18:29 -0700 (PDT)
> From: "A. Katz" <amnfn at well.com>
> Subject: Re: [FUNKNET] FUNKNET] analysis: unhappiness
> To: Chris Butler <cbutler at ntlworld.com>
> Cc: FUNKNET <funknet at mailman.rice.edu>
> Message-ID: <Pine.GSO.4.64.1009110711390.29470 at well.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; Format="flowed"
>
> The problem is that once we achieve the psycholinguistic goal and see what
> is happening in each person's head, and we see that conflicting analyses
> are the norm, rather than the exception, among normal language speakers,
> then we will realize that the way language works to transmit information
> is despite individual differences and not because of uniform processing
> strategies.
>
> Even when all are agreed as to the meaning of an utterance, they do not
> process it the same way. Which means that processing is seocndary to
> information transmission.
>
>   --Aya
>
>
>
>
> On Sat, 11 Sep 2010, Chris Butler wrote:
>
> > 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 ma
>  ke 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
> qualificat
>  ions, 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
> >
> >
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 25
> Date: Sat, 11 Sep 2010 17:54:58 +0300
> From: "E.G." <eitan.eg at gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: [FUNKNET] "Relative clauses" with no relativized ele
> To: funknet at mailman.rice.edu
> Message-ID:
>        <AANLkTinXNY++7U+Y=RtvcEqdcQ52-bEvOrL2=03ZMYsk at mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
>
> Hi all,
>
> I'd like to thank Ron for pointing out the incompleteness of what I wrote,
> and for the reference to his article. I hope I didn't give the impression I
> was trying to give a complete description of noun complementation in Modern
> Hebrew in an email.
>
> What I *was* trying to say is that in some languages, unlike English, some
> nominalizations (of utterance and cognition verbs, as Ron points out, but
> also of some perception verbs too) can occur with a construction that is
> explicitly and unmistakably marked as a complement clause. Moreover, the
> nominalizations that take these explicit complement clauses are related to
> verbs that can take the same type of complement clause. In such languages,
> then, it's pretty clear that these instances involve complement clauses. It
> doesn't mean that other noun complementation strategies don't exist for
> other types of nouns.
>
> However, my main point was more general, albeit poorly expressed. It's that
> we can turn to cross-linguistic comparison in order to try to reach
> generalizations about how languages encode meaning. These generalizations
> are useful, because they can be used to ask "why" questions. For example,
> it's not really possible to ask *why* Hebrew has two distinct strategies
> for
> noun complementation, how *why* English has one. That's because it could
> always be otherwise, and language change can alter the picture (and has!).
> However, if we find that in languages that have two strategies, one is
> limited to nominalizations of PCU verbs, then we have the beginnings of a
> hierarchy that is amenable to functional explanation.
>
> Anyway, it seems that Thomas Payne's question has turned up a pretty
> general
> consensus that these constructions are complement clauses.
>
> Best wishes,
> Eitan
>
>
>
>
>
>
> On 10 September 2010 23:26, Ron Kuzar <kuzar at research.haifa.ac.il> wrote:
>
> > The Modern Hebrew data supplied by Eitan are incomplete.
> > Hebrew distinguishes between locution (say, hear, think, etc.) and
> > situation (action, event, state, etc.).
> > What Eitan describes is only true with regard to nouns (and clauses)
> > expressing locution. 'Announcement' is indeed such a noun.
> > Words such as ba'ya 'problem', macav 'situation', or cara 'trouble',
> > etc., whose denotatum is a situation, cannot be followed by ki, but only
> > by Se-, e.g.:
> >
> > margiz oti ha-macav Se-kulam halxu (*ki kulam halxu)
> > annoys me the-situation that-all went
> > 'I am upset about the situation that all have gone'
> >
> > On the other hand, the relative Se- may be replaced by the more
> > elegant and classical aSer, while the Se- of situation clauses may not.
> > Sorry about the invented example. I am overseas now.
> > All this has been described (with corpus data) in:
> >
> > Kuzar, Ron. 1993. Nominalization Clauses in Israeli Hebrew. Balshanut
> Ivrit
> > [Hebrew
> > Linguistics] 36: 71-89 [unfortunately available only in Hebrew].
> >
> > The article is somewhat outdated and contains some inaccuracies I would
> > formulate differently today, but the basic distinction is valid in my
> > opinion.
> > Best,
> > Ron Kuzar
> > ---------------
> > On Fri, Sep 10, 2010 at 8:54 PM, E.G. <eitan.eg at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > > Hi all,
> > >
> > > I'd agree with Arie Verhagen. But there's a way that cross-linguistic
> > > comparison can help what seems to be a purely theoretical question
> based
> > on
> > > a single language. The problem here is that English uses the same
> element
> > > to
> > > mark regular relatives and these "appositional" relatives. But if at
> > least
> > > one language encodes them by different means, then there's at least a
> > good
> > > case for seeing them as distinct functions. It's basically the same
> > > principle that's used to decide whether to put a meaning on a semantic
> > map.
> > > So here are two languages that I know that encode them differently.
> > >
> > > In Modern Hebrew, these clauses can be encoded as a dedicated
> complement
> > > clause (ki), which differs from the relative clause marker (Se-), e.g.
> > >
> > > ha-hoda'a Se-kibalnu
> > > the-announcment rel-we_got
> > > "The announcement that we got."
> > >
> > > ha-hoda'a ki hitbatel ha-mifgaS
> > > the-message CMP was_cancelled the-meeting
> > > "The announcement that the meeting was cancelled."
> > >
> > > In Coptic, these clauses are marked by ce-, which marks complement
> > clauses,
> > > *inter alia*, but not relative clauses:
> > >
> > > ph-mewi ce- (complement clause)
> > > 'the-thought that (we are angry)'
> > >
> > > ph-mewi ete- (relative clause)
> > > 'the thought that (we used to think)'
> > >
> > > This seems to be a pretty clear indication that these are complement
> > > clauses
> > > rather than relatives. Even if one doesn't like the notion of nouns
> > taking
> > > complement clauses (and why not? nominalizations in some languages can
> > take
> > > accusative modifiers as well as genitives), it still probably isn't
> > > incidental that the nominalizations are of verbs that take complement
> > > clauses when finite.
> > >
> > > As usual, the perspective in Talmy Giv?n's *Syntax* (vol. 2) is worth
> > > looking at.
> > >
> > > Best,
> > > Eitan
> > >
> > >
> > > On 10 September 2010 19:21, Arie Verhagen
> > > <Arie.Verhagen at hum.leidenuniv.nl>wrote:
> > >
> > > > And as another addition: the clauses that can only be introduced by
> > > *that*
> > > > (with no role to
> > > > play in the subordinate clause) may be seen as (subtypes of)
> complement
> > > > clauses,
> > > > expressing a proposition with the noun functioning as Complement
> Taking
> > > > Predicate (CTP),
> > > > expressing a propostional attitude, epistemic/evaluative stance, etc.
> > > > (following analyses by
> > > > Thompson, Diessel, Langacker, myself, and others), i.e. not
> relatives.
> > > Cf.
> > > > constructions like
> > > > "The claim is that X" (traditionally analysed as subject clauses), "I
> > > claim
> > > > that X", "I put forward
> > > > the claim that X", in which the relationship between the verb or noun
> > and
> > > > the that-clause is
> > > > comparable to the one in "The claim that X".
> > > >
> > > > --Arie Verhagen
> > > >
> > > > ----------------
> > > > Message from Rong Chen <rchen at csusb.edu>
> > > > 10 Sep 2010, 23:42
> > > > Subject: Re: [FUNKNET] "Relative clauses" with no relativi
> > > >
> > > > > To add to Joanne's comments:
> > > > >
> > > > > There are basically three ways to distinguish an appositive clause
> > > > > (AC) from a relative clause (RC).
> > > > >
> > > > > 1) An AC can only be led by *that* while an RC can be led by other
> > > > > pronouns.
> > > > >
> > > > > 2) The AC and the noun it modifies display an equative
> > > relationship--one
> > > > can say X
> > > > > (denoted by the noun) is Y (presented by the appositive)--while an
> RC
> > > > often doesn't
> > > > > (except, perhaps, when the relative clause is sentential).
> > > >
> > > > > 3)--which Tom noted--*that* is not part of the clause in an AC; but
> a
> > > > relative pronoun
> > > > > is always part of the clause in an RC.
> > > > >
> > > > > Rong Chen
> > > > >
> > > >
> > > >
> > >
> > >
> > > --
> > > Eitan Grossman
> > > Martin Buber Society of Fellows
> > > Hebrew University of Jerusalem
> > >
> >
> >
> >
> > --
> > ===============================================
> >                    Dr. Ron Kuzar
> > Address:       Department of English Language and Literature
> >                    University of Haifa
> >                    IL-31905 Haifa, Israel
> > Office:          +972-4-824-9826, Fax: +972-4-824-9711
> > Home:          +972-77-481-9676, Mobile: +972-54-481-9676
> > Home fax:     153-77-481-9676 (only from Israel)
> > Email:           kuzar at research.haifa.ac.il
> > Homepage:   http://research.haifa.ac.il/~kuzar<http://research.haifa.ac.il/%7Ekuzar>
> > ===============================================
> >
>
>
>
> --
> Eitan Grossman
> Martin Buber Society of Fellows
> Hebrew University of Jerusalem
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 26
> Date: Sat, 11 Sep 2010 10:19:05 -0500
> From: Kristine Hildebrandt <khildeb at siue.edu>
> Subject: [FUNKNET] Job Advertisement
> To: funknet at mailman.rice.edu
> Message-ID:
>        <AANLkTiny2Oya6N9fg0PT_ZQ4AMgiKNaZB1iVd+hYHAV9 at mail.gmail.com<AANLkTiny2Oya6N9fg0PT_ZQ4AMgiKNaZB1iVd%2BhYHAV9 at mail.gmail.com>
> >
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=windows-1252
>
> Dear Funknetters:
>
>
> Please distribute this job advertisement to interested colleagues and
> doctoral students completing their degrees.
>
>
> *HIRING UNIT*:   *DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE*
>
> **
>
> *TITLE/RANK*:    Assistant Professor of English-Linguistics
>
>
> *DESCRIPTION OF DUTIES*:   The Department of English Language and
> Literature
> invites applications for a tenure-track position in general linguistics,
> with secondary specialization in applied linguistics.  The candidate will
> teach courses in the MA TESL program, along with undergraduate courses in
> linguistics, composition (ESL and regular), and some general education
> courses.  Academic year: 3/3 load.
>
> *TERMS OF APPOINTMENT*:  Academic, tenure-track beginning August 16, 2011,
> 100% appointment.
>
> *SOURCE OF FUNDS*:   State
>
>
> *SALARY RANGE*:  commensurate with training and experience
>
>
> *QUALIFICATIONS REQUIRED:  *A Ph.D. in Linguistics, Applied Linguistics, or
> related field required.  If Ph.D. is not completed by the beginning of the
> contract period, appointment will be at the rank of Instructor until all
> degree requirements are fulfilled.  A record of ESL and/or TESL experience
> is desirable.
>
>
> *CLOSING DATE FOR APPLICATIONS*:  Position open until filled; completed
> applications postmarked by November 15, 2010 will have priority.  Possible
> interviews at LSA in January 2011.
> * **
> **SEND COVER LETTER, VITA, UNOFFICIAL TRANSCRIPT, STATEMENT OF TEACHING
> PHILOSOPHY AND RESEARCH AGENDA, AND THREE LETTERS OF RECOMMENDATION TO:**
> *
> Linguistics Search Committee
> Southern Illinois University Edwardsville
> Department of English Language & Literature
> Campus Box 1431
> Edwardsville, IL  62026-1431
> NOTE:  Electronic applications will not be accepted for this position.
>
>
> SIUE is a state university-benefits under state sponsored plans may not be
> available to holders of F1 or J1 visas.   Applicants may be subject to a
> background check prior to an offer of employment.  SIUE is an affirmative
> action and equal opportunity employer.  The SIUE ANNUAL SECURITY REPORT is
> available on-line at: http://admin.siu.edu/studentrightto/.  The report
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> through the SIUE Home Page:  http://www.siue.edu under *Ready References,
> Quick Links or Publications/Reports*.  For those without computer access, a
> paper copy of the report may be obtained from the Office of the Vice
> Chancellor for Administration, Rendleman Hall, Room 2228.
>
>
> --
> *Kristine A. Hildebrandt*
> *Assistant Professor, Department of English Language & Literature
> Southern Illinois University Edwardsville*
> *Box 1431
> Edwardsville, IL 62026 U.S.A.
> 618-650-3380 (office)*
> *khildeb at siue.edu
> http://www.siue.edu/~khildeb* <http://www.siue.edu/%7Ekhildeb*>
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 27
> Date: Sat, 11 Sep 2010 11:45:27 -0400
> From: Ted Gibson <egibson at MIT.EDU>
> Subject: Re: [FUNKNET] analysis: unhappiness
> To: funknet <funknet at mailman.rice.edu>
> Cc: Richard Hudson <dick at ling.ucl.ac.uk>, Daniel Everett
>        <dan at daneverett.org>,   Evelina Fedorenko <evelina9 at MIT.EDU>
> Message-ID: <65E6B9DA-7FB1-4240-927B-C7141F6A55C9 at MIT.EDU>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=WINDOWS-1252; format=flowed;
>        delsp=yes
>
> Dear Brian, Dick, Dan et al:
>
> Thanks for the discussion.  Here are a few responses:
>
> 1. Brian:
>
> "But I understand Dick's worry about how far Gibson and Fedorenko are
> trying to push this.  Neither their email nor their paper sets clear
> limits on what we should be testing and we certainly don't want to
> waste time checking out  go-goed-went.  So, Gibson and Fedorenko owe
> us those clarifications."
>
> The answer that we give to this question in Gibson & Fedorenko (in
> press) is as follows (the final paragraph in the paper):
>
> "Finally, a question that is often put to us is whether it is
> necessary to evaluate every empirical claim quantitatively.  A major
> problem with the fields of syntax and semantics is that many papers
> include no quantitative evidence in support of their research
> hypotheses.  Because conducting experiments is now so easy to do with
> the advent of Amazon.com?s Mechanical Turk, we recommend gathering
> quantitative evidence for all empirical claims.  However, it would
> clearly be a vast improvement to the field for all research papers to
> include at least some quantitative evidence evaluating their research
> hypotheses."
>
> Another possible answer to this question is: the more important some
> observation is, the better your evidence should be.  If the
> observation is a key reason for some important theoretical claim, then
> there should be solid quantitative  data supporting that observation.
>
> In practice, once a linguist starts gathering quantitative data, s/he
> will realize (a) how easy it is to do; and (b) how beneficial the
> methods are, with the consequence that these researchers will probably
> do most or all of their work quantitatively in the future.
>
>
> 2. Dick (by the way, thank you for the kind responses, and your
> positive tone):
>
> "Your [the psycholinguists'] goal is to find general processes and
> principles that apply uniformly across individuals, so you have to use
> methods to check for generality."
>
> in contrast to "my focus is on items and structures, and I start from
> the assumption that these can and do vary across speakers."
>
> Many cognitive psychologists / cognitive scientists (all the ones I
> know at MIT for example) are interested in both cognitive
> generalizations across people and ways in which people differ
> cognitively.  In fact, some methods (e.g., the individual differences
> approach where co-variation of various behaviors / characteristics is
> examined across individuals) have been specifically developed to study
> differences among individuals.  Both kinds of data are important for
> understanding human cognition, including language.  This applies to
> language research directly: generalizations across people are
> important, but so are individual differences.  In either case,
> quantitative data are necessary to evaluate research questions and
> test hypotheses.
>
> On a related note, it is a mistake to characterize researchers with a
> background in "psychology" or cognitive science as being interested in
> "processing", and researchers with a background in "linguistics" as
> being interested in "knowledge" or "representation / structure".  Both
> psychologists and linguists should be interested in *both*
> representation and processing (and learning, for that matter).  We
> wrote a little about this confusion in Gibson & Fedorenko (in press),
> which we include at the end of the message.
>
> This leads to something that Dan said:
>
> 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.
>
> Thanks to all for the interesting discussions.
>
> Ted & Ev
>
> We have encountered a claim that the reason for different kinds of
> methods being used across the different fields of language study
> (i.e., in linguistics vs. psycho-/neuro-linguistics) is that the
> research questions are different across these fields, and some methods
> may be better suited to ask some questions than others.  Although the
> latter is likely true, the premise ? that the research questions are
> different across the fields ? is false.  The typical claim is that
> researchers in the field of linguistics are investigating linguistic
> representations, and researchers in the fields of psycho-/neuro-
> linguistics are investigating the computations that take place as
> language is understood or produced.  However, many researchers in the
> fields of psycho-/neuro-linguistics are also interested in the nature
> of the linguistic representations (at all levels; e.g., phonological
> representations, lexical representations, syntactic representations,
> etc.) [1].  By the same token, many researchers in the field of
> linguistics are interested in the computations that take place in the
> course of online comprehension or production.  However, inferences ?
> drawn from any dependent measure ? about either the linguistic
> representations or computations are always indirect.  And these
> inferences are no more indirect in reading times or event-related
> potentials, etc., than in acceptability judgments: across all
> dependent measures we take some observable (e.g., a participant?s
> rating on an acceptability judgment task or the time it took a
> participant to read a sentence) and we try to infer something about
> the underlying cognitive representations / processes.  More generally,
> methods in cognitive science are often used to jointly learn about
> representations and computations, because inferences about
> representations can inform questions about the computations, and vice
> versa.  For example, certain data structures can make a computation
> more or less difficult to perform, and certain representations may
> require assumptions about the algorithms being used.
>
> In our opinion then, the distinction between the fields of linguistics
> and psycho-/neuro-linguistics is purely along the lines of the kind of
> data that are used as evidence for or against theoretical hypotheses:
> typically non-quantitative data in linguistics vs. typically
> quantitative data in psycho-/neuro-linguistics.  Given the superficial
> nature of this distinction, we think that there should be one field of
> language study where a wide range of dependent measures is used to
> investigate linguistic representations and computations.
>
>
> [1] In fact, some methods in cognitive science and cognitive
> neuroscience were specifically developed to get at representational
> questions (e.g., lexical / syntactic priming methods, neural
> adaptation or multi-voxel pattern analyses in functional MRI).
>
>
> On Sep 10, 2010, at 9:05 PM, Daniel Everett wrote:
>
> > I think that Brian and Dick make excellent points. There are very
> > good grammars written that could be improved by psycholinguistic
> > experimentation and more quantitative approaches. But large sections
> > of those grammars aren't going to change one bit (go-went) with
> > quantitative tests and such tests would be completely
> > counterproductive given the shortness of life and the vastness of
> > the field linguist's tasks.
> >
> > Part of the problem is that linguistics is not simply a
> > subdiscipline of psychology. Linguistics has its own objectives and
> > those only occasionally overlap with psychology. The same for methods.
> >
> > On another note, I don't buy the 'in my head' 'out of my head'
> > distinction either (that Matt seems to be urging upon us). We study
> > different things and have different reasons for being satisfied with
> > the results we achieve.
> >
> > I believe that  we linguists are often complacent and fail to apply
> > better methods. But of course that applies to all disciplines.
> >
> > In the meantime, checking corpora, collecting data as a result of
> > careful interviews with native speakers, and the other aspects of
> > the field linguist's task are vital parts of the linguist's task and
> > much of this won't be improved by quantitative methods as we
> > currently understand them. Maybe sometime.
> >
> > Dan
> >
> > P.S. In my original reference to Ted and Ev's paper, I said that
> > they showed the danger of using intuitions. What I meant to say of
> > using intuitions as standardly used by linguists. They convinced me
> > that there is a lot to learn from quantitative methods.
> >
> > On 10 Sep 2010, at 19:40, Richard Hudson wrote:
> >
> >> Dear Ted and Ev,
> >> Yes, I understand your view, but I think it's a psycholinguist's
> >> view. Your goal is to find general processes and principles that
> >> apply uniformly across individuals, so you have to use methods to
> >> check for generality. And (as you know) I admire the way you pursue
> >> that goal. But my goal, as a linguist, is different. I want to
> >> explore the structure of a language so that I can understand how
> >> all the bits fit together. Like you, I'm aiming to model cognition,
> >> but my focus is on items and structures, and I start from the
> >> assumption that these can and do vary across speakers.
> >>
> >> However, having said all that I do agree with you that linguists
> >> should all get used to collecting and using quantitative data; and
> >> with the help of Brian MacWhinney's typology we'd know what methods
> >> to use when. And I do agree with your points about bid/bidded: in
> >> cases like that, quantitative data would be at least a very good
> >> starting point for a proper investigation.
> >>
> >> Best wishes, Dick
> >>
> >> Richard Hudson www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/dick/home.htm
> >>
> >> On 10/09/2010 19:30, Ted Gibson wrote:
> >>> Dear Dick:
> >>>
> >>> Perhaps we are talking at cross purposes. I don't understand what
> >>> is confusing about what Ev Fedorenko and I are claiming. All we
> >>> are saying is that if you have some testable claim involving a
> >>> general hypothesis about a language, then you need to get
> >>> quantitative data from unbiased sources to evaluate that claim. If
> >>> you are interested in English past tense morphology, then
> >>> depending on the claims that you might want to investigate, there
> >>> are lots of ways to get relevant quantitative evidence. Corpus
> >>> data will probably be useful. For very low frequency words, you
> >>> can run experiments to test behavior with respect to such words.
> >>>
> >>> Your example of the past tense of "bid" is a fine such example.
> >>> You can run an experiment like the one you suggested to find out
> >>> what people think the past tense is. If you then found that 20/50
> >>> people responded "bidded" and 30/50 respond "bid", that is a lot
> >>> of useful information. As you suggest in your discussion, this
> >>> result wouldn't answer the question of how past tense is stored in
> >>> each individual. This result would be ambiguous among several
> >>> possible explanations. One possibility is that the probability
> >>> distribution that is being discovered reflects different dialects,
> >>> such that 2/5 of the population has one past tense, and 3/5 has
> >>> another. Another possibility is that each person has a similar
> >>> probability distribution in their heads, such that 2/5 of the time
> >>> I respond one way, and 3/5 of the time I respond another. Further
> >>> experiments would be necessary to answer between these and other
> >>> possible theories (e.g., with repeated trials from the same
> >>> person, carefully planned so that the participants don't notice
> >>> that they are being asked multiple times). Without the
> >>> quantitative evidence in the first place, there is no way to
> >>> answer these kinds of questions.
> >>>
> >>> Regarding the past tense of "go", this would be useful as a
> >>> baseline in an experiment involving the less frequent ones. So,
> >>> yes, it would useful to gather quantitative evidence in such a
> >>> case also, as baselines with respect to the more interesting cases
> >>> for theories.
> >>>
> >>> The bottom line: if you have a generalization about a language
> >>> that you wish to evaluate (such that you hypothesize that it is
> >>> true across the speakers of the language), then you need
> >>> quantitative evidence from multiple individuals, using an unbiased
> >>> data collection method, to evaluate such a claim. The point about
> >>> Mechanical Turk is that it is really *easy* to do this now, at
> >>> least for languages like English.
> >>>
> >>> Best wishes,
> >>>
> >>> Ted Gibson & Ev Fedorenko
> >>>
> >>> On Sep 10, 2010, at 1:59 PM, Richard Hudson wrote:
> >>>
> >>>> Dear Ted,
> >>>> Thanks for the very interesting comment, but are you REALLY
> >>>> saying that I shouldn't claim, for example, that the past tense
> >>>> of GO is "went" without first cross-checking with 50 native
> >>>> speakers?
> >>>>
> >>>> Isn't there a danger of missing the point that we all, as native
> >>>> speakers, spend our whole lives scanning other people's
> >>>> linguistic behaviour (language 'out there', E-language) and
> >>>> trying to explain it to ourselves in terms of a language system
> >>>> (language 'in here', I-language)? So every judgement we make is
> >>>> based on thousands or millions of observed exemplars, and
> >>>> reflects a unique experience of E-language filtered through a
> >>>> unique I-language.
> >>>>
> >>>> Given that view of language development, I don't see how
> >>>> quantitative data will help. Let's take a real uncertainty, such
> >>>> as the past tense of BID. If I want to say I did it, do I say "I
> >>>> bidded" or "I bid"? My judgement: I don't know. Ok, you get 50
> >>>> people to oblige on Mechanical Turk, and 20 of them give "bidded"
> >>>> and 30 "bid". So what? Does that mean that the correct answer is
> >>>> "bidded"? Surely not. How is it better than my judgement? I agree
> >>>> you could record my speech and find how often I use each
> >>>> alternative; but the reason I don't know is precisely because
> >>>> it's a rare word, so in a sense quantitative data are irrelevant
> >>>> even there. What would solve the problem of subjectivity, of
> >>>> course, would be a machine for probing the bit of my mind (or
> >>>> even brain) that holds BID and its details; but I suspect that
> >>>> even that wouldn't move us much further forward than my original
> >>>> "don't know". (Incidentally I write as a fan of quantitative
> >>>> sociolinguistics, so I do accept that quantitative data are
> >>>> relevant to linguistic analysis in some areas, where the I-
> >>>> language phenomenon is frequent enough to produce usable data.)
> >>>>
> >>>> It seems to me that this discussion raises the really fundamental
> >>>> question of what kind of thing we think language is: social or
> >>>> individual. The problem isn't unique to linguistics of course;
> >>>> it's the same throughout the social sciences. But what's special
> >>>> about linguistics is that we deal in very fine details of culture
> >>>> (e.g. details of how a particular word is used or pronounced) so
> >>>> the differences between individuals really matter. I don't see
> >>>> that we're ever going to have anything better than judgements to
> >>>> go on, so what we need is a way to ensure that judgements are
> >>>> accurate reports of individual I-language. A rotten situation for
> >>>> a science, but I don't see how it can get better.
> >>>>
> >>>> Dick
> >>>>
> >>>> Richard Hudson www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/dick/home.htm
> >>>>
> >>>> On 10/09/2010 14:03, Ted Gibson wrote:
> >>>>> Dear Dan, Dick:
> >>>>>
> >>>>> I would like to clarify some points that Dan Everett makes, in
> >>>>> response to Dick Hudson.
> >>>>>
> >>>>> Ev Fedorenko and I have written a couple of papers recently
> >>>>> (Gibson &
> >>>>> Fedorenko, 2010, in press, see references and links below) on
> >>>>> what we
> >>>>> think are weak methodological standards in syntax and semantics
> >>>>> research over the past many years. The issue that we address is
> >>>>> the
> >>>>> prevalent method in syntax and semantics research, which involves
> >>>>> obtaining a judgment of the acceptability of a sentence / meaning
> >>>>> pair, typically by just the author of the paper, sometimes with
> >>>>> feedback from colleagues. As we address in our papers, this
> >>>>> methodology does not allow proper testing of scientific hypotheses
> >>>>> because of (a) the small number of experimental participants
> >>>>> (typically one); (b) the small number of experimental stimuli
> >>>>> (typically one); (c) cognitive biases on the part of the
> >>>>> researcher
> >>>>> and participants; and (d) the effect of the preceding context
> >>>>> (e.g.,
> >>>>> other constructions the researcher may have been recently
> >>>>> considering). (As Dan said, see Schutze, 1996; Cowart, 1997; and
> >>>>> several others cited in Gibson & Fedorenko, in press; for similar
> >>>>> points, but with not as strong a conclusion as ours).
> >>>>>
> >>>>> Three issues need to be separated here: (1) the use of intuitive
> >>>>> judgments as a dependent measure in a language experiment; (2)
> >>>>> potential cognitive biases on the part of experimental subjects
> >>>>> and
> >>>>> experimenters in language experiments; and (3) the need for
> >>>>> obtaining
> >>>>> quantitative evidence, whatever the dependent measure might be.
> >>>>> The
> >>>>> paper that Ev and I wrote addresses the last two issues, but
> >>>>> does not
> >>>>> go into depth on the first issue (the use of intuitions as a
> >>>>> dependent
> >>>>> measure in language experiments). Regarding this issue, we don't
> >>>>> think
> >>>>> that there is anything wrong with gathering intuitive judgments
> >>>>> as a
> >>>>> dependent measure, as long as the task is clear to the
> >>>>> experimental
> >>>>> participants.
> >>>>>
> >>>>> In the longer paper (Gibson & Fedorenko, in press) we respond to
> >>>>> some
> >>>>> arguments that have been given in support of continuing to use the
> >>>>> traditional non-quantitative method in syntax / semantics
> >>>>> research.
> >>>>> One recent defense of the traditional method comes from Phillips
> >>>>> (2008), who argues that no harm has come from the non-quantitative
> >>>>> approach in syntax research thus far. Phillips argues that there
> >>>>> are
> >>>>> no cases in the literature where an incorrect intuitive judgment
> >>>>> has
> >>>>> become the basis for a widely accepted generalization or an
> >>>>> important
> >>>>> theoretical claim. He therefore concludes that there is no
> >>>>> reason to
> >>>>> adopt more rigorous data collection standards. We challenge
> >>>>> Philips?
> >>>>> conclusion by presenting three cases from the literature where a
> >>>>> faulty intuition has led to incorrect generalizations and mistaken
> >>>>> theorizing, plausibly due to cognitive biases on the part of the
> >>>>> researchers.
> >>>>>
> >>>>> A second argument that is sometimes presented for the continued
> >>>>> use of
> >>>>> the traditional non-quantitative method is that it would be too
> >>>>> inefficient to evaluate every syntactic / semantic hypothesis or
> >>>>> phenomenon quantitatively. For example, Culicover & Jackendoff
> >>>>> (2010)
> >>>>> make this argument explicitly in their response to Gibson &
> >>>>> Fedorenko
> >>>>> (2010): ?It would cripple linguistic investigation if it were
> >>>>> required
> >>>>> that all judgments of ambiguity and grammaticality be subject to
> >>>>> statistically rigorous experiments on naive subjects, especially
> >>>>> when
> >>>>> investigating languages whose speakers are hard to
> >>>>> access? (Culicover
> >>>>> & Jackendoff, 2010, p. 234). (Dick Hudson makes a similar point
> >>>>> earlier in the discussion here.) Whereas we agree that in
> >>>>> circumstances where gathering data is difficult, some evidence is
> >>>>> better than no evidence, we do not agree that research would be
> >>>>> slowed
> >>>>> with respect to languages where experimental participants are
> >>>>> easy to
> >>>>> access, such as English. In contrast, we think that the opposite
> >>>>> is
> >>>>> true: the field?s progress is probably slowed by not doing
> >>>>> quantitative research.
> >>>>> Suppose that a typical syntax / semantics paper that lacks
> >>>>> quantitative evidence includes judgments for 50 or more
> >>>>> sentences /
> >>>>> meaning pairs, corresponding to 50 or more empirical claims.
> >>>>> Even if
> >>>>> most of the judgments from such a paper are correct or are on the
> >>>>> right track, the problem is in knowing which judgments are
> >>>>> correct.
> >>>>> For example, suppose that 90% of the judgments from an arbitrary
> >>>>> paper
> >>>>> are correct (which is probably a high estimate). (Colin Phillips
> >>>>> and
> >>>>> some of his former students / postdocs have commented to us
> >>>>> that, in
> >>>>> their experience, quantitative acceptability judgment studies
> >>>>> almost
> >>>>> always validate the claim(s) in the literature. This is not our
> >>>>> experience, however. Most experiments that we have run which
> >>>>> attempt
> >>>>> to test some syntactic / semantic hypothesis in the literature
> >>>>> end up
> >>>>> providing us with a pattern of data that had not been known
> >>>>> before the
> >>>>> experiment (e.g., Breen et al., in press; Fedorenko & Gibson, in
> >>>>> press; Patel et al., 2009; Scontras & Gibson, submitted).) This
> >>>>> means
> >>>>> that in a paper with 50 empirical claims 45/50 are correct. But
> >>>>> which
> >>>>> 45? There are 2,118, 760 ways to choose 45 items from 50. That?s
> >>>>> over
> >>>>> two million different theories. By quantitatively evaluating the
> >>>>> empirical claims, we reduce the uncertainty a great deal. To make
> >>>>> progress, it is better to have theoretical claims supported by
> >>>>> solid
> >>>>> quantitative evidence, so that even if the interpretation of the
> >>>>> data
> >>>>> changes over time as new evidence becomes available ? as is
> >>>>> often the
> >>>>> case in any field of science ? the empirical pattern can be used
> >>>>> as a
> >>>>> basis for further theorizing.
> >>>>>
> >>>>> Furthermore, it is no longer expensive to run behavioral
> >>>>> experiments,
> >>>>> at least in English and other widely spoken languages. There now
> >>>>> exists a marketplace interface ? Amazon.com?s Mechanical Turk ?
> >>>>> which
> >>>>> can be used for collecting behavioral data over the internet
> >>>>> quickly
> >>>>> and inexpensively. The cost of using an interface like this is
> >>>>> minimal, and the time that it takes for the results to be
> >>>>> returned is
> >>>>> short. For example, currently on Mechanical Turk, a survey of
> >>>>> approximately 50 items will be answered by 50 or more participants
> >>>>> within a couple of hours, at a cost of approximately $1 per
> >>>>> participant. Thus a survey can be completed within a day, at a
> >>>>> cost of
> >>>>> less than $50. (The hard work of designing the experiment, and
> >>>>> constructing controlled materials remains of course.)
> >>>>>
> >>>>> Sorry to be so verbose. But I think that these methodological
> >>>>> points
> >>>>> are very important.
> >>>>>
> >>>>> Best wishes,
> >>>>>
> >>>>> Ted Gibson
> >>>>>
> >>>>> Gibson, E. & Fedorenko, E. (In press). The need for quantitative
> >>>>> methods in syntax and semantics research. Language and Cognitive
> >>>>> Processes.
> http://tedlab.mit.edu/tedlab_website/researchpapers/Gibson
> >>>>> & Fedorenko InPress LCP.pdf
> >>>>>
> >>>>> Gibson, E. & Fedorenko, E. (2010). Weak quantitative standards in
> >>>>> linguistics research. Trends in Cognitive Science, 14, 233-234.
> >>>>> http://tedlab.mit.edu/tedlab_website/researchpapers/Gibson &
> >>>>> Fedorenko
> >>>>> 2010 TICS.pdf
> >>>>>
> >>>>>
> >>>>>
> >>>>>
> >>>>>> 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
> >>>>>
> >>>>>
> >>>>>
> >>>
> >>>
> >>>
> >>
> >
>
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 28
> Date: Sat, 11 Sep 2010 12:53:23 -0400
> From: Daniel Everett <dan at daneverett.org>
> Subject: Re: [FUNKNET] analysis: unhappiness
> To: Ted Gibson <egibson at MIT.EDU>
> Cc: Richard Hudson <dick at ling.ucl.ac.uk>, Daniel Everett
>        <dan at daneverett.org>,   Evelina Fedorenko <evelina9 at MIT.EDU>,
> funknet
>        <funknet at mailman.rice.edu>
> Message-ID: <0021EEE8-560C-4E0A-8A3B-9595384807D6 at daneverett.org>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
>
> 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, lingu
>  istics, 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
>
>
>
>
> End of FUNKNET Digest, Vol 84, Issue 10
> ***************************************
>