FUNKNET] analysis: unhappiness

[Chris Butler]

Aya, I think two different things are getting a bit mixed up here.

I don't for a moment dispute that expressions are often susceptible to 
multiple interpretations, that these interpretations are guided by all kinds 
of contextual information, or that different people, or even the same person 
at different times, may end up selecting differently from the various 
interpretations. Your example 'Open happiness' in another contribution to 
this thread illustrates these points very well.

My point, though, is that each of these different interpretations, as well 
as the selection of one (or more) as more likely in a particular context, is 
achieved through mechanisms in the interpreter's brain which evolved in the 
course of the phylogenetic development of language in the human species, and 
developed ontogenetically in that particular interpreter's brain. It is 
surely likely that those mechanisms are highly similar in different human 
beings, even though there may be differences in the detailed wiring in 
different brains. What I'm saying is that in order to answer the question 
'How do we communicate using language?' or, if you prefer, 'How does the 
language user work?', we need to investigate what those mechanisms are, and 
this is what psycholinguists can help us with.

In particular, as linguists, we are interested (well, some of us are, though 
clearly not all) in whether the constructs we posit in our theories of 
language have psychological validity in the sense that they correspond to 
ways in which aspects of language are represented in the brain. [As an 
aside, I do realise that there are linguists who strenuously resist what 
they see as a misguided emphasis on mental representation in the work of 
cognitive scientists, but it seems clear that language must be represented 
in some way in the brain in order that we can engage in the sociosemiotic 
acts of meaning making which are the primary focus for many of these 
critics.] Taking your 'Open happiness' examples again, I think we need 
answers to questions such as: What kind of representation does the human 
language processing system have for 'open' and for 'happiness'? Are the 
phonological, syntactic, semantic and pragmatic (for those who distinguish 
the semantic from the pragmatic) properties of these items (and we might 
want to add 'for this particular interpreter', though there must be 
similarities across interpreters for communication to be possible) 
represented in the same or different ways, in the same or different 
locations (or sets of distributed locations)? Indeed, are we right in 
thinking that these familiar levels of linguistic description must be 
differentiated, as such, in the human language processing system? Does the 
representation for 'open' distinguish between what we call verbal and 
adjectival uses of this item, and if so how? Or are syntactic analyses 
computed on the fly, using semantic and contextual clues, rather than the 
neural equivalent of pigeon holes corresponding to verbs and adjectives? Is 
'happiness' represented as 'happy + ness', or in its entirety, or both? All 
these questions, and many many more, are relevant to the construction of a 
model of language which reflects how language users communicate (as, of 
course, are a whole set of other questions about the sociocultural aspects 
of communication).  I am not a psycholinguist, but my all too superficial 
reading in the area suggests that psycholinguists have gone some of the way 
towards answering some of the questions we might want to ask, but that there 
is still a long way to go.

Chris
--------------------------------------------------
From: "A. Katz" <amnfn at well.com>
Sent: Saturday, September 11, 2010 3:18 PM
To: "Chris Butler" <cbutler at ntlworld.com>
Cc: "FUNKNET" <funknet at mailman.rice.edu>
Subject: Re: [FUNKNET] FUNKNET] analysis: unhappiness

> 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 
>> make such interaction possible. Both are important parts of the answer to 
>> the question 'How do we communicate using language?', though this 
>> particular thread of the Funknet discussion has concentrated more on the 
>> second aspect, and so will I.
>>
>> This doesn't mean that all the work linguists have done on "exploring the 
>> structure of a language so that I can understand how all the bits fit 
>> together" and "exploring the connections between items", as Dick puts it, 
>> is useless - far from it. After all, the hypotheses that psycholinguists 
>> test are based on ideas about what languages are like. But it does mean, 
>> in my view, that ultimately we need to get evidence that the constructs 
>> and analyses we propose are ones that are at least consistent with what 
>> we know of the  processes which go on when we use language. So I am with 
>> Matthew when he says that for him, "the only sense in which an analysis 
>> can be "the correct analysis" is in terms of what is inside of people's 
>> heads". Of course, this doesn't imply that linguists should just give up 
>> their jobs until such time as we know everything there is to know about 
>> language processing. But it does mean that we need to collaborate with 
>> psycholinguists, psychologists and neurologists, as has also been pointed 
>> out by linguists such as Ray Jackendoff, Asif Agha, Ewa Dabrowska and Jan 
>> Nuyts. [We also need to collaborate much more with sociolinguists and 
>> sociologists, so that we can get a better handle on the sociocultural 
>> aspects of how we communicate.]  And it also means that psycholinguists, 
>> for their part, need whenever possible to follow up tightly controlled 
>> lab experiments with studies under more naturalistic conditions, to avoid 
>> the criticism that what happens in artifical lab situations may not 
>> happen in natural communicative conditions.
>>
>> I also agree with Dick when he says that "the differences between 
>> individuals really matter", and with Lise when she points out that "we 
>> must also be careful not to idealize "what's in people's heads" as if it 
>> were a single coherent construct that we are trying to discover". 
>> However, there are surely processing mechanisms which are common to all 
>> language users by virtue of the evolution of the language faculty and 
>> which constitute the "general processes" which Dick says psycholinguists 
>> are interested in.
>>
>> On the issue of quantitative methodology, I'm sympathetic in general to 
>> Ted and Ev's views, though it does seem sensible to prioritise cases in 
>> terms of a hierarchy such as Brian suggests. One thing this means is that 
>> we should be giving our university students of linguistics (and some of 
>> our linguistics lecturers!) courses in quantitative aspects of 
>> linguistics that introduce them to the use of at least some of the basic 
>> statistical methods in language study, and I'm sure this is indeed going 
>> on in some enlightened places. To those who suspect this can't be done 
>> with maths-shy students who don't initially see the need for it, I offer 
>> my own experience, over quite a long period, of teaching such courses to 
>> people with little or no prior experience in quantitative techniques. For 
>> some years in the 1990s, I taught such courses to all linguistics 
>> students in an institution where we had many mature students who had come 
>> into university level studies with non-standard qualifications, and were 
>> not well equipped for courses of this kind by their previous experience. 
>> I'm glad to say that teaching the subject from their own perspective as 
>> language students rather than that of the statistician, and explaining 
>> the reasons for doing things in particular ways rather than just 
>> presenting formulae, paid off in the end, so that most students were able 
>> to appreciate the relevance of these courses and to turn in very 
>> creditable projects showing an understanding of research design and 
>> competence in the use of a range of basic statistical techniques. And I 
>> still find that bright graduate students respond well to similar courses 
>> which incorporate some of the rather more advanced techniques needed for 
>> many real research projects in various areas of linguistics. But I may 
>> well be out of date with what is now already happening in our fine 
>> institutions of higher education!
>>
>> Chris Butler
>>
>>