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<div class="moz-cite-prefix">Lise says that "a
psycholinguistic/diachronic account doesn't obviate the need for a
formal account", but Dan's original question was about human
language *in general*. So I don't quite agree with her:<br>
<br>
I'd say we need "formal accounts" (schemas/constructions like
Bruce's three-foot constraint) at the language-particular level,
but functional accounts at the general level, to account for
cross-linguistically general phenomena. So it's not about
"different folks" having different preferences. It's about
different problems requiring different solutions.<br>
<br>
In the generative approach, the two things are conflated and
constructions/schemas/rules are assumed to take care of
cross-linguistic generalizations as well, not just of
language-particular generalizations. That's just wrong, it seems
to me. The case of morph length is just one (particularly
spectacular, or trivial, depending on your perspective) example: A
generaivist would have to formulate a UG principle that accounts
for the relatively uniform length of morphs. That the explanation
is functional (referring to neighbourhood density, or simply
ambiguity avoidance, as Lise mentioned) is really obvious here.
Any language-particular constraints that one would identify are
only distantly related to the functional explanation of the
cross-linguistic trend.<br>
<br>
Greetings,<br>
Martin<br>
<br>
<pre class="moz-signature" cols="72">--
Martin Haspelmath (<a moz-do-not-send="true" class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="mailto:haspelmath@eva.mpg.de">haspelmath@eva.mpg.de</a>)
Max-Planck-Institut fuer evolutionaere Anthropologie, Deutscher Platz 6
D-04103 Leipzig
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<br>
Am 12/22/13 11:39 PM, schrieb Everett, Daniel:<br>
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cite="mid:DAD9F813-2BCD-4AB0-B634-FB536D6A5BAD@bentley.edu"
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<pre wrap="">Dear Lise,
No disagreement necessarily.
All accounts need to be formalized. For me the question is whether they are formalizations over structures or over functional, cultural, or other considerations e.g. cognition, climate, altitude, etc. There will always be some fundamental computational residue that needs its own account. These may or may not represent distinct components of the overall formalization. Grammars are composites of computational and other strategies. Divide and conquer may not be the best strategy in the sense that neither cognition, structure, or computation has privileged status. One may in one context but not another. All are not always needed.
Dan
Sent from my iPhone
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<pre wrap="">On Dec 22, 2013, at 16:05, "Lise Menn" <a class="moz-txt-link-rfc2396E" href="mailto:lise.menn@Colorado.EDU"><lise.menn@Colorado.EDU></a> wrote:
Thanks, Dan, but at the risk of opening another topic, I'd say that a psycholinguistic/diachronic account doesn't obviate the need for a formal account (or vice versa), because formal accounts and functional accounts are different kinds of entities. They serve different purposes and both are useful.
Formal constraints/accounts, like macro-level physical laws, look elegant and abstract away from particulars (think about the simple, elegant laws relating pressure, temperature, and volume of gases). Functional accounts are clunkier, concrete, but provide explanations for why things are the way they are (cf. the statistics of how molecules behave when they bump into each other, which is way beyond me but is what underlies the simple gas laws). Both kinds of accounts should yield testable predictions, and it seems that different folks prefer to work more with the abstract formulations or more with the concrete mechanics. And both kinds of people are needed to keep a science both accessible and empirical.
Lise
Lise Menn
Home Office: 303-444-4274
1625 Mariposa Ave
Boulder CO 80302
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://spot.colorado.edu/~menn/index.html">http://spot.colorado.edu/~menn/index.html</a>
Professor Emerita of Linguistics
Fellow, Institute of Cognitive Science
University of Colorado
________________________________________
From: Everett, Daniel [<a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="mailto:DEVERETT@bentley.edu">DEVERETT@bentley.edu</a>]
Sent: Saturday, December 21, 2013 3:15 PM
To: Lise Menn
Cc: Funknet List; <a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="mailto:LINGTYP@LISTSERV.LINGUISTLIST.ORG">LINGTYP@LISTSERV.LINGUISTLIST.ORG</a>
Subject: Re: [FUNKNET] Upper limits to morpheme length
Lise,
Great comments. These remarks likely obviate the need for a more formal account. But now we have a bit of both.
Thanks,
Dan
Sent from my iPhone
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<pre wrap="">On Dec 21, 2013, at 17:09, "Lise Menn" <a class="moz-txt-link-rfc2396E" href="mailto:lise.menn@Colorado.EDU"><lise.menn@Colorado.EDU></a> wrote:
The cognitive underpinnings of the Hayes and Wilson constraint (and of Zipf's law, of course) would come from several sources that I can think of (there might well be others):
1) the difficulty of catching all the phonemes when you a long, unfamiliar, unanalyzed word (hard to imagine Chaugoggagoggmanchagaugagoochaubungungamogg surviving in English without having been written down)
2) The very sparse neighborhoods of long monomorphemic words (that is, the rarity of pairs of long monomorphemic words that differ by only one phoneme) means that they are identifiable by listeners even when some of the sounds are inaudible, so misunderstandings won't offer any barrier to elision of the sounds
3) Speakers will abbreviate long words because - other things being equal - they are more work to produce.
Lise
Lise Menn
Home Office: 303-444-4274
1625 Mariposa Ave
Boulder CO 80302
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://spot.colorado.edu/~menn/index.html">http://spot.colorado.edu/~menn/index.html</a>
Professor Emerita of Linguistics
Fellow, Institute of Cognitive Science
University of Colorado
________________________________________
From: <a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="mailto:funknet-bounces@mailman.rice.edu">funknet-bounces@mailman.rice.edu</a> [<a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="mailto:funknet-bounces@mailman.rice.edu">funknet-bounces@mailman.rice.edu</a>] On Behalf Of Everett, Daniel [<a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="mailto:DEVERETT@bentley.edu">DEVERETT@bentley.edu</a>]
Sent: Saturday, December 21, 2013 12:39 PM
To: Funknet List; <a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="mailto:LINGTYP@LISTSERV.LINGUISTLIST.ORG">LINGTYP@LISTSERV.LINGUISTLIST.ORG</a>
Subject: Re: [FUNKNET] Upper limits to morpheme length
Folks,
Thanks for the suggestions. I just received the following from Bruce Hayes which exactly answers my question. With Bruce's permission, I pass this along here.
All the best for the end of one year and the beginning of another. I hope you have all finished posting your grades and are now able to relax a bit.
-- Dan
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<pre wrap="">1) The main way to get really long morphemes, I suspect, is to borrow from languages with which you have little contact, so you can't parse their long polymorphemic words. Hence English Okaloacoochee, Hanamanioa, Chaugoggagoggmanchagaugagoochaubungungamogg.
2) I think the upper limit for English morphemes is three metrical feet. When I make up a four-foot word it sounds odd to me, e.g. ?Okaloaseppacoochee. The famous lake Chaugoggagoggmanchaugagoggchaubungungamogg is not an exception; it pronounced as three separate phonological words: Chaugoggagogg, manchaugagaug, ch[schwa]bunagungamogg.
3) If you adopt the phonotactic model of Hayes and Wilson (LI 2008), then if you include a contraint of the type *Struc, and train up the grammar, you get the right predictions: *Struc gets a modest weight, which predicts a descending-exponential probability function for words of ever-increasing length. In this theory, the extreme unlikelihood of extremely long words is simply an extrapolation from the moderate unlikelihood of somewhat-long words.
Best regards,
Bruce
Bruce Hayes
Professor and Chair
Department of Linguistics, UCLA
Los Angeles CA 90095-1543
<a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="mailto:bhayes@humnet.ucla.edu">bhayes@humnet.ucla.edu</a>
<a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="http://www.linguistics.ucla/people/hayes">www.linguistics.ucla/people/hayes</a>
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