data and analysis

[RonButters at AOL.COM]

In a message dated 1/28/06 6:33:52 PM, zwicky at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU writes:

> ... i'm not promising an analysis; i don't have a lot of insight into
> my mental processes.  i'm  giving you an account of how i understood
> the utterance in the context provided.  period.
> 
> it's like a grammaticality judgment.  it just is.  i can try to
> figure out the system of grammatical knowledge that gave rise to the
> judgment, but that's not the same thing as analyzing my mental
> processes, which are not available to me directly.
> 
> 
Surely it is not only "grammatical" knowledge that affects one's judgment 
about interpretation--even grammatical judgments ("The horse raced by the barn 
door fell" and all that). If all we looked at were bald judgments, we wouldn't 
get very far in the analysis of conversation, for example. 

> i will, eventually, i hope, post about the larger issues.  and point
> out (surprise surprise) that unmanliness, femininity, and (male)
> homosexuality are connected in complex ways.
> 
Arnold and I agree about a lot of things, and the complexity hypothesis 
suggested here is certainly one of them. But can one get to it without atempting to 
discern "a lot of insight into
... mental processes"?
> 
> arnold
> 
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> 
> 

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The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org