analysis: unhappiness

[Johanna Rubba]

One thing that consistently occurs in my intro linguistics classes is  
that at least half of my students do not analyze complex words the  
way a linguist would -- many would analyze "unhappiness" as "un" +  
"happiness." They make such analyses over and over. It makes one  
wonder, of course, about how much native-speaker intuition is in  
agreement with some linguistic analyses. I can *feel* that the  
analysis is [[un-happy]-ness], but, apparently, large numbers of  
native speakers cannot.

Another thing I often find is that many students cannot locate either  
primary or (especially) secondary stress in words. This is very  
bizarre, considering that they produce the stresses correctly and  
hear them correctly in others' speech. So many are unsuccessful at  
this that I have stopped requiring them to find stress in words on  
tests. I give them tricks like singing the word and monitoring for  
the highest-pitched syllable, but the tricks don't work. That many  
students can't be tone-deaf.

Dr. Johanna Rubba, Ph. D.
Professor, Linguistics
Linguistics Minor Advisor
English Dept.
Cal Poly State University San Luis Obispo
San Luis Obispo, CA 93407
Ofc. tel. : 805-756-2184
Dept. tel.: 805-756-2596
Dept. fax: 805-756-6374
E-mail: jrubba at calpoly.edu
URL: http://cla.calpoly.edu/~jrubba