analysis: unhappiness

[Edith A Moravcsik]

It seems to me that it is important to construct grammars that are based simply on the form-meaning correspondences of the language 'out there', as Lise said, apart from psycholinguistic data, and that are constrained by the usual requirements of scientific descriptions, such as generality and simplicity. Such grammars may not be psycholinguistically real at all nor do they try to be; but they provide a baseline in reference to which we can then assess people's actual ways of learning, processing, and analyzing structures. In the absence of such basic descriptions, it would be hard to know what psycholinguistic data we should be "surprised at" - i.e., what it is that needs to be explained about acquisition, processing, and people's intuitive analyses of structures. 


Edith Moravcsik 







From: "Lise Menn" <Lise.Menn at Colorado.EDU> 
To: dryer at buffalo.edu, "Funknet" <funknet at mailman.rice.edu> 
Cc: "Richard Hudson" <dick at ling.ucl.ac.uk> 
Sent: Thursday, September 9, 2010 6:26:13 PM 
Subject: Re: [FUNKNET] analysis: unhappiness 

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 
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-- 
Professor Emerita of Linguistics 
Department of Linguistics 
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee 
Milwaukee, WI 53201-0413 
USA