analysis: unhappiness

[dryer at buffalo.edu]

The following sentence of Lise's

"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'"

suggests that there are two senses in which an analysis can be "the correct 
analysis", one in terms of what is in people's heads, the other in terms of 
what is "out there".

There are a vast number of patterns "out there".  The only distinction, on 
my view, amongst this vast number of patterns, is between those that 
reflect something inside people's heads and those that don't.  But if that 
is the case, then there is no coherent sense in which one can talk of "the 
correct analysis" of what is "out there", except in terms of what is in 
people's heads, and thus no second sense of "the correct analysis".  The 
patterns that don't correspond to things in people's heads fall into (at 
least) two categories.  There are those that are akin to constellations of 
stars and, as with constellations, there is no reality to these patterns, 
except in the minds of linguists.  And there are those patterns which are 
the fossil remains of what was in the heads of speakers of an earlier stage 
of the language but which no longer are.  These latter patterns are real, 
and they are relevant to exlaining why the language is now the way it is, 
but they are not relevant, I think many would agree, as to what is the 
"correct analysis" of the language today.

For this reason, I claim that the only sense in which an analysis can be 
"the correct analysis" is in terms of what is inside of people's heads.

Again, I recommend the work of Bruce Derwing for lengthy discussion of 
these issues.

Matthew

--On Thursday, September 9, 2010 5:26 PM -0600 Lise Menn 
<Lise.Menn at Colorado.EDU> wrote:

> 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
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>
>
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