FUNKNET] analysis: unhappiness

[Tom Givon]

I wonder whether asking "how does language work?" is really a meaningful 
question without  asking "how does the language user work?"  One of the 
worst legacies good ol' Noam stuck us with is his (really, Saussure's) 
distinction of competence ("language", "knowledge") vs. performance 
("language user", "processing"). It purported to limit linguists to the 
armchair methods that study competence, and relegated to psychology the 
quantified, distributional/variationist methods that study behavior, 
processing and on-line communication. The first breach in this 
artificial methodological wall occurred, leastwise for some of us, when 
we discovered the intermediate method of quantified studies of text, 
interaction, and conversation. As an ex-biologist, I am forever puzzled 
by the methodological purism we sill seem to embrace in linguistics, in 
the face of the manifest complexity and connectivity of language (mind, 
brain, culture, sociality, evolution, etc.). In biology, another 
extremely complex science with multiple connections (chemistry, geology, 
paleontology, behavior, sociality, economics, evolution, etc.), ANY 
method is welcome so long as it does the job of furthering our 
understanding. And by understanding we mean ever-wider circles of 
connectivity.

Best,  TG
================


A. Katz wrote:
> Chris,
>
> Thanks for addressing this question. I understand that many, many 
> linguists are quite properly and approriately interested in this 
> ultimate question: "How does the language user work?" (I am also 
> intetested in this question some of the time.)
>
> My point is that "how does language work?" is also a valid question, 
> and a central one to the field of linguistics. These two questions are 
> not at all the same.
>
> Let me be very explicit: My aim is to separate out the "human" from 
> the "language". There are many good reasons to do so. For anyone 
> working in computerized language processing or in non-human language 
> studies, this is a significant point.
>
> It does not matter if a computerized language processing system even 
> remotely simulates what humans do with language in their brains. It 
> does matter whether it comes up with comparable or indistinguishable 
> results.
>
> It does not matter whether a parrot, a dolphin or a chimpanzee is 
> doing the same things inside the same modules in his brain as a human 
> does. It does matter if the results are functionally equivalent.
>
> We need to make that distinction, between humans and their language, 
> or we will be caught inside a circular definition with no way to break 
> out or to prove anything, not about others and not about ourselves!
>
>    --Aya
>
> http://hubpages.com/hub/What-Constitutes-Proof-in-Ape-Language-Studies
>
>
> On Sun, 12 Sep 2010, Chris Butler wrote:
>
>> Aya, I think two different things are getting a bit mixed up here.
>>
>> I don't for a moment dispute that expressions are often susceptible 
>> to multiple interpretations, that these interpretations are guided by 
>> all kinds of contextual information, or that different people, or 
>> even the same person at different times, may end up selecting 
>> differently from the various interpretations. Your example 'Open 
>> happiness' in another contribution to this thread illustrates these 
>> points very well.
>>
>> My point, though, is that each of these different interpretations, as 
>> well as the selection of one (or more) as more likely in a particular 
>> context, is achieved through mechanisms in the interpreter's brain 
>> which evolved in the course of the phylogenetic development of 
>> language in the human species, and developed ontogenetically in that 
>> particular interpreter's brain. It is surely likely that those 
>> mechanisms are highly similar in different human beings, even though 
>> there may be differences in the detailed wiring in different brains. 
>> What I'm saying is that in order to answer the question 'How do we 
>> communicate using language?' or, if you prefer, 'How does the 
>> language user work?', we need to investigate what those mechanisms 
>> are, and this is what psycholinguists can help us with.
>>
>> In particular, as linguists, we are interested (well, some of us are, 
>> though clearly not all) in whether the constructs we posit in our 
>> theories of language have psychological validity in the sense that 
>> they correspond to ways in which aspects of language are represented 
>> in the brain. [As an aside, I do realise that there are linguists who 
>> strenuously resist what they see as a misguided emphasis on mental 
>> representation in the work of cognitive scientists, but it seems 
>> clear that language must be represented in some way in the brain in 
>> order that we can engage in the sociosemiotic acts of meaning making 
>> which are the primary focus for many of these critics.] Taking your 
>> 'Open happiness' examples again, I think we need answers to questions 
>> such as: What kind of representation does the human language 
>> processing system have for 'open' and for 'happiness'? Are the 
>> phonological, syntactic, semantic and pragmatic (for those who 
>> distinguish the semantic from the pragmatic) properties of these 
>> items (and we might want to add 'for this particular interpreter', 
>> though there must be similarities across interpreters for 
>> communication to be possible) represented in the same or different 
>> ways, in the same or different locations (or sets of distributed 
>> locations)? Indeed, are we right in thinking that these familiar 
>> levels of linguistic description must be differentiated, as such, in 
>> the human language processing system? Does the representation for 
>> 'open' distinguish between what we call verbal and adjectival uses of 
>> this item, and if so how? Or are syntactic analyses computed on the 
>> fly, using semantic and contextual clues, rather than the neural 
>> equivalent of pigeon holes corresponding to verbs and adjectives? Is 
>> 'happiness' represented as 'happy + ness', or in its entirety, or 
>> both? All these questions, and many many more, are relevant to the 
>> construction of a model of language which reflects how language users 
>> communicate (as, of course, are a whole set of other questions about 
>> the sociocultural aspects of communication).  I am not a 
>> psycholinguist, but my all too superficial reading in the area 
>> suggests that psycholinguists have gone some of the way towards 
>> answering some of the questions we might want to ask, but that there 
>> is still a long way to go.
>>
>> Chris
>> --------------------------------------------------
>> From: "A. Katz" <amnfn at well.com>
>> Sent: Saturday, September 11, 2010 3:18 PM
>> To: "Chris Butler" <cbutler at ntlworld.com>
>> Cc: "FUNKNET" <funknet at mailman.rice.edu>
>> Subject: Re: [FUNKNET] FUNKNET] analysis: unhappiness
>>
>>> The problem is that once we achieve the psycholinguistic goal and 
>>> see what
>>> is happening in each person's head, and we see that conflicting 
>>> analyses
>>> are the norm, rather than the exception, among normal language 
>>> speakers,
>>> then we will realize that the way language works to transmit 
>>> information
>>> is despite individual differences and not because of uniform processing
>>> strategies.
>>>
>>> Even when all are agreed as to the meaning of an utterance, they do not
>>> process it the same way. Which means that processing is seocndary to
>>> information transmission.
>>>
>>>   --Aya
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> On Sat, 11 Sep 2010, Chris Butler wrote:
>>>
>>>> Dick's comment that "this discussion raises the really fundamental 
>>>> question of what kind of thing we think language is: social or 
>>>> individual" is, it seems to me, an important one, particularly for 
>>>> those of us who are committed functionalists. My own view is that a 
>>>> truly functional model of language would be one which aims to 
>>>> account for how human beings communicate using language, or in 
>>>> other words tries to answer the question which was posed by Simon 
>>>> Dik a long time ago now, but which was not tackled head-on in his 
>>>> own work: "How does the natural language user work?' In trying to 
>>>> answer this question we need to accept that language is BOTH social 
>>>> AND individual, and we need to explore both aspects to get as 
>>>> complete a picture as possible of how we communicate using 
>>>> language. We need to know BOTH how people create and respond to 
>>>> meanings and express those meanings in forms during social 
>>>> interaction AND the mechanisms which operate in the brains of 
>>>> individuals in order to make such interaction possible. Both are 
>>>> important parts of the answer to the question 'How do we 
>>>> communicate using language?', though this particular thread of the 
>>>> Funknet discussion has concentrated more on the second aspect, and 
>>>> so will I.
>>>>
>>>> This doesn't mean that all the work linguists have done on 
>>>> "exploring the structure of a language so that I can understand how 
>>>> all the bits fit together" and "exploring the connections between 
>>>> items", as Dick puts it, is useless - far from it. After all, the 
>>>> hypotheses that psycholinguists test are based on ideas about what 
>>>> languages are like. But it does mean, in my view, that ultimately 
>>>> we need to get evidence that the constructs and analyses we propose 
>>>> are ones that are at least consistent with what we know of the  
>>>> processes which go on when we use language. So I am with Matthew 
>>>> when he says that for him, "the only sense in which an analysis can 
>>>> be "the correct analysis" is in terms of what is inside of people's 
>>>> heads". Of course, this doesn't imply that linguists should just 
>>>> give up their jobs until such time as we know everything there is 
>>>> to know about language processing. But it does mean that we need to 
>>>> collaborate with psycholinguists, psychologists and neurologists, 
>>>> as has also been pointed out by linguists such as Ray Jackendoff, 
>>>> Asif Agha, Ewa Dabrowska and Jan Nuyts. [We also need to 
>>>> collaborate much more with sociolinguists and sociologists, so that 
>>>> we can get a better handle on the sociocultural aspects of how we 
>>>> communicate.]  And it also means that psycholinguists, for their 
>>>> part, need whenever possible to follow up tightly controlled lab 
>>>> experiments with studies under more naturalistic conditions, to 
>>>> avoid the criticism that what happens in artifical lab situations 
>>>> may not happen in natural communicative conditions.
>>>>
>>>> I also agree with Dick when he says that "the differences between 
>>>> individuals really matter", and with Lise when she points out that 
>>>> "we must also be careful not to idealize "what's in people's heads" 
>>>> as if it were a single coherent construct that we are trying to 
>>>> discover". However, there are surely processing mechanisms which 
>>>> are common to all language users by virtue of the evolution of the 
>>>> language faculty and which constitute the "general processes" which 
>>>> Dick says psycholinguists are interested in.
>>>>
>>>> On the issue of quantitative methodology, I'm sympathetic in 
>>>> general to Ted and Ev's views, though it does seem sensible to 
>>>> prioritise cases in terms of a hierarchy such as Brian suggests. 
>>>> One thing this means is that we should be giving our university 
>>>> students of linguistics (and some of our linguistics lecturers!) 
>>>> courses in quantitative aspects of linguistics that introduce them 
>>>> to the use of at least some of the basic statistical methods in 
>>>> language study, and I'm sure this is indeed going on in some 
>>>> enlightened places. To those who suspect this can't be done with 
>>>> maths-shy students who don't initially see the need for it, I offer 
>>>> my own experience, over quite a long period, of teaching such 
>>>> courses to people with little or no prior experience in 
>>>> quantitative techniques. For some years in the 1990s, I taught such 
>>>> courses to all linguistics students in an institution where we had 
>>>> many mature students who had come into university level studies 
>>>> with non-standard qualifications, and were not well equipped for 
>>>> courses of this kind by their previous experience. I'm glad to say 
>>>> that teaching the subject from their own perspective as language 
>>>> students rather than that of the statistician, and explaining the 
>>>> reasons for doing things in particular ways rather than just 
>>>> presenting formulae, paid off in the end, so that most students 
>>>> were able to appreciate the relevance of these courses and to turn 
>>>> in very creditable projects showing an understanding of research 
>>>> design and competence in the use of a range of basic statistical 
>>>> techniques. And I still find that bright graduate students respond 
>>>> well to similar courses which incorporate some of the rather more 
>>>> advanced techniques needed for many real research projects in 
>>>> various areas of linguistics. But I may well be out of date with 
>>>> what is now already happening in our fine institutions of higher 
>>>> education!
>>>>
>>>> Chris Butler
>>>>
>>>>
>>
>>