formal vs. functional account

Mon Dec 23 05:38:23 UTC 2013

Lise says that "a psycholinguistic/diachronic account doesn't obviate 
the need for a formal account", but Dan's original question was about 
human language *in general*. So I don't quite agree with her:

I'd say we need "formal accounts" (schemas/constructions like Bruce's 
three-foot constraint) at the language-particular level, but functional 
accounts at the general level, to account for cross-linguistically 
general phenomena. So it's not about "different folks" having different 
preferences. It's about different problems requiring different solutions.

In the generative approach, the two things are conflated and 
constructions/schemas/rules are assumed to take care of cross-linguistic 
generalizations as well, not just of language-particular 
generalizations. That's just wrong, it seems to me. The case of morph 
length is just one (particularly spectacular, or trivial, depending on 
your perspective) example: A generaivist would have to formulate a UG 
principle that accounts for the relatively uniform length of morphs. 
That the explanation is functional (referring to neighbourhood density, 
or simply ambiguity avoidance, as Lise mentioned) is really obvious 
here. Any language-particular constraints that one would identify are 
only distantly related to the functional explanation of the 
cross-linguistic trend.

Greetings,
Martin

-- 
Martin Haspelmath (haspelmath at eva.mpg.de)
Max-Planck-Institut fuer evolutionaere Anthropologie, Deutscher Platz 6	
D-04103 Leipzig

Am 12/22/13 11:39 PM, schrieb Everett, Daniel:
> Dear Lise,
>
> No disagreement necessarily.
>
> All accounts need to be formalized. For me the question is whether they are formalizations over structures or over functional, cultural, or other considerations e.g. cognition, climate, altitude, etc. There will always be some fundamental computational residue that needs its own account. These may or may not represent distinct components of the overall formalization. Grammars are composites of computational and other strategies. Divide and conquer may not be the best strategy in the sense that neither cognition, structure, or computation has privileged status. One may in one context but not another. All are not always needed.
>
> Dan
>
> Sent from my iPhone
>
>> On Dec 22, 2013, at 16:05, "Lise Menn" <lise.menn at Colorado.EDU> wrote:
>>
>> Thanks, Dan, but at the risk of opening another topic, I'd say that a psycholinguistic/diachronic account doesn't obviate the need for a formal account (or vice versa), because formal accounts and functional accounts are different kinds of entities. They serve different purposes and both are useful.
>> Formal constraints/accounts, like macro-level physical laws, look elegant and abstract away from particulars (think about the simple, elegant laws relating pressure, temperature, and volume of gases).  Functional accounts are clunkier, concrete, but provide explanations for why things are the way they are (cf. the statistics of how molecules behave when they bump into each other, which is way beyond me but is what underlies the simple gas laws).  Both kinds of accounts should yield testable predictions, and it seems that different folks prefer to work more with the abstract formulations or more with the concrete mechanics. And both kinds of people are needed to keep a science both accessible and empirical.
>>
>> Lise
>>
>> Lise Menn
>> Home Office: 303-444-4274
>> 1625 Mariposa Ave
>> Boulder CO 80302
>> http://spot.colorado.edu/~menn/index.html
>>
>> Professor Emerita of Linguistics
>> Fellow, Institute of Cognitive Science
>> University of  Colorado
>> ________________________________________
>> From: Everett, Daniel [DEVERETT at bentley.edu]
>> Sent: Saturday, December 21, 2013 3:15 PM
>> To: Lise Menn
>> Cc: Funknet List; LINGTYP at LISTSERV.LINGUISTLIST.ORG
>> Subject: Re: [FUNKNET] Upper limits to morpheme length
>>
>> Lise,
>>
>> Great comments. These remarks likely obviate the need for a more formal account. But now we have a bit of both.
>>
>> Thanks,
>>
>> Dan
>>
>> Sent from my iPhone
>>
>>> On Dec 21, 2013, at 17:09, "Lise Menn" <lise.menn at Colorado.EDU> wrote:
>>>
>>> The cognitive underpinnings of the Hayes and Wilson constraint (and of Zipf's law, of course) would come from several sources that I can think of (there might well be others):
>>>
>>> 1) the difficulty of catching all the phonemes when you a long, unfamiliar, unanalyzed word (hard to imagine Chaugoggagoggmanchagaugagoochaubungungamogg surviving in English without having been written down)
>>>
>>> 2) The very sparse neighborhoods of long monomorphemic words (that is, the rarity of pairs of long monomorphemic words that differ by only one phoneme) means that they are identifiable by listeners even when some of the sounds are inaudible, so misunderstandings won't offer any barrier to elision of the sounds
>>>
>>> 3) Speakers will abbreviate long words because - other things being equal - they are more work to produce.
>>>
>>> Lise
>>> Lise Menn
>>> Home Office: 303-444-4274
>>> 1625 Mariposa Ave
>>> Boulder CO 80302
>>> http://spot.colorado.edu/~menn/index.html
>>>
>>> Professor Emerita of Linguistics
>>> Fellow, Institute of Cognitive Science
>>> University of  Colorado
>>> ________________________________________
>>> From: funknet-bounces at mailman.rice.edu [funknet-bounces at mailman.rice.edu] On Behalf Of Everett, Daniel [DEVERETT at bentley.edu]
>>> Sent: Saturday, December 21, 2013 12:39 PM
>>> To: Funknet List; LINGTYP at LISTSERV.LINGUISTLIST.ORG
>>> Subject: Re: [FUNKNET] Upper limits to morpheme length
>>>
>>> Folks,
>>>
>>> Thanks for the suggestions. I just received the following from Bruce Hayes which exactly answers my question. With Bruce's permission, I pass this along here.
>>>
>>> All the best for the end of one year and the beginning of another. I hope you have all finished posting your grades and are now able to relax a bit.
>>>
>>> -- Dan
>>>
>>>
>>>> 1) The main way to get really long morphemes, I suspect, is to borrow from languages with which you have little contact, so you can't parse their long polymorphemic words. Hence English Okaloacoochee, Hanamanioa, Chaugoggagoggmanchagaugagoochaubungungamogg.
>>>>
>>>> 2) I think the upper limit for English morphemes is three metrical feet.  When I make up a four-foot word it sounds odd to me, e.g. ?Okaloaseppacoochee.  The famous lake Chaugoggagoggmanchaugagoggchaubungungamogg is not an exception; it pronounced as three separate phonological words:  Chaugoggagogg, manchaugagaug, ch[schwa]bunagungamogg.
>>>>
>>>> 3) If you adopt the phonotactic model of Hayes and Wilson (LI 2008), then if you include a contraint of the type *Struc, and train up the grammar, you get the right predictions: *Struc gets a modest weight, which predicts a descending-exponential probability function for words of ever-increasing length.  In this theory, the extreme unlikelihood of extremely long words is simply an extrapolation from the moderate unlikelihood of somewhat-long words.
>>>>
>>>> Best regards,
>>>> Bruce
>>>>
>>>> Bruce Hayes
>>>> Professor and Chair
>>>> Department of Linguistics, UCLA
>>>> Los Angeles CA  90095-1543
>>>> bhayes at humnet.ucla.edu
>>>> www.linguistics.ucla/people/hayes
>>>

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