This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm Episode 23: When Nothing Means Something. It’s been lightly edited for readability. Listen to the episode here or wherever you get your podcasts. Links to studies mentioned and further reading can be found on the Episode 23 show notes page.

[Music]

Lauren: Welcome to Lingthusiasm, a podcast that is enthusiastic about linguistics! I’m Lauren Gawne.

Gretchen: And I’m Gretchen McCulloch, and today we’re talking about how nothingness fits into language. But first: We’re very excited to announce the location for our live show, thanks to meeting our latest goal on Patreon, which we announced first in the bonus episode and now you get to find out here!

Lauren: So our last live show was in Gretchen’s hometown of Montreal and we decided it’s only fair that our next official show means that I get to repay the favour, and so we’re going to have it in my hometown of Melbourne.

Gretchen: I’m so excited to get to go to Australia. I have never been to Australia before.

Lauren: I’m so excited to show you around Melbourne when you come to visit.

Gretchen: I wanna see a kangaroo – maybe not in Melbourne, I hear they’re not super urban.

Lauren: That’s okay. We have zoos. You’ll get to see kangaroos.

Gretchen: Okay, okay. This is important, I’m also very excited to be going to the Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language Summer School in Canberra and the annual Australian Linguistic Society Conference in Adelaide, where I’m going to be talking about linguistics communication, doing workshops there, and if anyone else in Australia is listening to this and wants to invite me to do an event, now’s your chance!

Lauren: We will have more details about the date and location of the live show, should be sometime in November, and, hopefully, some other events that we can do while we have Gretchen in the country.

Gretchen: I’m super excited to spend a bunch of time there. I’m sure the weather will be much nicer than Montreal in November. I’ll get all the sunshine. And, yeah, looking forward to meeting a bunch of Australian linguists.

Lauren: The live show is all thanks to our amazing patrons who support us on Patreon. Our latest bonus episode for them was an inside view into the conference circuit. Gretchen and I had caught up about what we’ve been up to over the last couple of months of conferencing. That episode is available on patreon.com/lingthusiasm.

Gretchen: So you can hear about the two different emoji conferences that I went to, and the gesture conference and the International Congress of Linguists that Lauren went to, as well as 17 previous bonus episodes, which is quite a lot of bonus material, if you go to Lingthusiasm on Patreon.

[Music]

Lauren: Today we’re gonna talk about nothing! And it’s gonna be great.

Gretchen: Actually, this whole episode is just us not saying anything. The rest of it is just silence.

Lauren: I don’t think we’re actually capable of doing that. I’m just gonna put it out there.

Gretchen: This is like the John Cage 4:33 version of Lingthusiasm, where you put us both ambiently in a room, and we just like, we don’t say anything, we eventually – we just start giggling.

Lauren: No, defy science. It’s not gonna happen. And the thing is, there’s so much to say about nothing because nothing is incredibly meaningful.

Gretchen: That’s the thing, there is so much to say about nothing. We’re gonna to start with pauses.

Lauren: Yes, we are gonna start with – we’re gonna move through different kinds of meaningful nothingness in language and what they can tell us about how meaning works and how brains work, but I wanna start with pauses and their importance for conversation. And pauses are actually kind of rare.

Gretchen: How rare is rare? Like, does that mean just, like, one person talks a lot and so you can’t get a word in edgewise?

Lauren: Well, I think it’s English speakers, we have this idea that words are separated by pauses because we have spaces between words to indicate their boundary in written text, but when we speak there’s no margin between – you can’t look at a recording spectrogram and see breaks between every word. It’s all just run together in a single string.

Gretchen: Yeah, so there’s not really pauses between words. And even between when one person talks, another person talks, there’s often not that much pausing, right?

Lauren: There’s actually so little pausing in some interactional – in many interactional contexts – that it is too short for the brain to actually, really have prepared for it without doing some clever anticipation about how that person’s speech goes, and how interaction goes. So, the average time between me saying something and someone replying is, like, 200 milliseconds, which is, like, the speed of a blink.

Gretchen: That’s really not that much.

Lauren: No, it turns out that we’re just basically all constantly ready to reply to someone as soon as they have something to say.

Gretchen: And we’re constantly trying to, like, predict where the pauses are. I was reading this paper about conversation analysis and it said that even if you get up to 500 milliseconds of a pause – like if I say, “Hey, Lauren, how’s it going?” and then you wait for 500 milliseconds – which, again, is, like, half a second – if you don’t say anything in that 500 milliseconds, I’m gonna be like, “Did you understand me? Are you there?” I’m gonna be rephrasing the question like, “No, seriously, what’s up? Is there a problem?” Or, in the case that I run into in Montreal with French, if you don’t reply in that 500 milliseconds, people think you don’t speak the language and so they’ll switch languages.

Lauren: Yeah, so a lot of data that I’ve been looking at for this comes from Nick Enfield’s book, How We Talk, which I reviewed a while ago and really enjoyed, and I’m excited to get to talk about it again, because yes, like, a half a second we don’t think of as being very long but in a conversation that is ages.

Gretchen: Yeah, it’s so long, and this is the eternal bane of the language learner because you’re like, “No, no, no, I’m just taking that extra half second to figure out what you’re saying and prepare my response.” But because you can’t quite do that, that’s one of the things that trips people up, makes it hard to speak in another language, which, if you can figure out how to fill that pause with, like, the right filled pause sound, like if you say “uhh” or “euhh” or different sounds – depending on the language, what you say in pauses, sometimes that could be enough to let your brain recover but stay in the language.

Lauren: Yeah, you’re like, “Wait, wait, I’ve got something, I’m just processing, not that I’m ignoring you.” And, interestingly, if you take longer to reply, it often indicates that you’re going to say a “no.” We’re very quick to say “yes,” and in a conversation, the silence before a “no” is often longer, and it’s a way of signalling very subtly to the person you’re talking to that they’re probably not gonna get the answer they want.

Gretchen: Yeah, that’s a good point. There’s another thing that’s really neat, which is our brains are also very good at kind of faking lack of pauses even when there is one? So, when you talk to someone on Skype or on other kinds of internet video chat, Skype often has a little bit of a time delay between you, but you generally don’t really notice that. So a way you can notice that time delay if you’re talking to someone on Skype, is try counting together. If you try counting, like, “one, two, three, four, five,” in synchrony, or if you try singing a song together, you’ll discover that one person is on an apparent time delay, or you’re both on an apparent time delay to each other because you’re not actually hearing the person as instantly as you think you are.

Lauren: And we cope with the transitions. Our brains just kind of do a little mental shift.

Gretchen: Yeah, it doesn’t seem to bother us that much.

Lauren: People talk a lot about how this varies a lot between cultures, and one of the studies from Nick’s book looks at the variation in turn-taking and conversation across ten languages and finds that, sure, there is variation in the average amount of time it takes, but that all of them actually fall within, on average, that half a second, 500-millisecond, boundary, and that the variation isn’t as massive as we think it is.

Gretchen: It just feels very important because we’re very sensitive to that short amount of time.

Lauren: Yeah.

Gretchen: And you can also get kind of pseudo-pauses in written text, right?

Lauren: Well, it’s so necessary to – because we can just read text at this kind of constant blur, you have to force it to have the breaths and the space that you want to convey, that are very easy to do in spoken language, and require some extra tools in written language.

Gretchen: Yeah, I think of this especially in text chat, like if you’re talking on, you know, GChat, or WhatsApp, or iMessage, or Facebook chat, or any of the different kinds of instant chat platforms, and every time you put in a new message or a new line break, it’s kind of like adding in a pause.

Lauren: Yeah, I find it very stressful when people send whatever their contribution to the conversation is as one giant paragraph of text.

Gretchen: Oh, yeah!

Lauren: I’m very much like, “Split it all up, keep it rolling.”

Gretchen: Unless it’s, like, the first message, because then you didn’t even know they were messaging you.

Lauren: True.

Gretchen: But if you just see the “is typing” indicator for, like, five minutes, you’re like, “Oh my god, what is this person trying to say?”

Lauren: Something exciting, hopefully! I also like a good ellipsis when you want to, like – when it’s not just this, like, brief, turn-taking pause, it’s that you really want to emphasise that you’re thinking about something.

Gretchen: Yeah, that you wanna kind of link two things together and send them at the same time, but also put a pause in between them.

Lauren: Yeah.

Gretchen: So you can put the “…”

Lauren: An even more subtle, but more torturous, form of pause in chat and messager is when you have the option to show someone that you’ve read their message but you haven’t replied. I find those kind of chat apps very stressful, and it really, I mean, it’s just a reminder that even though we think of online chat as being the same as face-to-face chat and, often, we use it in that kind of immediate “I say something, you say something” way, it is still not synchronous. It’s an asynchronous form of communication. If you said something or asked me a question, and then I went away for a week, and then replied – face-to-face it is, like, impossible.

Gretchen: That’s really weird, yeah. But you can leave someone on read in chat or in text messages, and it’s like, there are aspects of it that are weird, but there are aspects of it that are maybe less weird, you know?

Lauren: And it’s mostly just very stressful or irritating if you are banking on a reply.

Gretchen: I mean, normally, it happens to me if, like, someone messaged me overnight and I check it first thing in the morning but I’m not quite awake yet, and then I kind of forget. I don’t have the energy to type anything yet. Like, you message me from Australia and it’s like, “Oh yeah, here, there’s this thing,” and then later in the day I’m like, “Wait a second. Lauren sent me a message. I should reply that.”

Lauren: And it’s always the person who started the interaction or is waiting for the reply that has more invested than the person who’s not replying.

Gretchen: Although, I don’t feel so bad because you’re always asleep anyway when I wake up so.

Lauren: That’s true. Asynchronous communications works very well when you live asynchronously.

Gretchen: That’s true. Another type of nothing and pause that I really like is when you can put a pause – a teeny, tiny, micro pause – in the middle of a word, or use it as a part of the sounds that are going to create a word.

Lauren: So this is no longer part of the kind of turn-taking conversational cut-and-thrust, this is part of the sounds that might make up the alphabet of a language.

Gretchen: Like, what if pausing is just another letter of the alphabet? And this is true in a number of languages, and it’s also true in some languages that don’t so much put it in the alphabet but still integrate into the words. So in the English word “uh-oh”, you can’t just say “uhoh.”

Lauren: You can say “uhoh,” it just means something weird and different.

Gretchen: Because that’s, like, not the same thing as “uh-oh.”

Lauren: It is not the same thing, no.

Gretchen: Right. Well, it’s not the same thing as “uh-oh” and “uhoh.” And so the pause in the middle of “uh-oh,” even if it’s a very tiny “uh-oh” pause, or you could say “uh… oh,” that could be a longer pause, but that pause is doing something that’s working on it at the word level, because “uhoh” does not feel like the same word. And so there are a bunch of different sounds that are produced by blocking the flow of air coming out of the mouth. So if you say, like, /b/ or /p/ or /t/ or /k/, those are all produced by creating that blockage with your lips or with your tongue and then letting the air puff out.

Lauren: And you can tell that it’s a stop because you can really extend that. So you could go “up…pa” or “ud…da” or “ug…ga,” and it’s really weird because we obviously don’t hold a “G” for that long when we’re saying a word. But hold it, and then you see that it’s like everything has stopped, nothing’s going forward.

Gretchen: Exactly. And so some sounds don’t do that. So if you say “ooo,” or if you say “ssss,” you can hold on to an “oooo” or an “sssss” as long as you have breath to spare.

Lauren: Yeah.

Gretchen: But for /p/ or /b/ or /k/, it’s the closure, and it’s the release of that closure, or the release of that stop, that makes the sound really happen. And if you hold a “K” for extra long like, “uk…ka” that’s just an extra period of silence.

Lauren: I didn’t realize you were making a noise then. I thought you just paused.

Gretchen: That’s the thing, right? Like, I knew that there was this blockage of air happening in my throat but you can’t hear that, ‘cause nothing’s coming out!

Lauren: Yep.

Gretchen: So one of things that we’re doing constantly and not really thinking about is creating these kind of mini blockages, but the biggest of those blockages is the one that happens in “uh-oh,” which is known as a glottal stop because it’s produced with the glottis or the voice box, the vocal cords. And so rather than pause the airflow at your lips or at your tongue, where maybe you can still kind of squeak a little bit of air by, or you can still do other stuff with your mouth to kind of control the air as it’s coming out, if you block off the flow of air in your throat, you can’t do anything else with your vocal cords, you can’t do anything else with your nose, you can’t do anything else with your tongue at the same time. You’re really just kind of blocking off air in its purest form.

Lauren: Nothing is happening, like, nothing is escaping. And if you really want to see what that looks like, thankfully we don’t have to cut people open anymore, we have some really great videos in the show notes that show people saying these sounds in an MRI machine. It’s pretty amazing. If you click on the little glottal stop, yeah, it’s pretty spectacular.

Gretchen: And English uses this sound in “uh-oh” – and “uh-oh” is kind of one of those things that’s, like, dubiously a word. It’s kind of a word, but it’s also kind of just one of those sounds that you make.

Lauren: It’s not a sound in our alphabet. We don’t have, like, A-B-C- […] -E-F-G…

Gretchen: But there are languages that have this sound, the glottal stop, as just a regular sound in their alphabet. One of them is Hawaiian. So if you have the name Hawaii, but in Hawaiian it’s pronounced Hawai'i, and the apostrophe that’s written in between the two “I’s” is actually indicating that pause. So: /həwaɪʔi/. there’s two “[i]” sounds there, and there’s a pause in between them. And similarly, one of the islands of Hawaii is O'ahu: /oʔahu/, not /oʊahu/, which would be a different word.

Lauren: I have no idea – so, we should say the glottal stop is part of the International Phonetic Alphabet, because the International Phonetic Alphabet represents every sound that could be in a language, and the symbol for the glottal stop [Ed. note: ʔ], it looks a lot like our logo! We really like glottal stops.

Gretchen: Oh, hey, it does! I wonder where we got that idea! So it looks like a question mark without the dot, which is also our logo, because we were trying to pick distinctive symbols. I think we talked about it in one of the first episodes, we talked about where the logo was coming from.

Lauren: Probably, but it makes me realise I actually have no idea where the glottal stop symbol comes from.

Gretchen: Well, so, the glottal stop as a sound also has this kind of interestingly entangled history with the history of our own alphabet that we use in English. So the English alphabet comes from the Romans, which comes from the Greeks, but before the Greeks, it comes from the Phoenicians –

Lauren: Thanks, Phoenicians.

Gretchen: Thanks, Phoenicians! You had some great ships and you had some great alphabet. And what’s cool about Phoenician is Phoenician was a Semitic language. It’s not spoken anymore, but modern-day Semitic languages include Arabic and Hebrew, and Semitic languages – and Phoenician is no exception – for them, consonants are super important, and they don’t really care that much about vowels. And so most of the Semitic languages don’t bother writing vowels, or they only write some of the vowels, so modern-day Arabic and Hebrew do this, but also ancient Phoenician did this as well. So Phoenician had this letter at the very beginning of the Phoenician alphabet, which was derived from an Egyptian hieroglyph which depicted an ox’s head?

Lauren: Mm-hmm.

Gretchen: Which was known as 'alep, or aleph. And this sound made the sound at the beginning of the word for “ox’s head” –

Lauren: /a/?

Gretchen: – which was /ʔalɛf/. No, no, no, it’s not /a/, it’s the glottal stop, that bit of silence.

Lauren: See, because it’s not a part of my language’s sound system, I’m very bad at perceiving it.

Gretchen: And it’s really hard to hear at the beginning of a word because, of course, at the beginning of the word, what precedes a word is often just silence, and it’s really hard to hear the difference between silence and a glottal stop that’s intended.

Lauren: I’m gonna blame my own phonemic limitations rather than the quality of our video chat.

Gretchen: I think you can blame your brain for this one, because even when I try to produce it I’m like, “I’m just not doing anything,” but at the beginning of this /ʔalɛf/ was this glottal stop, and Phoenician used this letter aleph for the glottal stop.

Lauren: Mmm!

Gretchen: And then, when the Phoenician alphabet was borrowed into Greek, they were like, “Well, A of all, we don’t have a glottal stop in our language, and B of all, we do have all these vowels and they’re pretty important for us.”

Lauren: I’m really feeling the Greeks right now, like, yeah, great.

Gretchen: Yeah. They might have been like you, Lauren, and they might have been like, “I can’t even hear this sound, but do you know what I can hear? It’s this other sound, this /a/ sound, let’s just use this letter to write this /a/ sound that we have. But what’s actually very interesting is that at a later period, Arabic underwent the same process where they started writing – so modern-day Arabic alif is actually used for the /a/ sound, and there’s just some kind of, like, weird historical writing quirk relics that make it sometimes also stand for this glottal stop sound, and modern-day Arabic uses a different symbol, which is known as hamza – it looks kind of like a little "C” with an extra line on the bottom, but it’s a tiny “C” – and that’s used for the real glottal stop when you want to make sure that’s what you’re talking about. So, if you have a word like /miʔa/, “hundred” in Arabic, that pause in the middle of /miʔa/, that’s your glottal stop, and it’s written with this hamza instead. And Lauren, to come back to your question about where the IPA symbol comes from, which looks like this dotless question mark, that kind of “C” shape with the extra line is where the creators of the International Phonetic Alphabet got the idea to make some sort of C-ish type shape for the glottal stop in the IPA.

Lauren: Huh, I kind of see it now. It’s really nifty.

Gretchen: So that’s really neat. So there’s this hidden connection between IPA, and between Arabic, and the modern English alphabet, they kind of go around in a circle and they all influence each other.

Lauren: So far, we’ve talked about nothingness that is still a sound. It’s the absence of sound, nothingness, but now we are moving into pure nothingness. We’re not talking about sounds. We’re talking about an absence of sound, but that still has a meaning behind it.

Gretchen: This is getting really metaphysical.

Lauren: It is. But now we’re gonna go back and I’m gonna give you an English grammar test. Are you ready?

Gretchen: Okay, okay.

Lauren: So if I say the word “cats,” can you break the word “cats” or “dogs” down into meaningful units?

Gretchen: Okay. So you have the “cat” unit, which refers to the animal, and you have the /s/ unit, which refers to there being more than one of them.

Lauren: Okay. Exactly what I wanted to hear. Great work.

Gretchen: Yay!

Lauren: So we can break words down into – you passed the English grammar test. It was very gruelling. So we can break words down into parts, and those parts have meaning. You don’t see /s/ floating around by itself, it always has to hang out with a noun to make more than one of that noun, but it has its meaning. Now, if I gave you the word “cat” or “dog,” can you divide that down into meaningful parts?

Gretchen: I mean, there’s just the one. It still means the animal.

Lauren: Okay. So we can’t divide that down anymore. It would be like splitting an atom, you’d be left with little atomic parts that don’t have any meaning on their own.

Gretchen: I mean, like, /k/ and /æ/ and /t/, but those are sounds and by themselves they don’t do anything.

Lauren: Yeah. So if I said, “The cat on the wall,” and this sounds like a trick question, but how many are there?

Gretchen: On the wall? There’s one cat on the wall?

Lauren: Yeah. And if I said, “The cats on the wall,” how many are there?

Gretchen: There’s more than one?

Lauren: Okay. So the –

Gretchen: How are these cats getting on the wall?

Lauren: They’re very agile cats, and it’s a sunny wall.

Gretchen: Oh, that kind of wall, like an outdoor wall, not an indoor, inside wall.

Lauren: Yeah. We’ll have to have talk about the semantic range of “wall” after this episode.

Gretchen: I had a very interesting mental picture.

Lauren: But back to the important bit, which is the bits of the word, so /s/ means more than one. You know, though, if I don’t use a /s/, that I’m talking about one cat.

Gretchen: Right. And there’s nothing that – you’re not saying, “The one cat on the wall,” or “One cat on the wall,” there’s nothing there that’s telling you there’s only one of them. It’s just the fact that I –

Lauren: “The cat” or “the cats.”

Gretchen: It’s the fact that I know that /s/ is an option, and you decided not to use that option.

Lauren: Yes, and I have to use that option. It’s not like it’s optional if I’m talking about – I can’t say “the seven cat.” That sounds silly.

Gretchen: Right.

Lauren: So “S” –

Gretchen: Or “The one cats”

Lauren: I mean, yeah, you can’t use that without being ungrammatical in English. And so /s/ has meaning, but the absence of it, the absence of the plural, also has meaning for English speakers.

Gretchen: Right. And it has potentially different kinds of meaning depending on which kind of word has that absence.

Lauren: Yeah. So in terms of the plurals, it means it’s not plural, it just means singular.

Gretchen: But if I say something like, “I like the cat,” versus, “I liked the cat,” then now, you have a difference between –

Lauren: Oh, no! What did the cat do? I hope it didn’t have a problem with the wall.

Gretchen: It destroyed my wall and I have a grudge! So now I’ve changed “like” and “liked,” and so I’ve got this contrast between “like” plus the /t/ sound, which is spelled “e-d” but it’s only pronounced /t/, and “like” without anything, and now the absence of anything means that it’s present, not that it’s singular.

Lauren: Yeah, so it’s not that the absence always means exactly the same thing everywhere in the way that /s/ doesn’t. You know, “She eats” doesn’t refer to the fact that it’s a single person necessarily, it refers to the fact that it’s a single third person present verb so, just in the way that, like, /s/ –

Gretchen: Or, “The cat’s pyjamas” can be a singular cat possessing the pyjamas.

Lauren: Yeah, it could be possessive /s/. So this nothingness doesn’t have to mean the same thing everywhere depending on the thing it’s contrasting with, and we know that this is a particularly important feature of English because it’s not true for all languages. So one language that I learnt briefly in high school is Indonesian, and Indonesian is known – especially in kind of everyday, informal language – for not marking plurals at all, which is a thing that sounds strange to English speakers, but English does lots of things that sounds strange to grammars of other languages, and so –

Gretchen: I think, yeah, other languages don’t mark plurals as well. I can’t think of any off the top of my head but I’m sure there are some.

Lauren: Ah, there’s plenty that don’t mark plurals. It’s just that when something is obligatory in your language it’s very hard to imagine other languages not paying it the same attention, and so in Indonesian there’s no zero absence that is important for contrasting the singular, because the plural is not a thing that it contrasts with.

Gretchen: There are a few words in English where this happens, so if you have, like, “one deer” or “two deer”, or, like, “one sheep” and “two sheep,” now, “sheep” and “deer” don’t have the absence meaning something because for those particular words there’s no difference between the singular and the plural.

Lauren: No, and we get by. I mean, I don’t personally talk about sheep a lot in my day-to-day life.

Gretchen: But you could. That just means you’re not an insomniac because you’re not counting sheep.

Lauren: Yeah, and so what counts as needing this kind of meaningful nothingness in one language may not necessarily need it in another language. And this is so prevalent across languages, this idea that not marking something has a meaning, that it’s called a “zero morph” and it actually has its own symbol.

Gretchen: So it’s the “zero morpheme” or the “null morpheme,” and it gets a fancy symbol.

Lauren: It’s the same symbol, if you’re a maths person, as the empty set symbol or, if you’re a speaker of a Scandinavian language, it’s like an O with a line through it. [Ed. note: ∅]

Gretchen: Yeah, so it’s that simple with the line through it, like, the extra-clarifying zero or empty set or null. So one thing where the null morpheme really comes in handy is if you have something where in one language a particular set of meaning corresponds to a morpheme that’s right there, so if you had a language where the singular got one marker and the plural got another marker and they are both very visible or audible and then you wanted to translate that, or produce a version of it that was parallel in two different languages, you could say, “Well, this thing that is null in English actually corresponds to this particular morpheme in another language.”

Lauren: It’s very possible in English that we could have had an extra bit of a word that was like, “catten” versus “cats” and “-en” overtly marked a singular.

Gretchen: Yeah, absolutely, we could totally have done that, and especially, if you get languages where you have other kinds of markers like gender markers or case markers on your nouns, then sometimes you have a very broad system of – if you have something, like, in Latin if you have “cattus” versus “catti,” so “cattus” is a singular cat, a nominative singular cat, and “catti” is a nominative plural cat, and so there your “-us” and your “-i” are both – one’s indicating singular and the other one’s indicating plural. Although, I’ll have to note that’s the, that’s the late Latin, Vulgar Latin, for cat and the older, classical Latin was “felis,” but that doesn’t really matter at this point.

Lauren: I was really interested in, like, whether this was some kind of new idea, because the the null set symbol has only been around since, like, the 1930s, so I had a look at how long linguists have been talking about this kind of zero for. Have a guess, Gretchen.

Gretchen: Wow, I have no idea! I mean, it seems like something that’s definitely always been part of my linguistics education that you have null morphemes, so it’s definitely not in the past decade or two!

Lauren: Okay.

Gretchen: So let’s, I don’t know, let’s say, like, the '60s? A lot of stuff happened in linguistics in the '60s.

Lauren: Well, you’re not 2,500 years old, so you probably don’t remember when Panini started using it in his grammar of Sanskrit.

Gretchen: You led me on by saying this was from the 1930s.

Lauren: I did lead you on, it was very sneaky of me. But we haven’t talked about Panini much on the show, but he’s worth giving a shoutout to because he wrote the first grammar of Sanskrit, like, over 2000 years ago, and it’s kind of been something that grammarians have constantly come back to as a model for how to analyse language.

Gretchen: Is it the oldest grammar ever or just, like, one of the oldest grammars that we know about ever?

Lauren: It’s the oldest grammar that we know about, you know, proper grammatical tradition.

Gretchen: So shout-out to Panini for doing this, and he invented the null morpheme? What did he say about them?

Lauren: He came up with the idea in his paradigm of Sanskrit verbs that the absence of a particular marking had a meaning.

Gretchen: Good job, Panini.

Lauren: Good work him!

Gretchen: And the last case that I find super exciting about where nothing can mean something is that – this is a case of a nothing that doesn’t sound like anything, but it influences how other things around it sound.

Lauren: Oh, so we’re no longer even talking about – we’re talking about the way it affects other things. Excellent.

Gretchen: But we know it’s there because it affects the other things around it. So, Lauren, I need a book title for an example sentence for you. What’s a book you like?

Lauren: Okay. One of my favourite, like, language-y books that I like to read, I really like Ella Minnow Pea.

Gretchen: Oh my god, that’s so good! I love that book. Okay, we’re gonna use Ella Minnow Pea. It’s “Ella Minnow Pea,” like the girl’s name, and the fish, and the vegetable. It’s a great book about language. You guys should totally read it. I think we’ve both written reviews about it, actually.

Lauren: I’m very fond of it. It’s a kid’s book, but it’s compelling.

Gretchen: It’s like a young adult book. It’s got chapters. So here’s an example sentence, if I say, “I want to read Ella Minnow Pea.”

Lauren: You are correct.

Gretchen: Perfectly good sentence. I can also say, “I wanna read Ella Minnow Pea,” so I can say “want to” or “wanna,” both of those are totally reasonable sounding sentences. I could also say, “I want all of our listeners to read Ella Minnow Pea.”

Lauren: Agree.

Gretchen: Still a good sentence. And then I could ask you, Lauren, “Who do you want to read Ella Minnow Pea?”

Lauren: Everybody!

Gretchen: Everybody! But then, I could ask you, “Who do you wanna read Ella Minnow Pea?”

Lauren: Hang on. Wait, wait, wait, what? “Who do I wanna…”

Gretchen: “Who do you wanna read Ella Minnow Pea?”

Lauren: That sentence doesn’t – it’s missing something.

Gretchen: It’s weird, right?

Lauren: It makes it sound like you’re asking Ella Minnow Pea who it wants to read, but it’s a book, it can’t read anything. Gretchen?

Gretchen: Like, “Who do you wanna read, Ella? Ella, who do you wanna read?” Right? It doesn’t make any sense, and it’s really weird because we think of “want to” and “wanna” as meaning the exact same thing, right? Like, “I wanna read,” “I want to read,” those are the same thing, just one’s more informal than the other.

Lauren: I would say there is, there is no difference between them.

Gretchen: It just seems like it’s only a formality difference, that’s it, right? But then, when you get this other sentence, you’re like, “Wait a second. It doesn’t work.” So let’s break down what’s in that sentence again. So we have the sentence, “Who do you want to read Ella Minnow Pea?” And the answer to that is, “I want our listeners to read Ella Minnow Pea." 

So there’s something in the statement version of that, there’s something in between the "want” and the “to,” and that’s the “our listeners.” Whereas, in “I want to read Ella Minnow Pea,” there’s nothing in between there. You might be able to say, “I want me to read Ella Minnow Pea,” but that’s not really an English sentence. So you could also ask the sentence as, “You want who to read Ella Minnow Pea?” And again, there’s the “who.”

Lauren: Yes, I mean, it sounds weird.

Gretchen: I mean, it relies on a certain pragmatic context –

Lauren: But I can answer it.

Gretchen: It relies on a certain pragmatic context. You could say, “You want who to read Ella Minnow Pea?” That’s okay.

Lauren: Yeah, when I unveil my plan for everybody to read it.

Gretchen: You unveil your plan for world domination via literature. So there’s this sense that there is something that logically belongs in between the “want” and the “to” in that second set of sentences and not in the first set, and that something could be “listeners,” could be “who,” could be “you,” particularly Lauren, like, “I want Lauren to read Ella Minnow Pea.”

Lauren: But there’s nothing there, Gretchen.

Gretchen: There’s a sense that there’s a word there, and yet clearly there’s not a word there because the “who” is actually at the beginning of the sentence. So there’s nothing there, but that nothing, whatever that nothing is that’s there, is preventing the “want” and the “to” from smooshing into each other.

Lauren: Wow.

Gretchen: It’s really weird.

Lauren: This is most meaningfully nothing-y nothing that we’ve got.

Gretchen: Right? And so, you can do this in all sorts of sentences. It generally requires a “wanna,” but you can say something like, “Who will I want to see?” “Who will I wanna see?” These are fine. “Who will I want to go to the store?” “Who will I wanna go to the store?” No.

Lauren: You just changed sentences halfway through. “Who will I – Wanna go to the store?”

Gretchen: Well, that’s fine.

Gretchen: It’s a restart, but, “Who will I wanna go to the store?” It’s just like, “Wait, it crashed. What happened? What did you do to me?” And that’s a piece of evidence, and some theories of linguistics call this piece of nothing that’s in between “want” and “to,” call it a “trace,” like the “who,” which you could put there, you could say, “You want who to read?” But now you have “who” at the beginning, “Who do you want to read?” The “who” that’s at the beginning of the sentence left its trace in between “want” and “to,” and that’s the thing that’s preventing “want” and “to” from glomming into each other, and this is such a weird and interesting phenomenon that there are actually a couple different videos about this, so we can link to those as well if you want to see it demonstrated in front of you, if you want the visual, and I think the visual does help.

Lauren: So we’ve gone from nothing and the absence of something between people speaking, we’ve gone to the absence of sound as a sound, we’ve gone to the absence of a part of a word as a meaningful part of a word, and we’ve ended up with the absence of something in a sentence appearing to make a sentence have a different meaning.

Gretchen: Yeah, there’s all these things that nothing really does mean something, as long as you control the context and the something very, very carefully.

[Music]

Gretchen: For more Lingthusiasm and links to everything mentioned in this episode, go to lingthusiasm.com. You can listen to us on Apple Podcasts, iTunes, Google Podcasts or Google Play Music, SoundCloud, or wherever else you get your podcasts, and you can follow @Lingthusiasm on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Tumblr. You can get IPA scarves and other Lingthusiasm merch at lingthusiasm.com/merch. I can be found as @GretchenAMcC on Twitter. My blog is AllThingsLinguistic.com.

Lauren: I tweet and blog as Superlinguo. To listen to bonus episodes, ask us your linguistic questions, and help keep the show ad-free, go to patreon.com/lingthusiasm, or follow the links from our website. Recent bonus topics include: forensic linguistics, navigating linguistics grad school, homonyms, and an inside view of gesture and emoji conferences. And you can help us pick the next topic by becoming a patron. If you can’t afford to pledge, that’s also okay. We really appreciate it if you could rate us or leave a review on iTunes, or recommend Lingthusiasm to anyone who needs a little more linguistics in their life.

Gretchen: Lingthusiasm is created and produced by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our audio producer is Claire Gawne, our editorial producers are Emily Gref and A.E. Prévost, and our production assistants are Celine and Fabianne, and our music is by The Triangles.

Lauren: Stay Lingthusiastic!

[Music]

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