Carview!

CARVIEW

MOTORHOMES

Select Language

HTTP/2 200 server: nginx date: Sat, 17 Jan 2026 01:44:32 GMT content-type: text/html; charset=utf-8 vary: Accept-Encoding x-rid: afc603d9ee65d620ca3e9e3c237b2cfd x-xss-protection: 1; mode=block x-content-type-options: nosniff strict-transport-security: max-age=15552001 x-tumblr-user: lingthusiasm x-robots-tag: noindex x-tumblr-pixel-0: https://px.srvcs.tumblr.com/impixu?T=1768614272&J=eyJ0eXBlIjoidXJsIiwidXJsIjoiaHR0cDovL2xpbmd0aHVzaWFzbS5jb20vdGFnZ2VkL0NHRUwiLCJyZXF0eXBlIjowLCJyb3V0ZSI6Ii90YWdnZWQvOnRhZyJ9&U=PJDLFEDECE&K=4548fde1cd18cecadbfc5dbaa539da5cc6ffda71fffcc241cfb6f194f72104fc--https://px.srvcs.tumblr.com/impixu?T=1768614272&J=eyJ0eXBlIjoicG9zdCIsInVybCI6Imh0dHA6Ly9saW5ndGh1c2lhc20uY29tL3RhZ2dlZC9DR0VMIiwicmVxdHlwZSI6MCwicm91dGUiOiIvdGFnZ2VkLzp0YWciLCJwb3N0cyI6W3sicG9zdGlkIjoiNjYyNTM1NTYyNTA4NTE3Mzc2IiwiYmxv x-tumblr-pixel-1: Z2lkIjozMDI0NTU2NjksInNvdXJjZSI6MzN9LHsicG9zdGlkIjoiMTc0OTUxMzY5ODAxIiwiYmxvZ2lkIjozMDI0NTU2NjksInNvdXJjZSI6MzN9XX0=&U=DCDFPHDCEA&K=41d01c50498a9f2fe4bf87aa38baf63d61709c87d27089f8770837d64d75a796 x-tumblr-pixel: 2 link: ; rel=icon x-ua-compatible: IE=Edge,chrome=1 x-ua-device: desktop vary: X-UA-Device, Accept x-nc: MISS content-encoding: gzip Lingthusiasm

Posts tagged "CGEL"

Lingthusiasm Episode 60: That’s the kind of episode it’s – clitics

Here’s a completely normal and unremarkable sentence. Let’s imagine we have two different coloured pens, and we’re going to circle the words in red and the affixes, that’s prefixes and suffixes, in blue.

“Later today, I’ll know if I hafta get some prizes for Helen of Troy’s competition, or if it isn’t necessary.”

Some of these are pretty straightforward. “Some”? Word. The -s on “prizes”? Affix. But some of them, “I’ll”, “hafta”, “Helen of Troy’s”, “isn’t”….hmmm.

In this episode, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch get enthusiastic about a small bit of language that’s sort of a halfway point between a standalone word and a fully glommed-on affix: the clitic! We talk about why sentences like “That’s the kind of linguist I’m” feel so strange and how on the one hand clitics are a sign of increased efficiency in terms of saying more common words more quickly, but on the other hand they kind of add complication because there are some contexts where the full forms of the words would be fine and yet the clitic doesn’t work, giving you one more thing to keep track of. We also talk about clitics and reduced forms of words in Yolmo, Old English, and Dutch, and how clitic pronouns might be evolving into affixes in French and Spanish.

Click here for a link to this episode in your podcast player of choice or read the transcript here.

Announcements:
We’re excited to announce a special offer that we’re running on Patreon that brings you fun things in the mail! Join the Ling-phabet tier or higher by November 3, 2021 (anywhere on earth) and get a sticker pack of FOUR stickers:

Two round “Schwa never stressed” stickers (one floral, one geometric)
One classic square Lingthusiasm logo sticker
One BECAUSE INTERNET bookplate sticker signed by Gretchen, for you to stick inside your copy or anywhere else you like

Plus, if we reach a total of 1400 patrons at any level before November 3, then the sticker pack will also include:

Two mini Lingthusiasm green cutout stickers, one of which is called “bouba” and the other “kiki” — which is which? That’s an experiment you get to run on your friends when you stick them on your phone case, water bottle, laptop, etc.

This special offer is part of the Ling-phabet tier, which also has the ordinary perk of letting patrons sponsor an IPA symbol or other special character and be recognized on the Lingthusiasm website on our “Supporter Wall of Fame” page. You can get your symbol through our ~*~super scientific~*~ Which IPA Character Are You Quiz, or just tell us what your favourite character or other Unicode symbol is. Then you get an image with your name and favourite symbol on it (see samples here!) recognizing you as a supporter, which you can share on social media/print off and use as a bookmark/gaze at in warm satisfaction/etc. Plus, after 3 months at this tier, you get its regular “Lingthusiast” sticker in the mail, so that could be a total of 5 (or 7) stickers and 2 joyous mail occasions for you!

(Patrons at the Phil-ling-thropist tier will get two sticker packs — an extra one to share with a friend or to make sure your next laptop is still sufficiently lingthusiastic — plus the IPA Wall of Fame tile. Patrons at this level also receive a “Lingthusiast” mug after three months at this tier instead of the three month sticker.)

We’re still incredibly appreciative of all levels of support for our completely independent linguistics podcast! Regardless of what tier you’re at, you’ll help contribute to the 1400 patron stretch goal (and any new Phi-ling-thropists will let us reduce this goal by 10 patrons each!). Existing patrons at any of the relevant tiers will still receive sticker packs, and we’ll be in touch to confirm addresses closer to the shipping date.

The bonus episodes will continue to be available at the Ling-thusist tier and above the way they always have, so definitely don’t feel like you have to go for this special offer if you can’t spare the cash, but if you can and you’d like to help cross-subsidize Lingthusiasm for the many people learning about linguistics for free from our main episodes, then we’ve got these new special perks to make it even sweeter!

In this month’s bonus episode, we talk with Emily Gref, a linguist who’s been working at a new language museum called Planet Word since 2018, first on creating content for the museum and, now that it’s open, on analyzing how visitors interact with the exhibits. We talk about what’s in Planet Word (including a library room with secret passage!), Emily’s career journey from academia to publishing to the museum world, and Emily’s passionate defence of pigeons.

Join us on Patreon to listen to this and 53 other bonus episodes. You’ll also get access to the Lingthusiasm Discord server where you can discuss your favourite linguistically interesting fiction with other language nerds!

Here are links mentioned in this episode:

You can listen to this episode via Lingthusiasm.com, Soundcloud, RSS, Apple Podcasts/iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also download an mp3 via the Soundcloud page for offline listening.

To receive an email whenever a new episode drops, sign up for the Lingthusiasm mailing list.

You can help keep Lingthusiasm ad-free, get access to bonus content, and more perks by supporting us on Patreon.

Lingthusiasm is on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Tumblr. Email us at contact [at] lingthusiasm [dot] com

Gretchen is on Twitter as @GretchenAMcC and blogs at All Things Linguistic.

Lauren is on Twitter as @superlinguo and blogs at Superlinguo.

Lingthusiasm is created by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our senior producer is Claire Gawne, our production editor is Sarah Dopierala, our production manager is Liz McCullough, and our music is ‘Ancient City’ by The Triangles.

This episode of Lingthusiasm is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license (CC 4.0 BY-NC-SA).

“

Lauren: We’re gonna talk you through some of the highlights of what the Cambridge Grammar of English Language (CGEL) talks about with prepositions, but I think the important thing to take away from this is actually there are a couple of really basic, easy facts to understand about different categories of speech, because this is a category of the language, but actually grammar is this incredibly fuzzy thing at the edges – in the way sandwiches are semantically not always that easy, or birds are not always that easy to kind of categorise.

Gretchen: Yeah, you think sandwiches are hard to describe? They’ve got nothing on parts of speech. This is the fun part though. I think the way a lot of us encounter grammar the first time is in language textbooks. Like, okay, here’s a list of all the prepositions in Spanish, you should memorise them. Or in English classes, where it’s like, underline the prepositions in the sentence. And it seems like there’s these very clear answers because they selectively choose for you the sentences that have very clear answers. Whereas the version of grammar that something like CGEL gives us is this kind of scientific diagnostic grammar that says, “Well, if we’ve got this set of criteria for what a preposition should be and we apply this to this edge case, we end up with an answer for whether this particular word that’s of dubious status is actually a preposition, or is actually an adverb, or is actually a verb, or something else.” And so if you like the kinds of arguments about what is a sandwich, this is actually this very similar type of argument, except it’s about what is a preposition.

Lauren: Yeah, it’s so much fun.

Gretchen: And like how you end up with a scientific definition that says, okay, a robin is a canonical bird, and a bat doesn’t go within the bird category, but a penguin does, even though a bat flies and a penguin doesn’t, because we’ve got this set of definitions. You end up with this definition of a preposition that sometimes leads us in places that traditional grammars that aren’t as experimentally based wouldn’t have led us. And so the traditional grammar definition of a preposition is it’s a word that goes before a noun or a pronoun.

Lauren: Mm-hmm. That’s where the “pre-” comes from, they’re in pre- position.

Gretchen: Yeah. So this is wrong on both counts. And this is what CGEL points out. First of all, like, lots of stuff goes before nouns or pronouns! This is a wholly insufficient definition!

Lauren: Yeah.

Gretchen: So if you have a noun like kangaroo, you can say “the kangaroo.” That doesn’t make “the” a preposition just because it can go before kangaroo.

Lauren: You say “the big kangaroo” and “big” is not suddenly a preposition.

Gretchen: Or you can be like, “I see kangaroos,” and it doesn’t mean “see” is a preposition. So this is just a completely, completely insufficient definition. And the other problem is, is stuff that comes after prepositions isn’t just nouns or pronouns, so it fails on both counts. And this is something that traditional grammars kind of recognise but just kind of don’t really talk about that much. So, you can actually put a preposition in front of a whole noun phrase. So you have, like, “in the house,” not just like, “in house.” Fine. You can have adjectives – so if you say something like, “They took me for dead,” “dead” there is an adjective, but “for” is still a preposition. It can go before adverbs like “until recently.” So “recently” is an adverb and “until” is still a preposition. And in fact it can even go before other prepositions. So if you have something like “from behind the curtain,” “behind the curtain” is already a prepositional phrase and then you have “from” in front of the whole thing.

Lauren: And this is why CGEL classifies certain things as prepositions that other grammars might call subordinating conjunctions. Because if you can say “since childhood” or “until noon”, which are clearly prepositions that go before nouns, it’s not so weird to say that “since I was young” or “until you arrive” are just a kind of preposition that goes before a whole phrase.

”

—

Excerpt from Episode 14 of Lingthusiasm: Getting into, up for, and down with prepositions (edited).

Listen to the episode, read the full transcript, or check out more links about prepositions.

Talking about sandwiches and birds is in reference to our 9th bonus episode Is X a sandwich? Solving the word-meaning argument once and for all.

Original Source | Taken Source

Posts tagged "CGEL"

Lingthusiasm Episode 60: That’s the kind of episode it’s – clitics

About Lingthusiasm