Lingthusiasm Episode 22: This, that and the other thing - determiners

When linguists think about complicated words, we don’t think about rare, two-dollar words like “defenestration”. Instead, we think about the kinds of words that you use all the time without even thinking about it, like “the”. You might not already know that defenestration refers to throwing something out of a window, but once you find out, it’s easy to explain. But what does “the” mean? And, for that matter, what kind of a word even is “the”? 

If you think back to when you learned about nouns and verbs, you might have been told that “the” was an article. But this brings us to a circular question, which is, what exactly is an article, other than “that thing that ‘the’ is”? 

In this episode of Lingthusiasm, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch get enthusiastic about a bigger-picture answer to the question of how “the” works, one that joins together a bunch of words that might not seem related at first glance, including the, that, each, my, and five. Welcome to one of our favourite word classes: the determiner! 

Determiners are probably the most underrated word class. We use them all the time, and linguists have been talking about them by this name as a unified category for nearly a full century, and yet they’re still rarely discussed outside linguistics. That’s a shame, because determiners are also a really interesting way that languages differ from each other.  

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

Announcements:

This month’s bonus episode on Patreon is about homonyms, homophones and homographs. We discuss how they come to be, why English has so many, and how they can make for some fun sentences in different languages.

We also reached our live show goal on the Patreon! We had such a great time at our mini liveshow in Montreal last year, and we’re excited to get the two of us in the same place to do a full liveshow this time! (Which will, of course, be recorded for patreons in the rest of the world.) You can be the first to know more about the liveshow when we announce it (and see a sneak peek of the concept art for the Art Goal, up now!) by supporting Lingthusiasm on Patreon at any level.  

Here are the links mentioned in this episode:

• Live show Patreon goal met
• English determiners (including poor lost ‘yon’) (Wikipedia)
• Demonstratives across languages, and proximity distinctions (Wikipedia)
  
• And Then There Were N-One by Sarah Pinsker
• Englicious on nouns, adjectives & determiners
  
• Anarthrous
• Etymology of ‘the’ (Etymonline)
• Etymology of ‘a’ (Etymonline)
  
• Definite (’the’( & demonstrative (‘this’) relationship (WALS)
• Indefinite (’a’) and ‘one’ relationship (WALS)
  
• A haiku about determiners
  

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.

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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 editorial producers are Emily Gref and A.E. Prévost, our production assistants are Celine Yoon & Fabianne Anderberg, 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).