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Posts tagged "adjectives"
“Gretchen: I think it’s one of the things that distinguishes a linguistic approach to grammar from a “I’m taking this high school English class” approach to grammar because I definitely remember being taught, okay, if you wanna know if something’s an adjective, you can look it up in the dictionary, and the dictionary will tell you. This, of course, raises the very obvious question of, “Well, how did the dictionary makers know that this was an adjective? Who decided that?” Dictionaries are great. I’m not anti-dictionary. But if you’re always looking for external authorities for something that you can actually logic out for its principles, it’s unsatisfying. Whereas, being able to actually deduce, “Oh, I know this is an adjective because I’ve run it through these tests,” let’s you feel like you’re figuring something out about that world. It’s the appeal of doing a logic puzzle as opposed to being told like, “Here’s what the sudoku looks like. If you wanna know what the correct answer is to the Sudoku, you just look it up.” It’s like, well, you could actually just do the sudoku and then you could figure it out. That’s more fun than looking up the answer to the sudoku.
Lauren: Yeah. I enjoy being a part of speech detective and figuring out what a word is doing in a sentence using the linguistic evidence that I have.”
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Excerpt from Lingthusiasm episode ‘The happy fun big adjective episode’
Listen to the episode, read the full transcript, or check out more links about morphology, syntax, and parts of speech
Transcript Episode 47: The happy fun big adjective episode
This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm Episode 47: The happy fun big adjective episode. 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 47 show notes page.
[Music]
Gretchen: Welcome to Lingthusiasm, a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics! I’m Gretchen McCulloch.
Lauren: I’m Lauren Gawne. Today, we’re getting enthusiastic about adjectives. First, we now have masks to match your scarves, mugs, and notebooks in Lingthusiasm IPA, syntax, and esoteric symbol designs.
Gretchen: If you want a bit more Lingthusiasm as you go about your everyday life, that is a thing you can do. They’re available in many colours. You can go to lingthusiasm.com/merch.
Lauren: I’m interested to see whether prefer to colour coordinate their facemasks with their scarves or if contrasting colours is the way to go.
Gretchen: Stay tuned! We will report back on the Lingthusiasm fashion statement. Also, this month’s Patreon bonus episode is about doing linguistics communication on a shoestring –Bonus 42 – which means there’re 41 additional bonus episodes if you’ve run out of Lingthusiasm to listen to. There’s way more where that came from at patreon.com/lingthusiasm. It’s got a bit of bonus Lingthusiasm origin story because, spoiler, we started our ling comm projects on a shoestring as well.
Lauren: Absolutely. The ling comm on a shoestring episode came together because we’ve been talking to our wonderful linguistics communication project, LingComm, grantees. We realised that it’s the kind of information that’s useful whatever project you’re starting or if you wanna know how we got started doing linguistics communication.
Gretchen: It can probably be cross applied for communicating about other types of topics as well but, hey, we’re linguists, so we’ll call it “ling comm.”
Lauren: Talk about what we know.
[Music]
Gretchen: Lauren, I have a game for you.
Lauren: I love games.
Gretchen: I’m gonna give you a word and then you say whatever word you think of quickly after that.
Lauren: Okay.
Gretchen: Let’s start with “red.”
Lauren: Blue.
Gretchen: Big.
Lauren: Small.
Gretchen: Fast.
Lauren: Slow.
Gretchen: Loud.
Lauren: Quiet.
Gretchen: Online.
Lauren: Offline?
Gretchen: Afloat.
Lauren: “Asink”? What is the opposite of – I don’t know what the opposite of “afloat” is.
Gretchen: “On shore,” “on board,” I dunno.
Lauren: Sure.
Gretchen: I didn’t think through that one very deeply.
Lingthusiasm Episode 47: The happy fun big adjective episode
Adjectives: they’re big, they’re fun, they’re…maybe non-existent? In English, we have a fairly straightforward category of adjectives: they’re words that can get described with a comparative or a superlative, such as “bigger” or “most fun”. But when we start looking across lots of languages, we find that some languages lump adjectives in with verbs, some with nouns, and some do different things altogether.
In this episode, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch get enthusiastic about adjectives! We talk about how linguists come up with diagnostic tests to determine whether something is an adjective, other quirks about adjectives (such as why we say “big red ball” but not “red big ball”), and the galaxy-brain question of whether grammatical categories like adjectives are even valid across all languages.
Click here for a link to this episode in your podcast player of choice or read the transcript here
Announcements:
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This month’s bonus episode is about doing LingComm on a budget - plus the Lingthusiasm origin story! We got started doing linguistics communication when we were both broke grad students. We talk about the various stages we went through with launching our blogs, Superlinguo and All Things Linguistic, and of course this podcast a few years later! We give tips on how to come up with a topic, set a schedule, and promote your project, as well as the nitty-gritty details on free or low-cost ways to do things like registering a website and starting a blog, podcast, or youtube channel. Support Lingthusiasm on Patreon to get access to this and 40 other bonus episodes, and to chat with fellow lingthusiasts in the Lingthusiasm patron Discord.
Here are the links mentioned in this episode:
- Diagnostic word classes
- Adjective order (Tom Scott video)
- Lemon Iced Tea
- The bizarre syntax of “Sexiest Man Alive” (Arika Okrent)
- More than one type of adjective - the Manang language
- Lumpers vs. Splitters
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 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).
About Lingthusiasm
A podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne.
Weird and deep conversations about the hidden language patterns that you didn't realize you were already making.
New episodes (free!) the third Thursday of the month.
