This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm Episode 22: This, that and the other thing - determiners. 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 22 shownotes page.

[Music]

Gretchen: Welcome to Lingthusiasm, a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics! I’m Gretchen McCulloch.

Lauren: And I’m Lauren Gawne, and today we’re talking about this, that, and the other thing! The other thing of course being determiners. But first: We met our recent Patreon goal to do a live show!

Gretchen: Yay, live show! I’m excited! We will have more news for you about where and when that live show is gonna be, but stay tuned!

Lauren: Thanks to everyone who helped us meet this goal, all of our fabulous patrons who make these main episodes happen ad-free and available for everyone, and who, of course, as a thank you from us, get a bonus episode every month as well!

Gretchen: And if you’re a patron, you’ll also have seen the advance announcement that since we also met our art goal a while back –

Lauren: Yay, art goal!

Gretchen: – we now have preview art up on Patreon which you can see, a sample sketch, and we’re announcing here that the theme for this art is space babies!

Lauren: Space babies! We are so excited. Space babies have been with us since Episode 1, where we talked about what would happen on the International Space Station, given that they speak both Russian and English as their daily languages, if we sent a whole bunch of babies to space to grow up.

Gretchen: Yes, if all the astronauts and cosmonauts started having babies together, what would the babies speak? So we have an international array of cute babies floating in space, very unethically, we are not sending any actual babies to space, but they’re very cute when they’re cartoon versions!

Lauren: We just couldn’t get the ethics.

Gretchen: To be honest, we didn’t try to get the ethics, we knew we couldn’t.

Lauren: We’ve talked about space babies in a couple of other episodes, and of course we always love to chat about just what great language learners babies are, so we’re very happy to have some cute little mascots for the show. And we’ll be launching merch for those very soon!

Gretchen: And this has been one of our most popular quotes with you, the listeners, all the way through, so you will get to wear, or have stickers of, small, cute babies very soon! And you can see this preview and listen to two new bonus episodes – one about forensic linguistics, and another about homonyms – by becoming a patron.

[Music]

Lauren: Okay, Gretchen, it’s time to determine who knows the most determiners. Are you ready? This is not a competition, but, you know, I love framing things as a competition.

Gretchen: It’s a competition! It’s on! Okay. I’m gonna start with “the.”

Lauren: Oh, damn, you chose the easy one! I’m gonna go with “a.”

Keep reading

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).