This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm episode ‘When language become-s(3SG) linguistic example-s(PL). 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 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 the data people use to do linguistics. But first, if you wish there were more Lingthusiasm episodes to listen to, or you just wanna help us keep making the show, we have over 100 bonus episodes available for you to listen to on Patreon. If you’re not sure about committing to a monthly subscription, you can now sign up for a free trial and start listening to bonus episodes for free right away.

Gretchen: Our most recent bonus episode was a whole collection of extra, great material from interviews we’ve done over the past year that was too good not to share. You can hear more from Adam Aleksic about how the differences between platforms shape how slang evolves on them, and from Miguel Sánchez Ibáñez about Spanish internet memes.

Lauren: We have some bonus linguistics advice questions that we answer in this episode as well. For this and over 100 other bonus episodes, go to patreon.com/lingthusiasm.

[Music]

Gretchen: Lauren, what is linguistic data? I’m speaking a language right now. Does that mean I’m linguistic data right now?

Lauren: Absolutely. In fact, we have used recordings of this show with Bethany Gardner to make vowel plots of the two of us. Extremely yes.

Gretchen: That is true. Maybe this episode someday will be part of another analysis. This is one of the things that I find so exciting about linguistics. There’s always language to analyse. There’s language going on right inside my head that I could analyse at any time.

Lauren: Indeed. Even with a recording of a conversation, there’re so many different things that you could do with the same single recording. You could look at (as we’ve done) the way both of us pronounce different words. You could also look at the choices of words that we make, or the way our sentences are structured, or the way we do back and forth. Language is so many different things, and linguistic data can be so many different things as well.

Gretchen: One of the reasons I love linguistics is because of this wide-ranging approach to data. Linguistics really is a science. You can do linguistic experiments and get that kind of experimental scientific data. Linguistics is also a humanity in that you can do this kind of detailed textural analysis or very detailed analysis on one particular piece of a story or a conversation and analyse that one thing in its own terms. All of these fall within linguistics. They’re all different ways of relating to language and to linguistic data.

Lauren: It could be signed language or spoken language. You could look at written language. You could look at those things across time for a single person or a single group. You could look across different people right now. You can do experiments or you can observe naturalistic data.

Gretchen: One of the things that we want out of linguistics as an academic discipline, as a scientific discipline, is the idea that its data is replicable. Sometimes, that can be replicable in the scientific sense. If you’ve got a hundred Australian English speakers, and you have them read a list of words, and then you extract their vowels, and you analyse the vowels, the idea is that you could get a different group of another hundred Australian English speakers to read the same word list, and you should get the same results. Or if you get a different set of results, there should be some sort of reason why this group is different from that group. Maybe 50 years later the vowels have shifted because you’re doing these at different times.

Lauren: Maybe you’re looking at Melbourne and Sydney English speakers. Nothing like a bit of intercity variation to get people excited about comparing data. Sometimes, you can learn a lot about language by just studying a story or a conversation in a lot of detail. The real challenge with this data is that, even if you ask the same person to tell the same story again – or even if you have those two people have another conversation on the same topic – it’s always going to be different because you’re really trying to capture something about that particular moment.

Gretchen: In some ways, it makes them feel weirder if you say, “Now, can you just have the same conversation that you were having before I turned the tape recorder on? Make sure you laugh in all the same places that you were laughing before because you’re gonna find it just as funny the second time around, right?”

Lauren: This is maybe a good point to confess that once or twice we have lost a recording of this show. Doing it again – like, I fully sympathise why you can’t just replicate that exact moment.

Keep reading

Lingthusiasm Episode 112: When language become-s(3SG) linguistic example-s(PL)

Language is all around us. This sentence right here, is language! But between the raw experience of someone saying something and a linguistic analysis of what they’ve said, there are certain steps that make it easier for that analysis to happen, or to be understood or reproduced by others later.

In this episode, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch get enthusiastic about how language becomes linguistic data. We talk about making recordings of language, transcribing real-life or recorded language, annotating recordings or transcriptions, archiving all those materials for future generations, restoring archival materials from decaying formats, and presenting this information in useful ways when writing up an analysis. Along the way, we touch on playing 100+ year old songs from cracked wax cylinders, the multi-line glossing format used so readers can understand examples in a language they’re not already fluent in, analyzing spontaneous conversation using tapes from the Watergate Scandal, recognizing everyone who’s contributed (including your own intuitions!), and Lauren’s role on a big committee of linguists and archivists formalizing principles for data citation in linguistics.

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

Announcements:

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In this month’s bonus episode we get enthusiastic about some of our favourite deleted bits from recent interviews that we didn’t quite have space to share with you! First, an excerpt from our interview with Adam Aleksic about tiktok and how different online platforms give rise to different kinds of communication styles. Second, a return to our interview with Miguel Sánchez Ibáñez for a bit about Spanish internet slang, -och, and why “McCulloch” looks like a perfect name for an author of a book about internet linguistics. Finally, deleted scenes from our advice episode, in which we reveal some Lingthusiasm lore about pronouncing “Melbourne” and imitating each other’s accents and answer questions about linguistics degrees and switching languages with people..

Join us on Patreon now to get access to this and 100+ other bonus episodes. You’ll also get access to the Lingthusiasm Discord server where you can chat with other language nerds.

Here are the links mentioned in the episode:

• Leipzig Glossing Rules from Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology Department of Linguistics
• Kittens & Linguistic Diversity Facebook page
• Codes for the Human Analysis of Transcripts (CHAT)
• Child Language Data Exchange System (CHILDES)
• CABank English Jefferson Watergate Corpus
• Jefferson Transcription System – A guide to the symbols
• Wikipedia entry for ‘List of -gate scandals and controversies’
• The Austin Principles
• T-Recs - ‘Tromsø recommendations for citation of research data in linguistics’ by H. Andreassen, A. Berez-Kroeker, L. Collister, P. Conzett, C. Cox, K. De Smedt, and B. McDonnell
• ’Berkeley Cylinders’ post on Old Phono
• 'Media Stability Ratings’ post on Museum of Obsolete Media blog
• 'The Tape Restorator’ post on Endangered Languages and Cultures
• DELAMAN Award
• Pāṇini Award from the Association for Linguistic Typology
• 'New publication: Situating Linguistics in the Social Science Data Movement. Chapter in the Open Handbook of Linguistic Data Management’ post on Superlinguo
• 'Linguistic Data Interest Group: Five years of improving data citation practices in linguistics’ post on Superlinguo
• 'New Commentary Paper: Open research requires open mindedness: commentary on “Replication and methodological robustness in quantitative typology” by Becker and Guzmán Naranjo [open access]’ post on Superlinguo
• Lingthusiasm episode ’Frogs, pears, and more staples from linguistics example sentences’
• Lingthusiasm episode ‘What visualizing our vowels tells us about who we are’
• 'Tiny Turtle Follows Cat On a Skateboard | Cuddle Buddies’ on Cuddle Buddies YouTube page

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

Gretchen is on Bluesky as @GretchenMcC and blogs at All Things Linguistic.

Lauren is on Bluesky 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 assistant is Martha Tsutsui Billins, our editorial assistant is Jon Kruk, and our technical editor is Leah Velleman. 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).