Transcript Episode 111: Whoa!! A surprise episode??? For me??!!

This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm episode ‘Whoa!! A surprise episode??? For me??!!. 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]

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

Gretchen: I’m Gretchen McCulloch. Today, we’re getting enthusiastic about SURPRISE! From how languages express the concept of surprise, to what surprised looks like in the brain. But first, if you’ve been intrigued by the idea of our many bonus episodes, but aren’t sure about committing to another monthly subscription, we’ve now made a few of the most popular bonus episodes into collections that you can buy as a single one-time thing.

Lauren: These collections are so fun. We have Lingthusiasm Book Club for all of our book-related episodes; Linguistics Gossip for all the behind-the-scenes episodes; fun word-nerd topics like onomatopoeia and pangrams; Linguistics Advice; and my personal favourite, Lingthusiasm After Dark for our episodes about swearing, language under the influence, and the linguistics of kissing, and the weirdly soothing Lingthusiasmr episode that we’ve recorded of us reading example sentences in a very calm voice.

Gretchen: If there are any other bonus episodes that you’d like us to put in a collection, let us know. This feature is still pretty new and experimental. We’re interested in hearing how it goes for people. Also, this is a reminder that we have gift memberships. If you’re looking for a last-minute gift idea for yourself or someone else, you can get a year’s subscription to our bonus episodes for a person in your life and help keep the show running. Combining the previous two features, you can also gift one of the collections to some else if you wanna give someone a one-time gift.

Lauren: Our most recent bonus episode was an interview about the mysterious Voynich manuscript with Claire Bowern. Is it a centuries-old hoax? Go to patreon.com/lingthusiasm for collections, gifting, and all of the bonus episodes.

[Music]

Lauren: “Surprise! Gretchen, it’s a party for you! There’re balloons coming from the ceiling, and I’ve made you cake.”

Gretchen: Wow! Amazing! I’m so surprised! Not least because it’s not my birthday.

Lauren: And I’m in Australia, and you’re in Canada.

Gretchen: Yeah, well, there’s that, too.

Lauren: And because we scripted this whole thing to introduce our episode on surprise?

Gretchen: Look, let’s not quibble too much. Let’s talk about a few other things you could say if you were surprised.

Lauren: Okay, sure.

Gretchen: Like, “My, how sparkly these balloons are!”

Lauren: Bit of a throwback. It has “My, how sharp your teeth are, Grandma,” vibes from Little Red Riding Hood.

Gretchen: “Dang, these balloons are so sparkly!” Bit more modern.

Lauren: That works. What about if I didn’t realise it was your birthday, I could be like, “Oh, happy birthday!”

Gretchen: “I can’t believe it’s your birthday!”

Lauren: “Whoa, a whole cake – just for me!”

Gretchen: “Wow, you ate the whole thing!”

Lauren: “Wait, you have a birthday?”

Gretchen: Like we all do.

Lauren: There are so many different ways that we can indicate that we’re surprised, that something is contrary to our expectations, that we’re dealing with new information.

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Transcript Episode 85: Ergativity delights us

This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm episode ‘Ergativity delights us’. 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]

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

Gretchen: I’m Gretchen McCulloch. Today, we’re getting enthusiastic about ergativity. But first, next month, November, is Lingthusiasm’s anniversary month. It’s been seven years!

Lauren: For our anniversary month, we ask you to share your favourite episode or just share some lingthusiasm in general. Most people still find podcasts through word-of-mouth, and a lot of them don’t yet realise they could have a fun linguistics chat in their ears every month.

Gretchen: Or in their eyes since all Lingthusiasm episodes have transcripts. We’re asking you to help connect us with people who would be totally into a linguistics podcast if only they knew it existed.

Lauren: The other day, I shared our colour episode with a stylist because we were talking about the strange history of the colour orange. It’s so fun to find that perfect episode to recommend to someone, and we’ve touched on so many different topics over the last seven years.

Gretchen: I’m always sending people to our episode on turn-taking and conversational styles because there’s this comment that keeps coming up on social media about having to hold up the entire conversation by yourselves or not being able to get a word in edgewise. That’s a linguistics thing that’s been described. You can listen to an episode about it.

Lauren: We’ve asked you to do this every year on our anniversary, and we always see it in the stats. Your recommendations really do help more people find the show.

Gretchen: If you share us on social media, you can tag @lingthusiasm on basically all of the social media sites, so we can see it and reply, or like it, or reshare as appropriate. If you share it in private, we won’t necessarily know, but you can feel a warm glow of satisfaction – or you can tell us about it on social media if you still wanna be thanked.

Lauren: In what is becoming another anniversary tradition, we are doing our second listener survey this year. This is our chance to learn all about your linguistic interests, and we have a new set of linguistics experiments for you to contribute to.

Gretchen: If you did the survey last year, the experiment questions are different this year, so feel free to take it again. You can hear about the results of last year’s survey in a bonus episode, and we’ll be sharing the results of the new experiments next year.

Lauren: This year, we also wrote an academic article about the process of making Lingthusiasm, which featured some of your answers from the previous survey. You are officially contributing to academic research. Because of this, we have ethics board approval from La Trobe University for this survey.

Gretchen: To do the survey, or read more details, go to bit.ly/lingthusiasmsurvey23. That’s all lowercase and with the numbers in their numeric values – not written out as words.

Lauren: Or follow the links from our website and social media. Our most recent bonus episode was a recap of Gretchen’s time at the 2023 Linguistics Institute, which is a month-long linguistics summer course. Was I jealous? Yes. Was I delighted to hear about it? Yes. Go to patreon.com/lingthusiasm for this and many other bonus episodes.

Gretchen: Our patrons really do let us keep making this podcast, so we really appreciate any level of support.

[Music]

Lauren: You know, Gretchen, in some ways, ergativity is the basis of our LingComm friendship.

Gretchen: You know, you’re right about that that. I think it started in 2014, right?

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Lingthusiasm Episode 85: Ergativity delights us

When you have a sentence like “I visit them”, the word order and the shape of the words tell you that it means something different from “they visit me”. However, in a sentence like “I laugh”, you don’t actually need those signals – since there’s only one person in the sentence, the meaning would be just as clear if the sentence read “Me laugh” or “Laugh me”. And indeed, there are languages that do just this, where the single entity with an intransitive verb like “laugh” patterns with the object (me) rather than the subject (I) of a transitive verb like “visit”. This pattern is known as ergativity.

In this episode, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch get enthusiastic about ergativity! We talk about how ergativity first brought us together as collaborators (true facts: Lingthusiasm might never have existed without it), some classic examples of ergatives from Basque and Arrente, and cool downstream effects that ergativity makes possible, including languages that have ergatives sometimes but not other times (aka split ergativity) and the gloriously-named antipassive (the opposite of the passive). We also introduce a handy mnemonic gesture for remembering what ergativity looks like, as part of our ongoing quest to encourage you to make fun gestures in public!

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

Announcements:

November is Lingthusiasm’s anniversary month and it’s been 7 years! To help us celebrate we’re asking you to help connect us with people who would be totally into a linguistics podcast, if only they knew it existed. Most people still find podcasts through word of mouth, so we’re asking you to share a link to your favourite episode, or just share Lingthusiasm in general. Tag us on on social media so we can thank you, or if you share in private enjoy the warm fuzzies of our gratitude.

We’re doing our second listener survey! This is our chance to learn about your linguistic interests, and for you to have fun doing a new set of linguistic experiments. If you did the survey last year, the experiment questions are different this year, so feel free to take it again! You can hear about the results of last year’s survey in a bonus episode and we’ll be sharing the results of the new experiments next year. Take the survey here.

In this month’s bonus episode, Gretchen and Lauren get enthusiastic about linguistic summer camps for grownups aka linguistics institutes! Join us on Patreon now to get access to this and 80 other bonus episodes, including our 2022 survey results episode, and an eventual future episode discussing the results of our 2023 survey.

Here are the links mentioned in the 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 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, and our editorial assistant is Jon Kruk. 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: It can feel a bit anxiety-provoking about committing an analysis to paper because you are pinning a butterfly for a moment in time. People are still speaking the language, and it moves on. As long as you don’t think of the descriptive grammar as anything more canonical and authoritative than people’s actual intuitions, that’s an important thing to remember. Especially if you’re working with a grammar that’s more than a few generations old, it may be that the person didn’t quite capture what people were doing. It may be that the language has changed again.”

—

Excerpt from Lingthusiasm episode ‘How linguists figure out the grammar of a language’

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

“Gretchen: I think the best-known example of do you do the source language versus the target language in terms of plural in English is a certain little creature with eight legs.
Lauren: The octopus.
Gretchen: The octopus.
Lauren: Which I just avoid talking about in the plural at all to save myself a grammatical crisis.
Gretchen: I admit that I have also done this. If you were gonna pluralise “octopus” as if it’s English, it would just be “octopuses.” It’s very easy. But there’s a fairly long-standing tradition in English of when a word is borrowed from Latin to make the plural the actual Latin thing. Because, historically, many English speakers did learn Latin, and so you want to show off your education by using the Latin form even though it’s in English. So, if you’re going to pretend that “octopus” is Latin, then you wanna say, “octopi.” However, there is yet a third complication, which is that “octopus,” in fact, is actually Greek – “octo” meaning “eight” and “pus” meaning “feet. So, Greek does not make these plural by adding I to it. In that case, there has recently become popular a yet even more obscure and yet even more pretentious, to be honest, plural.
Lauren: Is there where you say, “octopodes”?
Gretchen: Well, this is where I used to say, “octopodes.” But I have recently learned that, apparently, it is, for maximum pretentiousness, /aktaˈpodiz/.
Lauren: You’ve out-pretentioused my out-pretentiousness.”

—

Excerpt from Lingthusiasm episode ‘Many ways to talk about many things - Plurals, duals and more’

Listen to the episode, read the full transcript, or check out more links about morphology, syntax, and words.

Transcript Episode 81: The verbs had been being helped by auxiliaries

This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm episode ‘The verbs had been being helped by auxiliaries’. 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]

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

Gretchen: I’m Gretchen McCulloch. Today, we’re getting enthusiastic about auxiliary verbs. But first, we’re doing a fun experiment. Are there linguistics things in your life that you would like advice about? Whether that’s serious advice or somewhat silly advice, we’re gonna do a special linguistics advice bonus episode for our 7th anniversary coming up in November 2023 with questions from patrons.

Lauren: Ask us your question by following the link in the show notes by September 1st, 2023. We’ll have the episode as our bonus in November 2023. Our most recent bonus episode was a discussion about linguistics and jobs, including a behind-the-scenes on a new academic paper that brings together seven years of interviews with people who have done linguistics and gone on to interesting careers.

Gretchen: You can go to patreon.com/lingthusiasm to get access to these and upcoming bonus episodes and also because our patrons are what lets us make the show. We don’t run advertising. If you like that Lingthusiasm continues to exist, we always appreciate patronage at any level.

[Music]

Lauren: Today, Gretchen, we’re going on an excursion to a farm.

Gretchen: Ooo, what are we gonna see at the farm?

Lauren: We’re gonna see all kinds of animals that we’re gonna use as our example sentences. The first is this horse. The horse is eating grass

Gretchen: Ah, look at the horse! The horse has eaten an apple.

Lauren: Oh, what a nice treat. Both sentences “The horse is eating grass” and “The horse has eaten an apple” are about the verb “eat,” but they’re structured a little differently.

Gretchen: Yeah. They’ve got something in common, which is that they have a main verb “eat” – “is eating grass,” “has eaten an apple” – and also a second helping verb that’s less important when it comes to how we’d draw a nice picture of the scenario but gives us some useful grammatical information.

Lauren: These verbs have their own life as well when they’re not hanging out alongside another verb and helping it. “The horse is eating grass” is the same verb as in “The horse is an animal.” Here “is” is doing the work of painting a picture of what’s happening. The “is” is the whole verb by itself. It doesn’t have any helpers.

Gretchen: The same thing with something like, “The horse has an apple.”

Lauren: Oh, lucky horse.

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Lingthusiasm Episode 81: The verbs had been being helped by auxiliaries

In the sentence “the horse has eaten an apple”, what is the word “has” doing? It’s not expressing ownership of something, like in “the horse has an apple”. (After all, the horse could have very sneakily eaten the apple.) Rather, it’s helping out the main verb, eat. Many languages use some of their verbs to help other verbs express grammatical information, and the technical name for these helping verbs is auxiliary verbs.

In this episode, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch get enthusiastic about auxiliaries! We talk about what we can learn about auxiliaries across 2000+ languages using a new linguistic mapping website called GramBank, why auxiliaries get pronounced subtly differently from the words they’re derived from, and how “be” and “have” are the major players of the auxiliary world (but there are other options too, like “do”, “let”, and “go”). We also put a whole bunch of farm animals in our example sentences this episode just so we have an excuse to make a very good wordplay at the end of the episode.

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

Announcements:

Are there linguistics things you want advice about? Both serious or somewhat silly? We’re going to doing a linguistics advice bonus episode for our 7th anniversary in November 2023, where we’ll answer your linguistics questions! Go here to ask us your questions by September 1st 2023, and join us on Patreon to hear the answers!

In this month’s bonus episode we get enthusiastic about the jobs that people go on to do after a linguistics degree! We talk about Lauren’s new academic article in a fancy linguistics journal about a blog post series she’s been running for 8 years, interviewing 80 people who studied linguistics, from a minor to a doctorate level, and their experience and advice for non-academic jobs.

Join us on Patreon now to get access to this and 70+ other bonus episodes, including our upcoming linguistics advice episode where we answer your questions! 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:

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, Mastodon, 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, and our production assistant is Martha Tsutsui Billins. 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).

Episode 74 Transcript: Who questions the questions?

This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm episode ‘Who questions the questions?’ 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, are we getting enthusiastic about questions? You bet. But first, our most recent bonus episode was a tour through the world of child language acquisition research after Gretchen read 103 papers on different languages.

Gretchen: You can go to patreon.com/lingthusiasm for this and many more bonus episodes.

Lauren: Our thanks, also, to everyone who joined in celebrating Lingthusiasm’s sixth anniversary in November by sharing a link to favourite episodes or your favourite Lingthusiasm fact or just sharing Lingthusiasm more generally.

Gretchen: We’ve really enjoyed seeing and replying to your recommendation posts. Thank you for tagging us in them – @lingthusiasm on all social media networks. Also, our thanks if you shared in private as well. We really appreciate it. It helps every year.

Lauren: In further anniversary celebrations, we’re conducting a listener survey for the first time.

Gretchen: This is your chance to tell us about what you’re enjoying in Lingthusiasm so far and what else we might wanna be doing in the future.

Lauren: Including suggestions for topics.

Gretchen: And maybe crossover episodes with other shows. Also, we couldn’t resist the opportunity to add a few linguistic experiments in there as well, which we’ll be sharing the results of next year.

Lauren: We even got ethics approval from La Trobe University so that we can write up the results maybe as a research paper one day. You can see links to the survey and the ethics information on the Lingthusiasm website in our show notes.

Gretchen: The Lingthusiasm survey is open until December 15th, 2022, anywhere on Earth. Go to bit.ly/lingthusiasmsurvery22 – all one word, all lowercase – to see the links to the survey or to see what an official ethics approval for a fairly minor survey looks like.

Lauren: Or follow the links from our website and social media.

Gretchen: Whether you’ve joined us recently or you’ve been with us the whole six years, thanks for helping us celebrate our anniversary.

[Music]

Lauren: What is a question?

Gretchen: Is this a question?

Lauren: Am I doing a question now?

Gretchen: This is a question here, right?

Lauren: Question?

Gretchen: Question.

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Transcript Episode 69: What we can, must, and should say about modals

This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm episode ‘What we can, must, and should say about modals’. 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]

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

Gretchen: I’m Gretchen McCulloch. Today we’re getting enthusiastic about what we can, must, and should say about modals. But first, our most recent bonus episode was on the different uses of “like” in English and the very long history of them.

Lauren: If you’d like to listen to this and all of our other bonus episodes, you can go to patreon.com/lingthusiasm.

[Music]

Gretchen: “Can” I introduce the topic?

Lauren: Yes, you “may” talk about modals.

Gretchen: We probably “should” introduce modals.

Lauren: Yeah, we “could” introduce modals.

Gretchen: We “gotta” talk about modals.

Lauren: We “must” talk about modals.

Gretchen: We “might” be talking about modals already.

Lauren: We’re definitely talking using modals. They’re easy to identify in English because there are nine that are commonly used.

Gretchen: We have “can,” “could,” “shall” and “should,” “will” and “would,” and the triplet, “may,” “might,” and “must.”

Lauren: They’re called “modals,” but you might also know them as “modal auxiliaries.”

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Lingthusiasm Episode 69: What we can, must, and should say about modals

Sometimes, we use language to make definite statements about how the world is. Other times, we get more hypothetical, and talk about how things could be. What can happen. What may occur. What might be the case. What will happen (or would, if only we should have known!) What we must and shall end up with. In other words, we use a part of language known as modals and modality!

In this episode, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch get enthusiastic about modals! We talk about the nine common modals in English, the gloriously-named quasimodals (no relation to the bellringer but I would absolutely read the Quasimodo/Quasimodal crossover, I’m just saying), and how people use the ambiguity between permission and believability in English modals for comic effect. We also talk about neat things modals do in various languages: in Nsyilxcen, the modal is a separate word, whereas in Nez Perce, it’s an affix on the verb, and in German, there are also modal adverbs. In Italian Sign Language and American Sign Language the forcefulness of the modal (such as the difference between “should” and “must”) is indicated through having modals that are performed faster or larger or have a more intensive expression in how they’re signed.

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

Announcements:

In this month’s bonus episode we get enthusiastic about the word “like”! We talk about why “like” falls prey to the frequency and recency illusions, why linguists get excited about “like” and other function words, and other important dispatches from the world of “like” (apparently people who use “like” are perceived as more attractive!).

Join us on Patreon to listen to this and 60+ 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 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 advertising-free by supporting our Patreon. Being a patron gives you access to bonus content, our Discord server, and other perks.

Lingthusiasm is on Facebook, Tumblr, Instagram, Pinterest, and Twitter.

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 assistant is Martha Tsutsui Billins, and our production manager is Liz McCullough. 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).

Posts tagged "grammar"

Transcript Episode 111: Whoa!! A surprise episode??? For me??!!

Transcript Episode 85: Ergativity delights us

Lingthusiasm Episode 85: Ergativity delights us

Transcript Episode 81: The verbs had been being helped by auxiliaries

Lingthusiasm Episode 81: The verbs had been being helped by auxiliaries

Episode 74 Transcript: Who questions the questions?

Transcript Episode 69: What we can, must, and should say about modals

Lingthusiasm Episode 69: What we can, must, and should say about modals

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