if you feel like you’re always getting talked over, or if you feel like you’re always accidentally interrupting people, you should consider looking into some of the linguistics research about conversation style and turn-taking. lingthusiasm podcast has a great episode called “how to rebalance a lopsided conversation” that goes over some of this research in a really accessible way; Deborah Tannen’s book You just don’t understand is an early book¹ that’s aimed at general audiences on the same topic.
the thing is, when there’s conflict in how a conversation flows, often what’s going on is a mismatch in norms or expectations – not that one person is necessarily acting “wrong” and the other person is “right.” the mismatches in norms/expectations can and do align with existing power structures in society, but being more aware of them can really help you as an individual trying to navigate them.
you can train your brain for more linguistic awareness! start listening for pauses, intakes of breath, or back-channeling that’s meant to support, not interrupt. try it out!
¹ I am linking to the wikipedia page for the book rather than a link to buy the book because it’s kind of outdated and the criticism section on the wiki page is pretty reasonable. If you do read this book, be prepared for uhhhh period-typical gender essentialism that, to my knowledge, Tannen has not particularly updated her views on in the intervening time. But it is an influential and important book, just read it skeptically imo

If you enjoyed this post, may we also suggest our episode ’Small talk, big deal’ for more behind the science chat on conversation styles, the fine art of media references from memes to movies, and our own tested strategies for dodging awkward small talk questions while keeping the conversation flowing.

Transcript Episode 101: Micro to macro - The levels of language

This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm episode ‘Micro to macro - The levels of language’. 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 all the different layers of language structure. But first, thank you to everyone who shared so many excellent linguistics facts to celebrate our 100th episode anniversary!

Lauren: To celebrate Lingthusiasm now having more than 100 episodes, we’ve compiled a list of 101 places where you can get even more linguistics enthusiasm.

Gretchen: If you want some suggestions for other podcasts, books, videos, blogs, other places online and offline to feed your interest in linguistics, you can check out that link from our website.

Lauren: Even with 101 options, I’m sure there’re still a few we’ve missed. Feel free to tag us @Lingthusiasm on social media about your favourites.

Gretchen: Or if there’re any that you’re particularly excited to see on the list, we would love this to help be a bit of a hub for people to find other cool linguistics communication projects.

Lauren: Our most recent bonus episode was an interview with Julie Sedivy about our relationship with language and how it changes throughout our lives and the linguistics of what makes writing feel beautiful.

Gretchen: You can also read Julie’s new book called Linguaphile, which is, indeed, very beautifully written. It is about that relationship that we have with language throughout our lives.

Lauren: For this and over 90 other bonus episodes, go to patreon.com/lingthusiasm.

[Music]

Lauren: Welcome to the 101st episode of Lingthusiasm.

Gretchen: It’s LING 101!

Lauren: Oh my gosh, that is a classic first year subject course code.

Gretchen: I feel like there’s this canonical introduction to linguistics course that almost every linguistics programme has in some form. It’s a classic textbook format. It’s a classic course style. It goes from this very micro-level of language to this macro-level of language where you’re starting with very small list units and zooming out into the whole area of discourse.

Lauren: Weirdly enough, I absolutely did this subject, but we didn’t have course codes like “LING 101,” but I did do an introduction to linguistics that was exactly like this.

Gretchen: Ours also was not called “LING 101.” It was called “LING 100.”

Lauren: Oh, no. That was the last episode. We missed it.

Gretchen: We missed it. Now we can’t do it ever. Then I was at another university where it was called “201.” I don’t really wanna wait for another 100 episodes for us to be able to do this. I think “101” is still classically in the culture – the idea of an intro linguistics course – even if there’re many course codes that are different from that.

Lauren: Lingthusiasm is intentionally not in this structure.

Gretchen: It seems like it would be a bit of a shame if we had to start like, okay, our first year is like, only phonetics, and then we’re gonna do only phonology, and then when we get all the way to pragmatics, we’ve got to stop doing the podcast or something. We made a very conscious decision early on to mix it up a bit.

Lauren: I mean, especially with the level of detail wherein – imagine if we’re like, “We’re 100 episodes in. We’re now moving from individual phones up to phonology.” We could’ve been here for quite a while.

Gretchen: Yeah, I think it’s more fun to mix it up. It also means that if we encounter a really good example or anecdote or paper – a new paper comes out – that we wanna talk about about a particular topic, there’s always more stuff that we can say about sounds. It’s not like, “Oh, well, we did sounds for the first three years, and then we never get to do sounds again.”

Lauren: Episode 101 is a great time to actually take ourselves through – 101 course-style – all these different layers of linguistic structure so you can see how a finite number of building blocks had this capacity to combine in so many novel ways.

Gretchen: I think of it as those – have you ever seen those videos where they start really, really zoomed in on a quark or an electron or a nucleus, and then they zoom out to the atom, and then to the cell, and then to the plant, and then to the backyard, and then to the map-view, and the Earth-view, and the Solar System, and the galaxy, and then you feel like, “Wow! We’re so far out!” and then you can zoom back in and back out. It’s very trippy and fun. We can do that with language.

Lauren: One of the great things about this is that those building blocks being able to combine in really versatile ways allows us to create sentences that have never been uttered before. Collecting these is something of a linguist’s hobby.

Gretchen: We have a few fun sentences that we can keep returning to and talk about them and all these different layers. But let’s debut our candidate sentences here.

Lauren: One: “Today, I learnt that there were smaller walrus ancestors, and I am extremely happy to report that the researcher writing about this did, indeed, refer to them as ‘smallrus’.”

Gretchen: Number Two: “Moons can have moons, and they are called ‘moonmoons’.”

Lauren: Three: “As the current record holder for the highest score in Donkey Kong, Hank Chien is legally fourth in line to be President of Taiwan.”

Keep reading

Lingthusiasm Episode 101: Micro to macro - The levels of language

When we first learn about nature, we generally start with the solid mid-sized animals: cats, dogs, elephants, tigers, horses, birds, turtles, and so on. Only later on do we zoom in and out from these charismatic megafauna to the tinier levels, like cells and bacteria, or the larger levels, like ecosystems and the water cycle. With language, words are the easily graspable charismatic megafauna (charismatic megaverba?), from which there are both micro levels (like sounds, handshapes, and morphemes) and macro levels (like sentences, conversations, and narratives).

In this episode, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch take advantage of the aptly numbered 101th episode to get enthusiastic about linguistics from the micro to macro perspective often found in Linguistics 101 classes. We start with sounds and handshapes, moving onto accents and sound changes, fitting affixes into words, words into sentences, and sentences into discourse. We also talk about areas of linguistics that involve language at all these levels at once, including historical linguistics, child language acquisition, linguistic fieldwork, sociolinguistics, and psycholinguistics. Plus: why we don’t follow this order for Lingthusiasm episodes or Crash Course Linguistics and how you can give yourself a DIY intro linguistics course.

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

Announcements:

To celebrate Lingthusiasm now having more than 100 episodes, we have compiled a list of 101 places where you can get even more linguistics enthusiasm! This is your one-stop-shop if you want suggestions for other podcasts, books, videos, blogs, and other places online and offline to feed your interest in linguistics. Even with a hundred and one options, we’re sure there’s still a few that we’ve missed, so also feel free to tag us @ lingthusiasm on social media about your favourites!

In this month’s bonus episode we get enthusiastic about what psycholinguistics can tell us about creative writing, with Julie Sedivy, psycholinguist and the author of Memory Speaks and Linguaphile! We talk about moving from the style of scientific writing to literary writing by writing a lot of unpublished poetry to develop her aesthetic sense, how studying linguistics for a writer is like studying anatomy for a sculptor or colour theory for a painter, and how you could set up an eyetracking study to help writers figure out which sentences make their readers slow down.

Join us on Patreon now to get access to this and 90+ 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:

Lingthusiasm episodes mentioned:

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, 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).

Transcript Episode 99: A politeness episode, if you please

This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm episode ‘A politeness episode, if you please’. 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 politeness and rudeness are made up of at a linguistic level. But first, people have been asking us for years, “You guys have bonus episodes on Patreon, but I wanna get a gift for someone,” or “I’m broke/I don’t have a credit card. Is there a way that I can buy a gift subscription for someone else to the bonus episodes or ask someone else to get them as a gift for me?”

Lauren: We’re pleased to say that the answer is now, “Yes!” Patreon have newly added a gift membership feature. If you’d be excited to receive a Patreon membership to Lingthusiasm as a gift, we’ll have the link in the show notes for you to forward to your friends and/or family with a little wink-wink, nudge-nudge.

Gretchen: Also, if you’re intrigued by the bonus episodes but a monthly subscription isn’t quite your thing, we also now have a way for you to buy a themed bundle of linguistic bonus episodes on a particular topic. If you’re looking for more linguistics-related books to read – both fiction and non-fiction – you can pick up the Lingthusiasm Book Club collection or check out the Lingthusiasm After Dark collection for our episodes about swearing, language under the influence of…various substances, and our special ASMR episode where we read the Harvard Sentences in a [ASMR voice] soothing, calming voice.

Lauren: For both of these collections or membership that gives you access to over 90 bonus episodes, go to patreon.com/lingthusiasm.

Gretchen: Our most recent bonus episode, for example, was a crossover chat with the team from Let’s Learn Everything. Let’s Learn Everything is a delightfully silly science podcast. They had me on their main show to ask me questions about linguistics. But they had so many fun questions that we recorded a second bonus part for patrons about science, metaphors, and more. You don’t need to already have any familiarity with their show to listen to the bonus episode, but we will link to the first part anyway since it was also really fun.

[Music]

Lauren: “Okay, Gretchen, let’s start the episode.”

Gretchen: “Lauren, would you like to start the episode?”

Lauren: “If you would please introduce the topic of the episode, Gretchen, I would be ever so grateful.”

Gretchen: “Oh, no, I couldn’t possibly. No, you go first. I really must insist that YOU introduce the topic of the episode. Ah, that is, if you wouldn’t mind. I hope I’m not imposing.”

Lauren: “Well, thank you. I appreciate that. It’s incredibly kind of you to concede to my feelings about whose turn it is to start the episode. Maybe we can start it by being incredibly impolite to each other.” [Both hosts hesitate]

Gretchen: It’s so – it was a lot easier to act at being very polite. This being rude to each other on purpose thing feels really hard to me, actually.

Lauren: If we were to try, though, I imagine that the sentences would be a lot shorter and involve a lot less deferring to each other. Maybe something very abrupt like, “Start the show now, lady!”

Gretchen: “Get on with the effin’ podcast, all right?”

Lauren: “Podcast, now!”

Keep reading

Lingthusiasm Episode 99: A politeness episode, if you please

If it wouldn’t be too much trouble, if you have a spare half hour, could we possibly suggest that you might enjoy listening to this episode on politeness? Or, if you’d prefer a less polite version, “Listen! Now!”

In this episode, your hosts Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne get enthusiastic about what politeness and rudeness are made up of at a linguistic level. We talk about existing cultural notions of “saving face” and “losing face”, aka the push and pull between our desire for help vs our desire for independence, and how they’ve been formalized in a classic linguistics paper. We also talk about being less polite to show intimacy, addressing God in English and French, which forms of politeness are and aren’t overtly taught, different uses of “please” in UK vs US English, levels of indirectness, email etiquette across generations and subcultures, rudeness and pointing, nodding norms in Japanese and English, smiling at strangers in the US vs Europe, and how a small number of politeness ingredients can combine in so many different ways that are culturally different.

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 science metaphors and learning everything with Tom Lum and Caroline Roper, cohosts of Let’s Learn Everything! We talk about whether programming languages should count as a language credit, numbers and ritual stock phrases like seventeen and “once upon a time”, as well as etymology and metaphor in ecology, chemistry, and linguistics. We also talk about turning the “constantly trying to figure things out” part of your brain off, attending the word of the year vote, and how linguists have a tendency to be curious about language all the time, which… sometimes gets us into trouble.

Join us on Patreon now to get access to this and 90+ other bonus episodes. You’ll also get access to the Lingthusiasm Discord server where you can chat with other language nerds.

Looking for a last minute gift for the language nerd in your life? Or are you trying to get someone in your life to love linguistics as much as you do? Patreon have newly added a gift memberships feature! So if you’d be excited to receive a patreon membership to Lingthusiasm, forward this link to your friends and/or family with a little wink wink nudge nudge.

Here are the links mentioned in the episode:

’Politeness: Some universals in language use’ by Penelope Brown and Stephen Levinson
Wikipedia entry for ‘Politeness’
Lingthusiasm bonus episode ’The Most Esteemed Honorifics Episode’
’Routine politeness in American and British English requests: use and non-use of please’ by M. Lynne Murphy and Rachele De Felice
@killersundy video about the Irish offering cake to the Irish on TikTok
Lingthusiasm episode ’If I were an irrealis’
Lingthusiasm episode ’Look, it’s deixis, an episode about pointing!’
’Nodding, aizuchi, and final particles in Japanese conversation: How conversation reflects the ideology of communication and social relationships’ by Sotaro Kita and Sachiko Ide
’Why Americans Smile So Much’ by Olga Khazan for The Atlantic
’Three-year-olds infer polite stance from intonation and facial cues’ by Iris Hübscher, Laura Wagner, and Pilar Prieto

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, 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).

Lauren: The thing that all of the examples in this episode have in common is that the implicature comes up because we can put these things on a scale, but that’s not the only way that implicature works.

Gretchen: You can also imply things that don’t really seem to be scalar. There was an example of a tweet that went up a little while ago where somebody posted a photo of a house that was for sale. There was a big sign on top of the “For Sale” sign that said, “Not Haunted.”

Lauren: Okay, so, I have a lot of questions that I possibly wouldn’t have had if there was just a normal “For Sale” sign.

Gretchen: Right, exactly. The “Not Haunted” sign is doing this implicature of “Wait, but I am supposed to expect this house might be haunted?” But it’s not doing so on a particular scale. Like, it’s haunted or not haunted, which is not really a scale. It’s just a “Wait. Suddenly this information is relevant?”

Lauren: This feels like an example of that meme of “My ‘House Not Haunted’ sign has people asking a lot of questions that are already answered by my ‘House Not Haunted’ sign.”

Excerpt from Lingthusiasm episode ‘Cool things about scales and implicature’

Listen to the episode, read the full transcript, or check out more links about semantics and pragmatics

Transcript Episode 80: Word Magic

This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm episode ‘Word Magic’. 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 word magic. But first, people often ask us to recommend books about linguistics that don’t assume prior knowledge of linguistics, so we’ve come up with a list of 12 books plus a few bonuses, including both nonfiction as well as some fiction books with some linguistically interesting elements.

Gretchen: Social media’s in an interesting state of flux these days, which, as someone who studies online interaction, I find very interesting. However, not unrelated to that, we like to encourage people to sign up for emails from us in case everything else just melts down.

Lauren: You can get this list of 12 of our favourite linguistics books by signing up for our free email list by following the link in the show notes or going to lingthusiasm.com.

Gretchen: Our email subscribers also regularly get an email once a month when there’s a new episode of Lingthusiasm. This month you will see a link to our linguistics books list if you’re an existing subscriber. Otherwise, you will get the books list in the confirmation email after you sign up at any time even if you’re listening to this way in the future. Technology is very useful for things like this.

Lauren: Our most recent bonus episode was the 2022 listener survey results. If you’d like to know whether being aware of the kiki-bouba meme affects how people respond to the blobby shape and the pointy shape, as well as other results from our survey, you can go to patreon.com/lingthusiasm.

[Music]

Gretchen: Speaking of books, I’ve read some linguistically interesting books lately!

Lauren: We realised that a common thread between some of the books we’ve been reading was this link of magic.

Gretchen: Specifically, I love the way that books about magic are also often really linguistically interesting because saying the word and casting the magic spell are so intertwined when it comes to our conception of how magic works. Actually, “magic spell” and “spelling a word” – etymologically, I’ve just look this up, and these have a common root.

Keep reading

Lingthusiasm Episode 80: Word Magic

The magical kind of spell and the written kind of spell are historically linked. This reflects how saying a word can change the state of the world, both in terms of fictional magic spells that set things on fire or make them invisible, and in terms of the real-world linguistic concept of performative utterances, which let us agree to contracts, place bets, establish names, and otherwise alter the fabric of our relationships.

In this episode, your hosts Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne get enthusiastic about word magic! We talk about how the word magic systems are set up differently in three recent fantasy books we like: Babel by R.F. Kuang, Carry On by Rainbow Rowell, and the Scholomance series by Naomi Novik. We also talk about linguistic performatives: why saying “I do” in a movie doesn’t make you married, aka Felicity Conditions, aka an excellent drag name; performativity as applied to gender (yup, Judith Butler got it from linguistics); the “hereby” test; and how technology changes what counts as a performative.

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

Announcements:
People often ask us to recommend interesting books about linguistics that don’t assume prior knowledge of linguistics, so we’ve come up with a list of 12 books that we personally recommend, including both nonfiction and fiction books with linguistically interesting elements! Get this list of our top 12 linguistics books by signing up for our free email list. Email subscribers get an email once a month when there’s a new episode of Lingthusiasm, and this month existing subscribers will see a link to our linguistics books list! If you find this any time in the future, you’ll get the books list in the confirmation email after you sign up.

In this month’s bonus episode, we get excited about the results of the 2022 Lingthusiasm Survey. We talk about synesthesia fomo, whether people respond differently to kiki/bouba depending on whether they’re aware of them as a meme, complicating the “where is a frown?” map, the plural of emoji, and more! Plus, we mentioned swearing in this episode? Yeah, we’ve got bonus episodes about that too.

Join us on Patreon now to get access to this and 70+ other bonus episodes, as well as access to the Lingthusiasm Discord server where you can chat with other language nerds! Our patrons let us keep making the main episodes free for everyone and we really appreciate every level of support.

Here are the links mentioned in the episode:

Lingthusiasm bonus episodes on swearing:

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).

“Gretchen: I did a study with a smartphone keyboard app looking at millions of anonymised examples of how real people use emoji in aggregate. One of the things that we came across really early on in this data – so I got them to extract examples of the most common sequences of two, three, and four emoji, because this is a common thing that people do for a large data set of words is they’ll say one of the most common sequences of two, three, and four words. So, let’s try to do the same thing with emoji and see what happens because, obviously, we couldn’t read individual people’s messages. This is a way of kind of extracting from that and figuring out what the common sequences are. The most common sequence of emoji overall is [tears of joy] [tears of joy].
Lauren: Right. Okay.
Gretchen: The second most common sequence is [tears of joy] [tears of joy] [tears of joy].
Lauren: Okay. Hmm…
Gretchen: Do you wanna guess what the third most common sequence is?
Lauren: I’m going for, hmm, [tears of joy] [tears of joy] [tears of joy] [tears of joy]?
Gretchen: Yeah. Four of them.
Lauren: Amazing.
Gretchen: Once you get to number four, I think it was two kiss faces. So, it did change eventually. We did eventually run out of [tears of joy].
Lauren: Just moved on to more repeating sequences.
Gretchen: Turned out, we looked at the Top 200 sequences of two, and then Top 200 of three, and Top 200 of four, and about half of all of these lists was just straight up repetition of the exact same emoji. This was really interesting to us because a lot of the emoji narratives and media at that point were really excited about the idea of telling stories with emoji of like, “Okay, if you have a [person] and then a [tongue sticking out] and then a [hamburger], maybe that means a person is eating a hamburger,” or something like that. But that’s not what people were doing. People were doing the exact same emoji a whole bunch of times in a row.”

—

Excerpt from Lingthusiasm episode ‘Emoji are Gesture Because Internet’

Listen to the episode, read the full transcript, or check out more links about language and society, and pragmatics.

Lingthusiasm Episode 74: Who questions the questions?

We use questions to ask people for information (who’s there?), but we can also use them to make a polite request (could you pass me that?), to confirm social understanding (what a game, eh), and for stylistic effect, such as ironic or rhetorical questions (who knows!).

In this episode, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch get enthusiastic about questions! We talk about question intonations from the classic rising pitch? to the British downstep (not a dance move…yet), and their written correlates, such as omitting a question mark in order to show that a question is rhetorical or intensified. We also talk about grammatical strategies for forming questions, from the common (like question particles and tag questions in so many languages), to the labyrinthine history that brings us English’s very uncommon use of “do” in questions. Plus: the English-centrically-named wh-word questions (like who, what, where), why we could maybe call them kw-word questions instead (at least for Indo-European), and why we don’t need to stress out as much about asking “open” questions.

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

Announcements:

Lingthusiasm turns 6 this month! We invite you to celebrate six years of linguistics enthusiasm with us by sharing the show - you can share a link to an episode you liked or just share your lingthusiasm generally. Most people still find podcasts through word of mouth, and lots of them don’t yet realise that they could have a fun linguistics chat in their ears every month (or eyes, all Lingthusiasm episodes have transcripts!). If you share Lingthusiasm on social media, tag us so we can reply, and if you share in private, we won’t know but you can feel a warm glow of satisfaction - or feel free to tell us about it on social media if you want to be thanked!

We’re also doing a listener survey for the first time! This is your chance to tell us about what you’re enjoying about Lingthusiasm so far, and what else we could be doing in the future - and your chance to suggest topics! It’s open until December 15, 2022. And 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. We might even write up a paper about the survey one day, so we have ethics board approval from La Trobe University for this survey. Take the survey here!

In this month’s bonus episode we get enthusiastic about a project that Gretchen did to read one paper for each of the 103 languages recorded in a recent paper by Evan Kidd and Rowena Garcia about child language acquisition. We talk about some of the specific papers that stood out to us, and what Gretchen hoped to achieve with her reading project.

Join us on Patreon now to get access to this and 60+ other bonus episodes, as well as 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, 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).

Posts tagged "pragmatics"

Transcript Episode 101: Micro to macro - The levels of language

Lingthusiasm Episode 101: Micro to macro - The levels of language

Transcript Episode 99: A politeness episode, if you please

Lingthusiasm Episode 99: A politeness episode, if you please

Transcript Episode 80: Word Magic

Lingthusiasm Episode 80: Word Magic

Lingthusiasm Episode 74: Who questions the questions?

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