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Posts tagged "prepositions"
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Lauren: We’re gonna talk you through some of the highlights of what the Cambridge Grammar of English Language (CGEL) talks about with prepositions, but I think the important thing to take away from this is actually there are a couple of really basic, easy facts to understand about different categories of speech, because this is a category of the language, but actually grammar is this incredibly fuzzy thing at the edges – in the way sandwiches are semantically not always that easy, or birds are not always that easy to kind of categorise.
Gretchen: Yeah, you think sandwiches are hard to describe? They’ve got nothing on parts of speech. This is the fun part though. I think the way a lot of us encounter grammar the first time is in language textbooks. Like, okay, here’s a list of all the prepositions in Spanish, you should memorise them. Or in English classes, where it’s like, underline the prepositions in the sentence. And it seems like there’s these very clear answers because they selectively choose for you the sentences that have very clear answers. Whereas the version of grammar that something like CGEL gives us is this kind of scientific diagnostic grammar that says, “Well, if we’ve got this set of criteria for what a preposition should be and we apply this to this edge case, we end up with an answer for whether this particular word that’s of dubious status is actually a preposition, or is actually an adverb, or is actually a verb, or something else.” And so if you like the kinds of arguments about what is a sandwich, this is actually this very similar type of argument, except it’s about what is a preposition.
Lauren: Yeah, it’s so much fun.
Gretchen: And like how you end up with a scientific definition that says, okay, a robin is a canonical bird, and a bat doesn’t go within the bird category, but a penguin does, even though a bat flies and a penguin doesn’t, because we’ve got this set of definitions. You end up with this definition of a preposition that sometimes leads us in places that traditional grammars that aren’t as experimentally based wouldn’t have led us. And so the traditional grammar definition of a preposition is it’s a word that goes before a noun or a pronoun.
Lauren: Mm-hmm. That’s where the “pre-” comes from, they’re in pre- position.
Gretchen: Yeah. So this is wrong on both counts. And this is what CGEL points out. First of all, like, lots of stuff goes before nouns or pronouns! This is a wholly insufficient definition!
Lauren: Yeah.
Gretchen: So if you have a noun like kangaroo, you can say “the kangaroo.” That doesn’t make “the” a preposition just because it can go before kangaroo.
Lauren: You say “the big kangaroo” and “big” is not suddenly a preposition.
Gretchen: Or you can be like, “I see kangaroos,” and it doesn’t mean “see” is a preposition. So this is just a completely, completely insufficient definition. And the other problem is, is stuff that comes after prepositions isn’t just nouns or pronouns, so it fails on both counts. And this is something that traditional grammars kind of recognise but just kind of don’t really talk about that much. So, you can actually put a preposition in front of a whole noun phrase. So you have, like, “in the house,” not just like, “in house.” Fine. You can have adjectives – so if you say something like, “They took me for dead,” “dead” there is an adjective, but “for” is still a preposition. It can go before adverbs like “until recently.” So “recently” is an adverb and “until” is still a preposition. And in fact it can even go before other prepositions. So if you have something like “from behind the curtain,” “behind the curtain” is already a prepositional phrase and then you have “from” in front of the whole thing.
Lauren: And this is why CGEL classifies certain things as prepositions that other grammars might call subordinating conjunctions. Because if you can say “since childhood” or “until noon”, which are clearly prepositions that go before nouns, it’s not so weird to say that “since I was young” or “until you arrive” are just a kind of preposition that goes before a whole phrase.
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Excerpt from Episode 14 of Lingthusiasm: Getting into, up for, and down with prepositions (edited).
Listen to the episode, read the full transcript, or check out more links about prepositions.
Talking about sandwiches and birds is in reference to our 9th bonus episode Is X a sandwich? Solving the word-meaning argument once and for all.
Transcript Lingthusiasm Episode 14: Getting into, up for, and down with prepositions
This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm Episode 14: Getting into, up for, and down with prepositions. 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 14 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 are getting into, under, over, and around prepositions.
Gretchen: But first: it’s our anniversary episode!
Lauren: Yay!
Gretchen: Wow! A whole year!
Lauren: It’s been a whole year! In the lead-up to this anniversary episode we’ve been asking you to recommend, review, and relisten to the show. We had the ambitious aim of hitting 100,000 listens for our first year. Thanks to your diligent sharing, your diligent reviewing, your diligent listening to the show –
Gretchen: Your enthusiastic sharing!
Lauren: There was so much great, enthusiastic sharing that happened.
Gretchen: And at the time of recording, we are on track to hit that by the time this episode goes up.
Lauren: Thank you so much! There’s just, like, so much thanking happening here. Thank you for listening for this year, thank you for continuing to support the show, and we’re looking forward to year two of Lingthusiasm. In the next few days we’ll be posting an anniversary post thanking everyone who rec'ed us in the last month. There is still time to get your name on the list if you publicly recommend Lingthusiasm on your social media platform of choice or leave a review on your pod feeder of choice and let us know that that happened.
Gretchen: Or if you want to just recommend us privately, you can have a warm, glowy feeling that we will confer upon you, or feel free tell us about it! People have also been asking us about merch. Are we gonna have any Lingthusiasm-themed items that you can adorn your body with? And the answer to that is yes. We now have merch.
Lauren: Yaaay! Think of this as our one-year celebration of Lingthusiasm! We are so excited about this because we decided that we would make merch that we would want to wear or use.
Gretchen: So, not only do we have Lingthusiasm logo t- shirts and other items, we also decided to make some more fun stuff.
Lauren: So not only do we have Lingthusiasm logo t-shirts and mugs and a whole bunch of other stuff, we also have some lingthusiast-themed items, including a range of products that say “Not judging your grammar, just analysing it.”
Gretchen: So you can wear that on your t-shirt or on a tote bag and promote the idea that linguistics is about analysing language rather than judging it, so I’m really excited about that. I’m also the most excited, because I’m someone who doesn’t really wear that many t-shirts with stuff on them, especially to conferences and stuff, so I’m the most excited about the fact that we also have scarves. We have scarves in a kind of subtle IPA print pattern that from far away just looks like red and white, or navy and white, or olive and white, and it just looks like you’re this classy person who happens to have an interestingly patterned scarf. And then when someone gets close to you they’re like, “Wait, are those letters?” And then when they get even closer to you they’re like, “Wait, that doesn’t look like the alphabet I’m used to.” And then you’re like, “Yeah! It’s because I’m a linguist, I’ve got these IPA letters on my scarf!”
Lauren: I’m really excited about my navy scarf, it’s really beautiful. We decided to go with Redbubble for this because they do print on demand, which means that you can choose the colour and size you want, we’re less constrained that way.
Gretchen: The scarves are one size fits all because they are a giant square of fabric, but that means you can use them for versatile purposes, if you want to use one as a tablecloth or something, or a wall hanging, you could do that as well. Or cut it up and sew something with it? I don’t know, your imagination is there. I have one, it is soft, it is vibrantly coloured, I am really excited to wear it to conferences, just in time for the linguistics holiday season!
Lauren: By which of course we mean the Australian Linguistic Society conference in December and the Linguistic Society of America conference in January, and I will be wearing mine to both.
Gretchen: The important linguistic holidays. Although I have to say as a Canadian that I celebrate my linguistics annual meeting in May, but I’ll also be at the LSA. So this is in time to wear to conference season. We also – because this is very important to us, they do ship internationally, they have very reasonable shipping prices to Australia, which was important to Lauren.
Lauren: And Canada, which was important to Gretchen. And we have a link in the show notes so you can conveniently forward it to your friends and fams for the linguist or non-linguist holiday season.
Gretchen: I’m excited to hopefully spot some Lingthusiasm fans at conferences. This is probably also a good time to mention, Lauren, that we are going to be doing “Linguistics in the Public Ear” podcasting panel at the LSA annual meeting in Salt Lake City in January.
Lauren: It’s my first LSA! I am beyond excited to be coming to a Linguistic Society of America annual conference. I’ll also be there presenting a paper in the regular sessions, but yes, we have a workshop on linguistics podcasting with a whole bunch of amazing people. There’ll be detailed links in the show notes if you’re coming to LSA.
Gretchen: Yeah, with other podcasts that you may listen to or maybe you would like to listen to, so we’re really excited to see those people and meet those people, and for you to get to see and meet everybody there. And you’re also doing a talk about linguistics outreach at the ALS, right, Lauren?
Lauren: I’m also doing a workshop on linguistics outreach at the Australian Linguistic Society conference in December in the pre-conference workshop sessions, so come along to that if you are in Australia!
Gretchen: I will, alas, not be joining you for that. Someday I’ll get to Australia.
Lauren: Someday, Gretchen, it will happen.
Gretchen: Someday. Okay! So, that’s all really exciting. We also have a Patreon episode this month which is about the eternal question of what is a sandwich?
Lauren: And we put that question to rest once and for all, thanks to semantic theory, particularly prototype theory. One patron said it was their favourite episode yet, which we were totally chuffed by. So that is up on the Patreon for our patrons to listen to.
Gretchen: And we’re really close to the Patreon goal of having full bonus episodes each month, as opposed to the slightly shorter ones that we’ve been doing so far. So if you want to take this opportunity to listen to the back episodes of the bonus ones and get us a little bit closer towards that goal, that would be great.
[Music]
Gretchen: Lauren, what’s up with prepositions? What’s under with prepositions? Are we over prepositions yet?
Lauren: We are going to be across prepositions by the end of this episode, Gretchen.
Gretchen: Prepositions notwithstanding, we are going to be into prepositions by the end of this episode.
Lauren: So to start with examples, maybe, instead of giving you a kind of rote definition of what prepositions are, because people use them all the time, a preposition will be the “in” in something like, “The moose was in the forest.”
Gretchen: Thanks for the very Canadian example, Lauren.
Lauren: You’re welcome.
Lingthusiasm Episode 14: Getting into, up for, and down with prepositions
Are you up for some prepositions? You might think you’re over prepositions, but have you ever really looked into them, or have you just gone by them? Other parts of speech notwithstanding, prepositions are something we’re really down with.
In Episode 14 of Lingthusiasm, your hosts Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne introduce you to our favourite English grammar book, the mammoth, 1800-page Cambridge Grammar of the English Language (affectionately known as CGEL), and take a deep dive into its 60+ pages all about prepositions. We also explore how it is that a grammar can even have sixty pages of things to say about prepositions in a single language and how the tricky edge cases are what makes grammar so interesting. Plus, we look at cousins of the preposition in other languages, like case markers, postpositions, and even circumpositions, why prepositions are complicated to translate, and pied-piping, the prepositional structure named after a fairy tale.
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 is about how linguists solve the divisive question of
what makes a sandwich a sandwich. We introduce prototype theory to solve
sandwiches, explain how bats and penguins relate to the idea of
‘birds’, and explore other meaning questions. You can get access to it
and previous bonuses about discourse markers, language games,
hypercorrection, teaching yourself linguistics, and more by supporting Lingthusiasm on Patreon.
We also now have Lingthusiasm merch! Check out our soft, patterned IPA scarves in red, olive, and navy; shiny Lingthusiasm logo stickers; and mugs, t-shirts, and tote bags that say NOT JUDGING YOUR GRAMMAR, JUST ANALYSING IT at lingthusiasm.com/merch.
Thanks so much to everyone who spent the month recommending and reviewing Lingthusiasm to celebrate our first anniversary this episode! We had the ambitious plan to get the show past 100,000 listens, but we knew we could only do it if you helped to introduce Lingthusiasm to new ears. You stepped up and helped us get there right on schedule! If you left a recommendation or review in public, we’ll thank you by name or pseudonym on our special anniversary post next week. If you recommended us in private, we obviously don’t know about it, but we hope you still feel a warm glow of satisfaction.
Here are the links mentioned in this episode:
- The Cambridge Grammar of English Language
- List of English prepositions
- Japanese postpositions
- Postpositions and case marking
- Polish do and na
- Pied-piping
- A paper arguing that “home” is not in fact a preposition (thanks to Byron Ahn!)
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, 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 producer is Emily Gref, 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.
