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Gretchen: You know how in chemistry you can add drops of a known chemical to a mystery liquid and see if it turns green?

Lauren: This is us getting our linguist lab coats on.

Gretchen: Like, if it turns purple, it’ll tell you whether it’s an acid or a base. In the same way, there’s stuff you can add to sentences that’s a known quantity that behaves in certain ways around constituents, which will tell you about the structure of your sentence.

Lauren: We don’t have something like a Large Hadron Collider to show you around.

Gretchen: More like a Large Hadron Constituencer!

Lauren: Haha, unfortunately we haven’t built one of those to smash words and phrases into each other. But that’s why linguistics is really cool, because you don’t even need the imaginary lab coats that we’re wearing right now, you just need some linguistic intuitions and you can do the science.

Gretchen: You can do the science right now with no fancy equipment! 

Lauren: In the privacy of your own mouth!

Gretchen: In the privacy of your own home, you too can do the science, you don’t need test tubes or safety goggles.

Lauren: Try this at home!

Gretchen: Do try this at home, it’s okay, it won’t break anything.

Lauren: Other than some rules of constituency.

Gretchen: No constituents were harmed in the making of this experiment.

Lauren: There are a whole range of constituency tests that linguists use to figure out whether something as a constituent or not and these are often language dependent. Some of them you can use in a lot of languages, others are really specific to a particular language. 

Gretchen: The core idea of a constituency test is you want to say ‘I’ve got a sentence and I’ve got a couple words in this sentence–’

Lauren: Any individual word is going to be a constituent because you could say it by itself if you want, so that’s not very interesting

Gretchen: But if you’ve got two words or three words or five words, and you want to say ‘Are these words functioning together as a unit or is there some break between them?’ Within a sentence, you’re going to have some groups of words that are more influenced by each other and some that aren’t. What we’re doing is saying ‘okay here’s a group of words that we’re wondering about. Let’s put it through a bunch of other contexts where we know that things that are units do act together and if this one does that too then it is a constituent, and if it doesn’t do that too then it’s not.

Lauren: We need a test subject.

Gretchen: I think we should use ‘time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana.’

Lauren: That is a very excellent set of guinea pigs to bring into the lab space.

Gretchen: Because this will give us some contrast. Let’s say we want to find out if ‘time flies’ is operating together as a single unit, and we will also want to see if ‘fruit flies’ is the same kind of unit.