This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm Episode 29: Hanging out with verbs. 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 29 show notes 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’re getting enthusiastic about verbs and how they make sentences happen. But first, Gretchen’s book has a release date and I’m very excited.

Gretchen: I am so excited. The book is gonna be coming out on July 23rd, 2019. That’s very soon. And you can pre-order it now.

Lauren: I have, maybe, already read the book and I’m so excited too. I’m just – it’s gonna be the thing that I buy everyone for the next year. If you invite me to your birthday party, or your wedding, or your graduation ceremony in the next 12 months, you’ll get a lovely gift-wrapped copy of Gretchen’s book.

Gretchen: Please invite Lauren to everything so she can buy more copies of the book. And you too can pre-order the book by following the links in the description. It’s on the usual places that you get books. Pre-orders are super important because they help the publisher know how many copies to print, which is hopefully lots of copies because the book’s gonna be very popular, we hope.

Lauren: Between your book and Peta’s book, I feel like I’ve learnt so much about this world of non-academic publishing and it’s fascinating. I hadn’t realised just how much pre-orders matter in this thing.

Gretchen: They’re super important. I now need to pre-order everything because of how important I realised it was. It’s kind of fun because it’s like a present from your past self to your future self, because then you get this book that just shows up when it’s out and you don’t have to remember about it.

Lauren: You can use the convenience of Amazon or you can use your local indie book seller if you want to support them.

Gretchen: Yeah! Indie bookstores love pre-orders because it’s also a guaranteed sale for them. You can use sites like IndieBound, which help you find your local indie bookstore to pre-order from. So you can pre-order the book. It’s called Because Internet.

Lauren: Oh, yeah. We should tell people that small detail.

Gretchen: Yeah. It’s called Because Internet. It is a lot easier to search for than the word “Lingthusiasm” because it is composed of two pre-existing English words, not a word we made up.

Lauren: True.

Gretchen: You can search for Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language wherever good books are sold. And, yeah, I’m excited to get to share it with people!

[Music]

Gretchen: Verbs. They’re so great.

Lauren: I really like verbs. They’ve got real personality.

Gretchen: Yeah, I especially like all the stuff you can do to make stuff verbs when it wasn’t trying to be originally.

Lauren: I feel like there’s a lot of grammatical anxiety when you ask people what’s a verb. There’s this instant, like, “Oh, it’s a…it’s a ‘doing’ word.” And that is, sure, that is a definition that might get you so far, but there are so many better definitions.

Gretchen: I first learned about verbs from Mad Libs. Remember those things where they had the blanks and they’d be like “Put in a verb” and then it would be like “Put in an adverb,” “Put in an adjective,” like “I ran down slowly from the treehouse and fell into my fluffy dog” or something like this.

Lauren: But you could say, “I jumped down slowly from the treehouse and hugged my fluffy dog.”

Keep reading

Lingthusiasm Episode 29: The verb is the coat rack that the rest of the sentence hangs on 

Some sentences have a lot of words all relating to each other, while other sentences only have a few. The verb is the thing that makes the biggest difference: it’s what makes “I gave you the book” sound fine but “I rained you the book” sound weird. Or on the flip side, “it’s raining” is a perfectly reasonable description of a general raining event, but “it’s giving” doesn’t work so well as some sort of general giving event. How can we look for patterns in the ways that verbs influence the rest of the sentence? 

In this episode, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch get enthusiastic about a new metaphor for how verbs relate to the other words in a sentence – a verb is like a coat rack and the nouns that it supports are like the coats that hang on it. Admittedly, it creates some slightly odd-looking coat racks that you might not actually want in your home, but as a metaphor it works quite well. (We’ll stick to linguistics rather than becoming furniture designers.) 

We also take you through a brief tour of other metaphors for verbs and sentences, including going across (aka transitivity) and molecular bonds (aka valency).  

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 a recording from our liveshow in Melbourne, Australia, where we talk about how the internet is making English better with real audience laughter occasionally in the background! Feel like you’re in a cosy room of friendly linguistics enthusiasts by supporting Lingthusiasm on Patreon to gain access to this and 23 previous bonus episodes. 

Internet language is also the topic of Gretchen’s book, Because Internet, which is now officially available for preorder! You can show the publisher that people are interested in fun linguistics books and have a delightful treat waiting for you on July 23, 2019 by preordering it here!

Here are the links mentioned in this episode:

• Episode 9: The bridge between words and sentences - Constituency
  
• The basics of arguments (Superlinguo)
• Word order (Superlinguo)
• Dummy pronouns (Wikipedia)
  
• Novel verbs: to internet (All Things Linguistic)
• To verb (All Things Linguistic)
  
• Transitivity (Wikipedia)
  
• Valency changing (Wikipedia)
• Causative (Wikipedia)
• Benefactive (Wikipedia)
• Passive (Wikipedia)
  
• Spray/load alternation (All Things Linguistic)
  

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.

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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 manager is Emily Gref, our editorial producers are A.E. Prévost and Sarah Dopierala, 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).