Lingthusiasm Episode 66: Word order, we love

Let’s say we have the set of words “Lauren”, “Gretchen”, and “visits” and we want to make them into a sentence. The way that we combine these words is going to have a big effect on who’s packing their bags and who’s sitting at home with the kettle on. In English, our two sentences look like “Gretchen visits Lauren” and “Lauren visits Gretchen” – but that’s not the only word order that’s possible. In theory, we could also use other orders, like “Lauren Gretchen visits” or “Visits Gretchen Lauren”, and in fact, many languages do. The only thing that really matters is that for any given language, we all agree on which order means what.

In this episode, your hosts Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne get enthusiastic about how languages put words in a particular order. There are many possibilities, but a few of them show up a lot more than others: “I <3 linguistics” (as in English and Indonesian) and “I linguistics <3″ (as in Turkish and Japanese) are the most common word orders for conveying who did what to who. Another common strategy is using some other way of marking the actor and the acted-upon, which frees up word order for other functions, like indicating the topic of the sentence first (and what you want to comment about it afterwards) – in English, this might be akin to “Linguistics, I <3 it”. We also look at how Yoda maintains his unique approach to word order across a variety of languages, including Hungarian, Japanese, Romanian, and Czech.

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

Announcements:
We’re doing another online Lingthusiasm liveshow on April 9th (Canada) slash 10th (Australia)! (What time is that for me?) It will be a live Q&A for patrons about a fan fave topic: swearing! We’ll be hosting this session on the Lingthusiasm patron Discord server. Become a patron before the event to live-react in the text chat, and it will also be available as an edited-for-legibility recording in your usual Patreon live feed if you prefer to listen at a later date. In the meantime: tell us about your favourite examples of swearing in various languages and we might include them in the show!

LingComm Grants are back in 2022! These are small grants to help kickstart new projects to communicate linguistics to broader audiences. There will be a $500 Project Grant, and ten Startup Grants of $100 each. Apply here by March 31, 2022 or forward this page to anyone you think might be interested, and if you’d like to help us offer more grants, you can support Lingthusiasm on Patreon or contribute directly. We started these grants because a small amount of seed money would have made a huge difference to us when we were starting out, and we want to help there be more interesting linguistics communication in the world.

If you want to help keep our ongoing lingthusiastic activities going, from the LingComm Grants to regular episodes to fun things like liveshows and Q&As, join us on Patreon! As a reward, you will get over 50 bonus episodes to listen to and access to our Discord server to chat with other linguistics nerds. In this month’s bonus episode we get enthusiastic about how linguistic research topics come together! We talk about where our own research came from, figuring out spaces for new questions in the existing literature, and bridging gaps between multiple subject areas and communities. Listen here!

Here are the links mentioned in this episode:

• WALS map of Order of Subject, Object and Verb (SOV, SVO, etc)
• All Things Linguistic post on the I <3 NY meme
• Inuit Sign Language: a contribution to sign language typology
  
• All Things Linguistic post on Yoda’s syntax in languages other than English
• All Things Linguistic post on what baby Yoda’s first words might be
• Why we need a gradient approach to word order
  
• @abenitezburraco tweet about gradient approach to word order
  
• Lingthusiasm episode ‘Pronouns. Little words, big jobs’
• Lingthusiasm episode ‘The verb is the coat rack that the rest of the sentence hangs on’

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.

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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 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).