Posts tagged mirativity

lingthusiasm:

Lingthusiasm Episode 111: Whoa!! A surprise episode??? For me??!!

Wait, surprise is associated with a particular intonation!? Oh, you can see surprise by measuring electricity from your brain!? Hang on, some languages have grammatical marking for surprise!?

In this episode, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch get enthusiastic about surprise. We talk about surprise voice and context, writing surprise with punctuation marks and emoji, anti-surprise and sarcasm, and measuring the special little surprise blip (technically known as the n400) in your brain using an EEG machine. We also talk about grammatically indicating surprise, aka mirativity, and whether that’s its own thing or part of a broader system related to doubt and certainty (spoiler: linguists are still debating this).

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

Announcements:

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In this month’s bonus episode we get enthusiastic about the mysterious Voynich Manuscript with Dr. Claire Bowern! We talk about We talk about what we can actually know about the manuscript for certain: no, it wasn’t created by aliens; yes, it does carbon-date from the early 1400s; and no, it doesn’t look like other early attempts at codes, conlangs, or ciphers. We also talk about what gibberish actually looks like, what deciphering medieval manuscripts has in common with textspeak, why the analytical strategies that we used to figure out Egyptian hieroglyphs from the Rosetta Stone and Linear B from Minoan inscriptions haven’t succeeded with the Voynich Manuscript, and finally, how we could know whether we’ve actually succeeded in cracking it one day.

Join us on Patreon now to get access to this and 100+ 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:

• ‘Intonation and Expectation: English Mirative Contours and Particles’ by Kelsey Kraus
• Kelsey Kraus’ intonationally contoured princess cake
• Etymonline entry for 'surprise’
• 'Tomorrow’s Emoji, Today: Unicode 17.0 Has Arrived’ by Jennifer Daniel
• 'Brainwaves of people with coarse, curly hair are now less hard to read’ by Laura Sanders for Science News Explores
• 'Novel Electrodes for Reliable EEG Recordings on Coarse and Curly Hair’ by A. Etienne, T. Laroia, H. Weigle, A. Afelin, S. K. Kelly, A. Krishnan, and P. Grover
• 'Reading Senseless Sentences: Brain Potentials Reflect Semantic Incongruity’ by Marta Kutas and Steven A. Hillyard
• 'Event-Related Potentials (ERP) explained! | Neuroscience Methods 101’ by Psyched! on YouTube
• Wikipedia entry for 'N400 (neuroscience)’
• Lingthusiasm bonus episode 'Language inside an MRI machine - Interview with Saima Malik-Moraleda’
• Lingthusiasm episode 'Language in the brain - Interview with Ev Fedorenko’
• Wikipedia entry for 'Mirativity’
• 'New Research Article: Looks like a duck, quacks like a hand: Tools for eliciting evidential and epistemic distinctions, with examples from Lamjung Yolmo (Tibetic, Nepal)’ post on Superlinguo
• Wikipedia entry for 'Topic and comment’
• ASL: Topic / Comment

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 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).

Surprise!!