It relieves you from the burden of remembering and keeping track of everything. If you can trust the system, you can let go of the attempt to hold everything together in your head and you can start focusing on what is important:
The content,
the argument and
the ideas.
By breaking down the amorphous task of âwriting a paperâ into small and clearly separated tasks, you can focus on one thing at a time, complete each in one go and move on to the next one . A good structure enables flow, the state in which you get so completely immersed in your work that you lose track of time and can just keep on going as the work becomes effortless (Csikszentmihalyi, 1975). Something like that does not happen by chance.
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Transcript Episode 29: The verb is the coat rack that the rest of the sentence hangs on
This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm Episode 29: Hanging out with verbs. Itâs 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 thatâs enthusiastic about linguistics! Iâm Gretchen McCulloch.
Lauren: And Iâm Lauren Gawne. And today, weâre getting enthusiastic about verbs and how they make sentences happen. But first, Gretchenâs book has a release date and Iâm very excited.
Gretchen: I am so excited. The book is gonna be coming out on July 23rd, 2019. Thatâs very soon. And you can pre-order it now.
Lauren: I have, maybe, already read the book and Iâm so excited too. Iâm just â itâs 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, youâll get a lovely gift-wrapped copy of Gretchenâs 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. Itâs 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 bookâs gonna be very popular, we hope.
Lauren: Between your book and Petaâs book, I feel like Iâve learnt so much about this world of non-academic publishing and itâs fascinating. I hadnât realised just how much pre-orders matter in this thing.
Gretchen: Theyâre super important. I now need to pre-order everything because of how important I realised it was. Itâs kind of fun because itâs like a present from your past self to your future self, because then you get this book that just shows up when itâs out and you donât 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 itâs 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. Itâs called Because Internet.
Lauren: Oh, yeah. We should tell people that small detail.
Gretchen: Yeah. Itâs called Because Internet. It is a lot easier to search for than the word âLingthusiasmâ 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, Iâm excited to get to share it with people!
[Music]
Gretchen: Verbs. Theyâre so great.
Lauren: I really like verbs. Theyâve got real personality.
Gretchen: Yeah, I especially like all the stuff you can do to make stuff verbs when it wasnât trying to be originally.
Lauren: I feel like thereâs a lot of grammatical anxiety when you ask people whatâs a verb. Thereâs this instant, like, âOh, itâs aâŠitâs a âdoingâ word.â 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 theyâd be like âPut in a verbâ and then it would be like âPut in an adverb,â âPut in an adjective,â like âI ran down slowly from the treehouse and fell into my fluffy dogâ or something like this.
Lauren: But you could say, âI jumped down slowly from the treehouse and hugged my fluffy dog.â
Gretchen: Exactly. You could put in these different versions. And it was â I donât know how baby Gretchen learned about parts of speech. Yeah, I have this fun Mad Libs-associated memory of verbs. But, yeah, I think when we get presented with like âHereâs a list of verbs. Hereâs a list of nouns,â it seems like they donât cross over much.
Lauren: And that youâre â it supposes that the way you learn what different verbs are is just to memorise lists, which is a terrible thing to do.
Gretchen: Yeah, itâs not fun at all. I like to think that verbs are things that act like verbs, which of course then brings up the rather large question of âWell, what does it mean to act like a verb?â
Lauren: That is the most circular definition Iâve ever heard. What do you do next if youâve caught yourself in this circle? What is the definition of a verb?
Gretchen: When Iâm trying to figure out âOkay, hereâs this word that Iâm encountering, is it acting like a verb? Can I make it act like a verb?â I put it in a sentence where itâs forced to act like a verb and see what happens.
Lauren: Okay.
Gretchen: If I wanna take â letâs take a brand-new fake word like âblorp.â
Lauren: Great fake word.
Gretchen: You know, hereâs âblorp,â not a pre-existing English word. It sounds like it could be... If I wanna say, âCan âblorpâ be used as a verb,â then I might say something like âI blorped youâ or âIâm blorping right now.â
Lauren: Okay. âI blorped out of the treehouseâ?
Gretchen: âI blorped out of the treehouse and ran down the hill.â And so, the stuff that can fit in this frame, the things that you do with verbs, which is that verbs are the scaffolding or the backbone or the thing that everything else in the sentence can hang onto.
Lauren: Right.
Gretchen: When you use a verb where you have all of these hangers-on, or these other bits of the sentence body, hanging onto them, you can see âOkay, does this sound like the normal use of this word already or does this sound like itâs a new thing that Iâm pushing that word into?â
Lauren: I like this idea of them providing the structure, but I worry, since weâre gonna talk a lot in this episode about rearranging the structure, that maybe using, like, a spine metaphor might be â
Gretchen: A little bit too Frankenstein?
Lauren: â a little bit too gross. Maybe we should go for a metaphor thatâs a little less animate?
Gretchen: Okay, okay. What about a coat rack?
Lauren: Okay, yeah, that could work.
Gretchen: Okay, so, if a verb is like the coat rack and the nouns and the other bits of the sentence are like the coats and stuff that hang on the coat rack â
Lauren: Then different verbs come with different hooks.
Gretchen: Yeah.
Lauren: Yeah, that works.
Gretchen: Iâm into this. Can you put a word in a place where itâs supporting a lot of different other parts of the sentence and does that sound normal, or does that sound like itâs an innovation? If you take a word like âinternet,â for example, and you say, âIâm gonna internet right nowâ or âIâve got a lot of internetting to do,â or âLetâs just internet that and see what the answer is,â thatâs using âinternetâ like a verb. You have this feeling that thatâs a novel thing to do or itâs a relatively new thing to do. And the canonical use of âinternetâ is more like âWhatâs on the internet right nowâ or â
Lauren: âThe internet is messy,â which is, like, a very noun thing.
Gretchen: âThe internet is a weird place.â You know, thatâs a very ânounâ use of âinternet.â You could use it as a verb. You can use anything as a verb if you try hard enough. But the question of âIs it a verb?â is often âIs it a pre-established verb that lots of people use it as a verb or is this a new thing that youâre doing to it thatâs verbing it?â
Lauren: Yeah.
Gretchen: You can verb âverb,â but the word âverbâ is canonically a noun.
Lauren: People get really upset when you talk about verbing stuff.
Gretchen: Yeah, thereâs this Calvin and Hobbes quote, âVerbing weirds language,â which of course is using âweirdâ as a verb. And, again, you can make any word into a verb if you try hard enough. But some words are already pre-packaged as verbs and some you have to put a little bit of effort in.
Lauren: And when you used âblorp,â you said, âIâm blorping right now,â which is like â âIâm blorping.â So thereâs one hook for âIâm.â Whereas I said, âIâm blorping out of the treehouse.â So Iâve got â âIâmâ is one hook and âout of the treehouseâ is another. So weâve used the same â well, weâve possibly used different made-up verbs because we donât really know what âblorpâ means yet. Weâre doing this all backwards.
Gretchen: Well, yeah, more often you start with the meaning. Or if I say, âIâm blorping youâ or âI blorped that to you,â then Iâve got two hooks, âIâ and âyou,â or three hooks âIâm blorping that to you.â We still donât know what âblorpingâ is, but we know that it can support these â you know, if itâs our coat rack, it can support the hooks that contain âIâ and âyouâ and âthat.â
Lauren: Weâve already talked a little bit in Episode 9 about constituency, which is this idea that language isnât just a random throwing-together of words. Itâs not just a bucket of balls. Itâs actually got this structure, and if you have one word, it comes with these other words. Verbs are a really great example of constituency and how just one verb can bring all these other things to the sentence.
Gretchen: Yeah, it can bring them, or it can support them if theyâre already there. Itâs creating this thing that things are mentioned around. I think one of my formative experiences with verbs, after Mad Libs, was when I was studying Latin in high school. One of the things about Latin is that you can put the words in almost any order. Especially in poetry, they really rearrange the words a lot, because you wanna line up the ones that rhyme, or you wanna line up the words for a particular rhythm. And so that means that you can have a verb and its nouns in, like, totally different lines and totally different parts of the sentence. And so youâre trying to figure out when youâre translating Latin poetry â because thatâs what you do in intro Latin class. You donât learn how to, like, ask Caesar where to buy pizza, much as maybe that would be useful. Youâre translating Latin poetry. And youâre going through these lines and being like âHey, I need figure out what the verbs are, how many of them there areâ and, you know, generally, underline them and then figure out which nouns are associated with which verbs. Then I can figure out which adjectives are associated with which nouns and so on down the line, so I can figure out whatâs actually going on in the sentence.
Lauren: And, conveniently, languages have different ways of trying different types of hooks on coat racks, so which ones are the nouns that belong with particular verbs and in what order. I think we should definitely say at the outset that there are lots of different hooks and lots of different ways to arrange them on coat racks both within a particular language and across the worldâs languages.
Gretchen: Yeah, absolutely. I think thinking about this verb-as-coat-rack/noun-as-coats-that-you-can-hook-onto-that is a way of entering into this. Thereâs a huge descriptive tradition of talking about each of these different types of relationships between the number of hooks you can have, and where they are, and what kinds of hooks they are, and what they look like, with all these specific names that are often used there. But itâs easy to get bogged down in terminology and think that you have to memorise all this terminology just in order to understand this central idea, which is that verbs support nouns and verbs create the conditions under which nouns can flourish. You can have some numbers of nouns to do that. I think thatâs the big insight here. And I think you can then walk into the terminology and have a little bit more confidence that you already understand the basic concepts involved.
Lauren: Often, you find that different languages will have the same number of hooks. They might be arranged differently for reasons of the particular word order of a language. So if you speak English, hopefully you can think for yourself the verb is in the middle.
Gretchen: Thereâs this really great example of that that uses the âI [heart] NYâ thing you put on t-shirts.
Lauren: Oh, yeah. Itâs as minimal as possible.
Gretchen: Exactly. So âIâ is the subject. The â[heart]â is the verb. And âNew Yorkâ is the object. English is âI [heart] NY,â and then other languages are âI NY [heart]â or â[Heart] I NYâ and so on and so forth down the line.
Lauren: And languages use other ways of telling which is which. They can go in any order, like Latin. Sometimes, the hooks are in a particular order because the language says that these are the instructions for how to build it. But each verb has its own instructions for how many hooks to start with.
Gretchen: I think that gets us into, initially, what do we mean by ânumber of hooksâ? What are some differences between different types of hook numbers?
Lauren: Okay.
Gretchen: You have your simplest sentence, which is one hook, one noun. These are verbs that support, basically, one noun most of the time. So something like âIâm sleeping,â that supports the âI.â
Lauren: I have to say, if this was an actual coat rack, you are getting a bad deal on your coat rack. You can just use a coat hanger and put that in your closet. You donât need a coat rack.
Gretchen: Yeah, this metaphorical coat rack â like, often, a regular coat rack will actually let you hang six or eight coats. There arenât a lot of sentences that let you do that. This is a metaphorical coat rack with very few hooks.
Lauren: Yeah.
Gretchen: But your simplest metaphorical coat rack has one hook. âI sleep,â âIâm sleeping,â âI dance,â âYou dance,â âThe dog is sleeping,â these are some individual coats that you can hook onto that metaphorical coat rack.
Lauren: Shall we compare that to some that have two, just to give people some contrast? So something like âI ateâ â youâve got here the example âI ate the apple,â but I always use the example âI ate the cakeâ because itâs more real-life.
Gretchen: I support a diet that includes both cake and apples. âThis message brought to you byâŠâ So, âI ate the cake,â âI ate the apple,â both of those â so âcakeâ or âappleâ is the kind of thing that can go on that second hook. Crucially, you can say, âI ate the cake and the apple,â and the âandâ there lets you hang âcakeâ and âappleâ on the same hook. But you canât say something like âI ate the cake the apple.â
Lauren: No.
Gretchen: That just sounds weird.
Lauren: Because youâre trying to add another hook where it shouldnât be.
Gretchen: Youâre trying to cram two coats onto one hook but youâre not giving them any means of relating to each other. Youâre just like âNo, both of you go here!â And itâs like âNo, we canât fit here. Iâm sorry.â But you could do something like âI ateâ â âHave you eaten yet?â âYeah, I ate.â
Lauren: Yeah, obviously implying cake and/or apples but not saying about that.
Gretchen: Or food in general. Some verbs let you imply an object. But, you know, you could say something like, âI ate rocks as a child.â
Lauren: I mean, you could say that.
Gretchen: But if you just say, âI ate,â that doesnât generally imply rocks. It generally implies a sort of food, unless youâre, like, a rock-eating creature from science fiction in which case maybe here itâs okay.
Lauren: So weâve got some one-hooks. Weâve got some two-hooks. Can we get some more hooks happening?
Gretchen: Yeah, so we can get another hook if you have something like âgive.â You can be like âI gave you the cakeâ because Iâm a very nice person.
Lauren: Mmm, thank you, Gretchen.
Gretchen: âI gave you the cakeâ or âI gave the cake to you,â both of which have three hooks to put these three different objects.
Lauren: Or âI sent you a letter.â
Gretchen: âI sent you a letter.â Thank you.
Lauren: More realistically, âI sent you a text message.â
Gretchen: Weâre updating examples for the 21st century. âI sent you a letter,â âI sent you a postcard,â âI sent you a DM on Twitter,â these are different kinds of hooks that you can have on âsendâ or âgive.â
Lauren: It would be weird to say, âI sent you.â I mean you could say that, but it means something very different. I made you go somewhere.
Gretchen: Yeah, âI sent you,â or something like âI sent you to the store to buy more cake.â Thereâs âI sent you to the storeâ â âto the storeâ is kind of interesting here because I could just say, âI sent you,â but I also have this option of adding on something â âto the store,â âI sent you a message on Monday.â
Lauren: Yeah.
Gretchen: Thereâs these additional sorts of things you could add on, but they arenât required.
Lauren: The hooks are very fixed into the coat rack. These are more like â just think extra hangers.
Gretchen: Yeah, okay. You can drape extra hangers on your coat rack. I like how this metaphorâs going.
Lauren: This is a much more realistic coat rack all of a sudden.
Gretchen: Iâm really glad we didnât do the Frankenstein thing. It becomes a bit of a messy coat rack like many of us probably have at home. The stuff like âon Monday,â âto the store,â âwith great alacrity,â you can drape extra things onto a sentence indefinitely. You can just keep piling stuff on there, but it only comes with a few hooks that are actually screwed into the coat rack itself.
Lauren: So thereâs a few fixed things but then we can just keep adding and enriching.
Gretchen: And the same thing goes â you know, âI gave you a book cake.â
Lauren: âBook cakeâ? Like a cake made out of books or a book about cakes?
Gretchen: So this is the thing. If we can figure out a way to bundle together âbook cake,â like, maybe itâs a cake that looks like a book, then we can hang those both on the same hook. But if we canât figure out how to bundle them together like âI gave you a book on cakeâŠâ
Lauren: No, I canât even fabricate a meaning for that.
Gretchen: Then those arenât hanging on the hook together properly. This is what we mean when we say a verb tends to have a specific number of nouns that it goes with.
Lauren: Itâs an ungrammatical coat rack.
Gretchen: The anti-grammatical coat rack. The other one that I really love is coat racks â okay, you probably canât get this at Ikea, but you can get a metaphorical sentence coat rack with no hook at all.
Lauren: Uh, okay? Thatâs just called a pole, Gretchen.
Gretchen: Definitely donât try to buy this. Itâs gonna be pretty useless for you. But sentence-wise itâs very interesting because you can get verbs like âItâs raining.â
Lauren: True.
Gretchen: If I say, âItâs a cake,â that oneâs pretty good. We know what âitâ is, âThis is a cakeâ or something like this, or âYouâre a cake,â which is probably an insult? I donât know.
Lauren: Iâm okay with being a cake.
Gretchen: But thatâs a real âitâ there. Itâs doing something. But if I say, âItâs raining,â I canât say, âYouâre raining.â
Lauren: That is true.
Gretchen: Or âYouâre snowing,â or, you know, âThe dog is raining.â
Lauren: âItâ is not a regular coat compared to âdogâ or âyouâ or these other nouns that are proper coats that we can hang on a hook. But âitâ is â
Gretchen: Maybe itâs like one of those fake rain-ponchos that doesnât really work like a coat but you keep it around in your purse in a little plastic container just in case you need a bad coat.
Lauren: Awkwardly hang it on your hookless â and we know that English is weird in terms of this using what I call âDummy It.â I mean, not me personally, thatâs just how I learnt about it. But this âDummy Itâ form is just there because ârainâ as a verb doesnât have any hooks and English freaks out and goes âOh, Iâd better add something. Itâs just a pole. I need to make it look like a coat rack.â
Gretchen: This is the thing thatâs interesting about verbs in particular is that this is how we know that ârainâ is still a verb even though itâs not actually supporting any real nouns because it has to support a fake noun because a verbâs like, âI just need a noun.â
Lauren: âI wouldnât be a coat rack. Iâd be a pole!â
Gretchen: âJust pretend that oneâs there even if itâs not really there.â But you get all sorts of other things happening with words like this in other languages. In some languages that donât actually require you to have a pronoun like âitâ â so in Spanish you can say, âllueve,â which just means ârains.â
Lauren: Okay.
Gretchen: Thatâs all you need. And itâs still got that, like, itâs still got the ending that youâd have if it was âheâ or âsheâ or âit rains.â Itâs just that that âheâ or âsheâ or âitâ doesnât actually refer to a specific person in the same way that âItâs rainingâ doesnât refer to a specific person.
Lauren: Right. Whereas, I had the opposite when I learnt Nepali. I had to remember that to say, âItâs raining,â you have to say, âPani pardaicha,â which is âRain is fallingâ or âRain is raining.â
Gretchen: Ah, âRain is raining.â So you do need a real noun there. It just has to be always the same noun.
Lauren: Well, because you can also say, âItâs snowingâ or âItâs some otherâ â
Gretchen: Is that like âSnow is snowingâ or âsnow is rainingâ?
Lauren: âSnowâ is just a kind of general âfalling/precipitatingâ verb. But you have to specify an actual â you have to have a real coat, a real noun there.
Gretchen: Kind of like âThe sun is outâ versus âThe clouds are out.â Whereas, the âis outâ isnât doing much or something like that.
Lauren: And then you have the opposite. In English you could have a sentence like âBlood rains down on the city.â
Gretchen: Thatâs a very post-apocalyptic sentence.
Lauren: For someone who didnât want the spine metaphor, Iâll just go straight into the emo dystopia.
Gretchen: Thatâs another reason you know that rain is a real verb sometimes because sometimes you could have something rain or like âTears rained down my face.â
Lauren: Aw, also cheerful. Gosh. Our novel is gonna be so compelling.
Gretchen: Well, this is kind of interesting because when I was learning German, I also learned about this thing you can do in German, and presumably in some other languages but not English, where you can make these what they called âImpersonal Constructions,â but for other verbs that arenât weather verbs. So in German you can say, âes wurde getanzt,â which means something like âThere was dancingâ or âIt danced.â
Lauren: Well, thatâs nice.
Gretchen: And that means âPeople danced/We danced/There was dancing in the rain,â maybe. This doesnât mean in the same way that â itâs kind of impersonal so when you translate it in English you use one of these various constructions. But in structure, itâs a lot more parallel to âEs regnetâ â âIt rains.â
Lauren: Hmm, cool. So, again, different languages have slightly different approaches to the coat rack and the number of hooks.
Gretchen: But theyâre all reflecting this idea that there isnât necessarily a real person happening here. You can do a similar thing, Iâm thinking of your Nepali example with â so some verbs in English that normally only have, really, one hook can in some contexts get a second one but only a specific one. So you can say, âIâm sleeping.â You canât normally âsleep something.â Like, I canât say, âI slept a nap.â
Lauren: No. I mean, you could, but Iâm gonna flag that as not likely to be grammatical.
Gretchen: Yeah, maybe I could try. But you can say, âI slept the sleep of the just.â
Lauren: True.
Gretchen: Or âI dreamed a dream of infamy.â I donât know why Iâm really pretentious right now.
Lauren: Because thatâs the only thing you can do if you wanna add more hooks to âsleep.â
Gretchen: Yeah, like âI dreamed a dream of times gone by,â which I think is a line from Les Mis. You can only âdream a dream.â You can âsleep a sleep.â Can I ânap a nap?â I donât think so.
Lauren: I donât think so.
Gretchen: Thereâs limitations on what you can do with it, but you can add this extra hook, but itâs a fake hook that only gets one thing on it.
Lauren: Okay, so weâve got our one-hook, two-hook, three-hook â our one-hook includes our weird Dummy-It-hook.
Gretchen: Zero-hook.
Lauren: Zero-ish-hook. Can we add more? Can we get to four?
Gretchen: Yeah, I was looking at examples of this and there is a four-hook one. Some people analyse the English for âbetâ as having four hooks. You could say, âI bet you five dollars on Usain Bolt that heâll win the race.â
Lauren: Okay, he was the only sportsperson that both Gretchen and I could identify off the top of our heads where you would say, âLauren bet five dollars onâŠâ
Gretchen: I mean, I could bet you five dollars on Usain Bolt, but I think you would not take this bet because probably heâs gonna win.
Lauren: Probably, yeah.
Gretchen: You can bet a person money on another person, or thing, or animal, or something that might win. And it seems like âbetâ can maybe accomplish this.
Lauren: Because âI bet youâ â so âIâ and âyou,â thatâs two. âFive dollarsâ is another coat. I mean, itâs a cheap coat but, you know. And then âUsain Boltâ is a very fancy coat.
Gretchen: Very fast coat.
Lauren: Very fancy coat.
Gretchen: It seems like maybe up to four. Again, I wouldnât necessarily buy this coat rack at Ikea because even four hooks is not that many.
Lauren: But it does show you that verbs come with all this structure. Just a single three-letter word like âbetâ can potentially come with up to four other bits of information built into the structure.
Gretchen: Exactly. And, without âbet,â this whole sentence isnât working. If I just say, âI you five dollars on Usain Bolt,â this is not working.
Lauren: Again, gonna point out, probably not grammatical.
Gretchen: Whereas, something like âI bet you five dollarsâ or âI bet five dollars on Usain Boltâ or âBetcha five dollars on Usain Bolt,â if you drop one of these nouns, itâs not as much of a problem.
Lauren: Yeah.
Gretchen: Whereas, the verb is really providing the scaffolding, or the support, or the hooks, for the rest of the sentence to happen.
Lauren: Weâve been talking about coat racks and hooks, but you may actually recognise the terminology that all this refers to, which is âtransitivity.â Itâs a verb-y word that comes up when people learn grammar.
Gretchen: Yeah, âtransitivityâ takes as a metaphor that a sentence goes across because this is from the Latin word âto go across/to translate/to transport.â It goes across from the subject to the object. If you have a transitive sentence, it goes âI see the book,â or a sentence that doesnât go across â âI slept.â Thatâs a core metaphor when it comes to transitivity. Itâs just that this metaphor has a bit of a difficult time with the sentences that have zero hooks, and four hooks, and some of these further expansions beyond what the original grammatical tradition had. So weâre looking at it with a different metaphor.
Lauren: Once we have a verb, we can get an idea for how many hooks it probably has as a default, but that doesnât mean we canât rearrange the hooks. Our coat rack is actually quite modular and flexible, and we can play around with it, which is a lot of fun.
Gretchen: Yeah, this is the DIY home-improvement project. One of my favourites is you can say something like âI made you read the book.â In contrast to regular âI read the book/You read the book,â âI made you read the book,â this âmakeâ is just introducing another hook. You have âI made you read the book.â Now you have three hooks on a verb that formerly only had two.
Lauren: We can add hooks that way. Thereâs another way to add a hook, which is to say, âI baked a cake for you, Gretchen.â
Gretchen: Oh, thank you. Thank you.
Lauren: By adding the âforâ there, Iâve added another reason to have a hook.
Gretchen: âI made you bake a cake for me.â
Lauren: Weâre adding hooks all over the place.
Gretchen: Now weâve got four hooks! You can just keep adding them on top of each other.
Lauren: In English we use verbs to do this, but just to specify why weâre calling this âadding hooksâ is because in other languages they donât necessarily use other verbs to make these extra hooks appear. They use bits of morphemes and bits of words.
Gretchen: Yeah, in English we use a verb to make someone, cause something to do something â âI made you bake the cakeâ or âI caused you to bake the cake.â But when I bake the cake âfor you,â I added that with a preposition.
Lauren: True.
Gretchen: Those look like theyâre different ways of adding things, but in some languages all of those different types of meaning are expressed by, say, adding one of the same type of little particle, or adding one of the same type of little affix onto the verb. There are good reasons to group them together when you consider languages as a group.
Lauren: Not just English. Weâre not just thinking about English coat racks today.
Gretchen: Yeah, this is the kind of thing when you group them all together, it pays out in the long run.
Lauren: You have another form of adding hooks that I had never heard of this terminology before, but I love it and weâre just gonna tell people what the terminology is.
Gretchen: So the terminology for this one â the other ones have complicated-sounding names like âcausativeâ and âbenefactive,â which, like, itâs fine. Theyâre useful if you know Latin. But these ones are called the âSpray/Load Alternation.â And what I love about the Spray/Load Alternation is it contains examples right in the name, which I think more words should do. So you can say something like âI sprayed the walls with paintâ or âI sprayed paint onto the walls.â
Lauren: Hmm, yeah, true.
Gretchen: Or say something like âI loaded the truck with hay,â âI loaded hay onto the truck.â In both cases you have two main hooks.
Lauren: âI sprayed the wallsâ or âI sprayed paint.â
Gretchen: Yeah. And you have one additional hook thatâs like our coat rack hook thatâs being added on like âwith paintâ or âonto the walls.â But you can alternate which one you want to make the main hook thatâs attached to the coat rack proper and the one thatâs, like, the more peripheral one thatâs your coat hanger one thatâs further away with the preposition there. Thereâs a whole list of words that have this alternation. Itâs kind of nifty that thereâs just a couple dozen words in English that do this kind of thing. There are people who, you know, go through and make lists of the words that belong to different types of categories like this because you want to maybe use them in psycholinguistic experiments. Or you can test what happens if you give people certain types of pictures. What do they look at first? If you give them âI sprayed the walls with paintâ versus âI sprayed paint onto the walls,â you can give them the same drawing and see where they look first and these kinds of things.
Lauren: Those examples are about adding hooks or deciding whatâs a hook and whatâs a coat hanger. It is also possible to remove hooks from sentences. If I have something like âI broke the /vÉz/â â Gretchen would have âI broke the /veÉȘs/,â I believe.
Gretchen: Yeah, I think Iâd say, âI broke the /veÉȘs/,â
Lauren: Weâll say thatâs the same sentence. So âI broke the vase,â âIâ and âthe vase,â Iâve got two coats hanging up there. But if I had a sentence like âThe vase was broken,â who knows how!
Gretchen: Maybe it was the dog. Maybe it was me.
Lauren: I canât tell because I donât have that second hook anymore. Iâve only got one for the vase.
Gretchen: Yeah, and so being able to demote hooks, and unscrew them, and take them off, and throw them away. Or you can say something like âThe /vÉz/ brokeâ â âThe /veÉȘs/ broke.â I donât know. I say both. âThe vase broke,â this could imply that maybe it just got too old and brittle and it spontaneously broke. Maybe no one particularly did it.
Lauren: I really love this alibi youâre building, Gretchen.
Gretchen: You know, Iâm just saying⊠it wasnât me. Yeah, so this ability to promote and demote things, which I think is super important because we donât often say sentences in a complete vacuum. Thatâs the kind of thing that happens in, like, psycholinguistic experiments. You bring people into the lab. You play them a sentence. You show them a picture. And you say, âWhat does this mean? Press a button.â
Lauren: It always looks very nice in a linguistics textbook, and then you actually speak in the real world.
Gretchen: Yeah, and in the real world, most of the time we say things with an established set of context. We have a story weâre already bringing a sentence into. And that story already has people that are more and less important, or already has people that are more and less familiar. In a story, we wanna highlight who is given information and who is not given information, who is already interesting to us for the purpose of the story, who isnât. If the storyâs about, you know, âHereâs all these types of things about the vaseâ versus if the storyâs about âHereâs all the trouble my dog got into,â we might want to highlight different things.
Lauren: So we might want to hang the vase more prominently or make the hook for the dog more prominent.
Gretchen: Yeah, exactly. Or you can picture, I donât know, like, a museum inscription is gonna be like âWell, this vase clearly broke a hundred years ago. We can tell that by the cracks on it. Blah blah blahâŠâ But maybe the museum doesnât know who broke it. So it wouldnât make sense to be like âSomeone clearly broke this vase. Someone or something unknown clearly broke this vase a hundred years ago. We can tell this by the cracks.â The important part here is this is the description of the vase. But in other circumstances, we might want to highlight that. I think thereâs this bigger question, âOkay, so verbs can support this whole scaffolding or this whole coat rack of a sentence, but what does it mean to have different types of hooks? Why would we want to be able to shuffle around how the coats are arranged on this metaphorical coat rack?â
Lauren: I think itâs also important that we have one flexible coat rack instead of many different coat racks for every single context. For some verbs we do have this. So if you think about, like, the similarity or difference between âkillâ and âdie.â If someone dies, then you have one hook. And if someone kills another person, you have two hooks.
Gretchen: I canât say, âI died you.â
Lauren: No.
Gretchen: Unless it means, like, I changed the colour of you. But thatâs a completely different word.
Lauren: Thatâs a completely different coat rack this time.
Gretchen: Whereas, I can say, âI killed you.â Itâs harder to say, âI killed.â That implies I killed someone or something.
Lauren: Yes, it always implies that thereâs a second hook thatâs being removed. Imagine if for every single verb every time we wanted to add a hook or remove a hook, we needed a completely different word. Itâs okay with a handful. English can cope with a handful. Other languages might have a handful. Or we might have verbs that â in some languages âkillâ and âdieâ are pretty much the same verb with some of those different extra affixes or particles you talked about.
Gretchen: So you could do something like âI caused you to dieâ or âI made you die,â which then means âI killed you.â
Lauren: In Syuba, one of the languages I work with, the verb for âto scatter,â like âto scatter grains,â is just âI caused grain to fall.â
Gretchen: Okay, yeah. This works.
Lauren: Using that âI made itâ hook to create an extra hook. And so in some languages, things that are two different coat racks are just the same coat rack. But imagine if all languages had â
Gretchen: Every single verb had a completely different form like âkillâ versus âdie,â or like âpushâ versus âfall.â In some languages âto push somethingâ is just âI caused it to fall.â
Lauren: Exactly.
Gretchen: And, again, imagine if every single pair of words instead of saying, âI caused it to fall,â âI caused you to bake a cake for me,â I had to say instead of âyou bake a cake for meâ â âYou âblorpâ a cake for me.â Thatâs a completely different word.
Lauren: That is the best definition.
Gretchen: To âblorpâ is to cause someone to make a cake for someone?
Lauren: Yeah. That is correct.
Gretchen: Yeah, so you had to change it completely. And âblorpâ is sounding similar to âbake,â but we know that âpushâ and âfall,â and âkillâ and âdieâ donât sound at all similar to each other.
Lauren: Yeah.
Gretchen: This is gonna be like âflorpâ or something like this. So you were talking about earlier how the words in a sentence arenât just little balls in a jar where they all just go in and tumble around with each other.
Lauren: No, they have this wonderful coat rack structure.
Gretchen: Or they could have another type of structure which Iâve started thinking about, which is, do you know those little plastic balls and beads and rods that you can get from, like, chemistry sets?
Lauren: Ah, I always liked â it was one of the fun things about chemistry, how visual it was.
Gretchen: Yeah, so you could connect oxygen and hydrogen, and you make H2O. And you have, like, two hydrogen molecules connected to the one oxygen and these kinds of things.
Lauren: I mean, itâs been a long time since Iâve done chemistry so Iâm probably just gonna agree with whatever you say here.
Gretchen: Yeah, itâs been a long time since I did chemistry as well. But I was thinking about it because different types of atoms like oxygen and hydrogen have different ways of connecting with each other that are characteristic of those atoms. You can make these kinds of connections between those little balls in a way thatâs similar to how you can make connections between how nouns connect onto verbs to form sentences.
Lauren: Ah, yeah.
Gretchen: Like, you have little sentence molecules.
Lauren: True.
Gretchen: A sentence is just a word molecule.
Lauren: I like that.
Gretchen: Yeah, and it turns out that Iâm not the first person to notice this connection because thereâs a term for this type of phenomenon, which is âvalency,â which is used in both chemistry and linguistics.
Lauren: Huh. I mean, I know the word âvalencyâ and I just never, ever thought about how thatâs also the word that they use for molecules in chemistry.
Gretchen: Yeah, so this goes back to the 1800s when some linguist was looking over at chemistry and being like, âTheyâre doing all this stuff with valency about how little things connect with each other, but what if we borrowed this metaphor over here?â And now weâve forgotten that these were once really connected.
Lauren: Who was that?
Gretchen: This was Charles S. Peirce â
Lauren: Ah, there we go.
Gretchen: â who wrote a paper in 1897 about the connection here. And then it comes up in linguistics again a few decades later. Thereâs this connection between, âOkay, how many other atoms can connect to this oneâ and âhow many other words can glom onto this sentence? How many nouns can we have on this verb?â
Lauren: We need little, like, verb-diagram structures the way that chemistry has those little atom structures.
Gretchen: Yeah, because you can draw them both on paper. You can draw atom bonds on paper, and you can draw syntax trees to draw the connections between the words. But chemistry gets these great plastic, manipulatable tools.
Lauren: We should sell little mini coat racks, Gretchen.
Gretchen: Oh my gosh. New business plan. Little mini coat racks to draw your sentence trees on.
Lauren: That would be delightful.
Gretchen: Thatâs definitely what weâre not gonna do.
[Music]
Lauren: For more Lingthusiasm, and links to all the things mentioned in this episode, go to lingthusiasm.com. You can listen to us on Apple Podcasts, iTunes, Google Podcasts, Spotify, SoundCloud, or wherever else you get your podcasts. And you can follow @Lingthusiasm on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Tumblr. You can get IPA scarves, IPA ties, and other Lingthusiasm merch at lingthusiasm.com/merch. I tweet and blog as Superlinguo.
Gretchen: And I can be found as @GretchenAMcC on Twitter, my blog is AllThingsLinguistic.com. To listen to bonus episodes, and help keep the show ad-free, go to patreon.com/lingthusiasm or follow the links from our website. Recent bonus topics include a video Q&A episode, given names, and a recording of our liveshow from Australia about how the internet is making English better. Canât afford to pledge? Thatâs okay too. We also really appreciate it if you can recommend Lingthusiasm to anyone who needs a little more linguistics in their life.
Lauren: Lingthusiasm is created and produced by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our audio producer is Claire Gawne, our editorial producers are A.E. Prevost and Sarah Dopierala, and our editorial manager is Emily Gref. Our music is âAncient Citiesâ by The Triangles.
Gretchen: Stay lingthusiastic!
[Music]
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
I just want to say one thing: there is nothing inherently wrong with being wrong. Itâs ok to admit you were wrong or ill-informed about a topic. Itâs not an admission of defeat. The pursuit of knowledge and truth isnât a competition; there is no shame or failure in recognizing an ideology you once held is incorrect/u substantiated. Someone who is truly invested in the pursuit of knowledge wonât be deterred or upset by being proven wrong. If you are dedicated to learning, being provided with information, even if itâs contrary to a previously held belief, wonât offend of upset you. Itâs not embarrassing to be wrong about something. Accept that you were incorrect, and adjust your thinking accordingly. Thatâs all it takes. Being wrong is not a value statement or judgement of your character; you were just ill informed, and now youâve been given better/more correct information. Thatâs all it is.
Too many times I ave seen people become enraged or embarrassed when their ideology or assertion is proven incorrect or ill informed; that reaction is unnecessary. No one can be correct 100% of the time, and you shouldnât hold yourself to that standard. Being incorrect is not shameful. What is shameful is being provided proper evidence contrary to your ideology and reacting with rage, frustration, and digging in your heels. It is most definitely shameful to hold tighter to a belief or ideology when said ideology or belief is proven wrong by copious amounts of evidence. Academia and education is not stagnant. Be willing and open to being proven wrong. The only shame you should feel when proven wrong is the shame that comes from maintaining a belief that has been proven time and again to be incongruent with reality.
Itâs a state of being both an insider and an outsider. The sad truth is that many people (especially men) are actually feminists but are avoiding âthe labelâ associated with the âcrazy, man hating, bra burningâ stereotype. In order to change minds, you may need to restructure your arguments to be more effective, in order to help them realize that they are in fact a feminist. Many argue that we âno longer need feminismâ but forget that it not only makes gains for women but prevents society to reverting to archaic limiting of a womanâs free will. Being against feminism means youâre against freedom, plain and simple. Take arguments like these where you reword some of the now meaningless stock phrases like âoppressionâ to words that resonate more with them such as âlimited freedom.â Whenever someone says âpeople died in wars for your freedom and youâre going around and [dressing and identifying how you want to be]â and remind them that youâre expressing your fought-for freedom. This is a country where you should be able to express yourself however you want (so long as itâs not too obscene for whatever setting) and thatâs exactly what weâve âfought forâ and striven to be a beacon of. Itâs freedom of speech. And no true American should be opposed to that.
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Thatâs a big promise up there in the title of this post. I will deliver on that promise in just a moment, but let me just make clear what Iâm not promising. Iâm not about to give you âtwo weird tricks to ace Reading Comp.â Iâm not âthe guy the makers of the LSAT hate.â What Iâm going to give you is a broad understanding of what youâre being asked to understand â and, just as importantly, what youâre not being asked to understand â in a Reading Comp passage.
Itâs all about argument structure. Three quarters of the exam â Reading Comprehension and the two Logical Reasonings sections â test exactly one thing. They test your understanding of argumentation. They come at that concept in a number of different ways, but this makes perfect sense because law school and the practice of law focus almost exclusively on making oneâs own arguments and undermining the arguments of oneâs opponent.
Reading Comprehension passages are analogues to judicial opinions, which will be the primary instrument with which your professors torture you. In a judicial opinion, itâs most often the case that the judge (really, the judgeâs clerk, but whoâs keeping track?) will lay out the arguments of plaintiff(s) and defendant(s), and usually the judge will accept one argument and reject the other. Thatâs why the most common passage type, by far, is what we here at Blueprint call an Antithesis passage. There are two points of view that are at odds with one another, even though those points of view rarely involve legal issues. Usually there is what we call a present author, meaning that the author decides that one of those two points of view is correct.
Thatâs the big picture stuff, but the slightly smaller picture is understanding how arguments work. An argument really consists of just two parts: a conclusion, which is a thing someone is trying to prove, and at least one premise, which is support for a conclusion. A very brief argument might look like this:
Conclusion: Smoking causes cancer.
Premise: Several studies showed higher rates of cancer among smokers than among nonsmokers.
Obviously, it will be more complicated than this in a Reading Comprehension passage, but thatâs what you need to keep your eye on. Answer these three questions, and youâve got Reading Comp in the bag:
(1) What conclusions are asserted?
(2) What is the support for each?
(3) Which conclusion, if any, does the author agree with.
Itâs NOT about subject matter. Passages range from the hunting habits of the duck-billed Platypus to the writing style of Willa Cather to the effect of the Cultural Revolution on Chinese art. None of these are related in the least to one another, nor are they related to the practice of law. So donât get caught up in the details. That is to say, a significant portion of most passages is background on the subject matter of the passage. While you certainly need to understand whatâs being said subject matter-wise to understand the arguments, that background takes a backseat to the arguments being made.
Knowing what the makers of the LSAT do and donât care about will help you anticipate the questions coming at you, as well as their answers, which will help you answer questions accurately and, perhaps even more importantly, answer them quickly.
How To Do Reading Comprehension was originally published on LSAT Blog
Youâve been practicing your reading every day for the past two months, reading every âWarning: Slippery Floorâ sign and nutritional label at the grocery store, but lo and behold, test day comes, and you get a reading passage with difficult subject matter. Itâs something science-y, where every other word in the first paragraph is followed by a comma and its definition. (For you science and engineering nerds, youâll have hit jackpot, but, odds are, if youâre thinking of going to law school, that general area isâŠnot your forte.) What do you do?
1. Donâts
First, some things not to do:
a. Lose your mind. A nasty passage is to be expected. You will have confronted this situation before in homework and in practice exams, and you should be expecting it. You can only be hurt by getting thrown off your game.
b. Read as fast as you can, have no clue what youâre reading, and, oh, thank God, youâre on the next reading passageâcan we just forget the previous passage ever happened? While this approach will perhaps free up time to work on the other three passages, you might as well just not spend any time reading the passage and guess on all the questions, because youâll get just as many answers right.
c. Read very, very carefully, and try to memorize every definition, so you can have some clue what is going on. Focusing on understanding everything seems like a good idea, but itâs not. By test day, a major skill you should have is picking out the items that will likely get questions and not wasting precious brainwaves on the other stuff.
2. Maintain composure. This is very closely related to item 1(a) above, but letâs just look at it in a positive light. Youâre going to beat that reading passage byâI pulled the following from a shirt, by the wayâKeeping Calm and Reading On (the way youâd do with any other passage). Remember: youâre reading a passage thatâs designed for LSAT-takers and not for those registered in Bio 432 or whatever advanced Hard Subject Matter you didnât take.
3. Read, as you always do, primarily for argument structure. You donât need to understand the mechanics of the complicated thingamabobsâyou just need to understand the argument the author is making. How to dissect the structure of an argument is the same regardless of how incomprehensible the subject matter may seem. Go forth and pull out the subject matter, author viewpoint, and tag as you would any other reading passage.
4. Find and note definitions of difficult words and concepts. What about those key words that just make no sense? Itâs impossible to do a reading passage if you struggle over half the words, right? The writers behind the LSAT know this, so they define those pesky words, and this is when tagging and marking comes in. Make sure to tag new words when they first appear. The LSAT writers love throwing in a question or two on the meaning of a difficult term. Plus, you can go back to the definition whenever the word pops up again in the passage.
It might still be hard to keep track of all of those definitions when youâre trying to describe an authorâs viewpoint or the main point of the passage. Just remember that the LSAT writers arenât going to throw you viewpoints and main points way out of left field just because itâs a difficult subject matter. The author will still usually be for or against something, agreeing/disagreeing with someone, arguing that the old/new way is betterâyou get the idea. Donât let the terminology and subject matter throw you off. The key to tackling a reading passage with difficult subject matter is to accept that you wonât fully understand the subject matter after reading it, but that doesnât mean you wonât be able to master the reading passage.
How to Tackle Brutal Reading Comp Passages was originally published on LSAT Blog