#ling 101

Gretchen: I need to check some of the accuracy of these sentences. But a sentence does not have to be true to be a linguistic example sentence. If you’re thinking, “Oh, I’m really excited about linguistics from micro to macro,” we also do organise Lingthusiasm episodes on our website by topics as well. You can group them together and listen to all of the sounds’ ones together or all of the words’ ones or grammatical ones together if you wanna approach Lingthusiasm episodes in that more structural way. It’s just something that we keep returning to because even after 100 episodes, we still have lots of future topics that we haven’t gotten to yet.

Lauren: So many. Also, as we’re going from micro to macro, that is a whole lot of different layers of language. That’s a whole lot of different structure. One of the joys of Lingthusiasm, rather than an actual LING 101, is there’s exam at the end of this episode, so there’s no requirement to memorise all the terminology as we sail through so many areas of linguistics.

Gretchen: If you want a more formalised lecture-style introduction to linguistics, another option is that we collaborated a few years ago on a Crash Course Linguistics. There’s these 16 10-minute videos that also go through linguistics at various levels if you like a style where you can see some illustrations of examples, some really fun animations that we did not make, but some very skilled animators at Crash Course did. That’s another way of doing this more structural approach to things.

Lauren: Let’s start with the smallest individual units.

Gretchen: These are the individual sounds or signs that themselves have an even smaller set of structural properties between them. If you think of something like the M in “moon” versus the N in “moon” – /m/ versus /n/ – these are two sounds that are found in English and a lot of languages around the world. They contrast in one particular way, and that’s where the closure in your mouth happens. If you make a /m/ sound and a /n/ sound, you can see that your lips are closing for the M, and your tongue is at the front part of the roof of your mouth, right behind your teeth, for an N. But they both have a full closure of your mouth, and your air going through your nose, compared to something like P and T, which have your mouth making the same closures, but this time the air is exiting through your mouth instead of through your nose.

Lauren: Spoken languages are manipulating mouths, lips, tongues, teeth. Signed languages are manipulating hands and other parts of the body to articulate differences between different signs. Some of those major features are the shape that your hand is in, the orientation and location of your hand, and any movement that gets made. Just like /m/ and /n/, you can have two signs that only vary in one particular like variable of that set.

Gretchen: For example, in ASL (American Sign Language), you have a pointing index figure towards the middle of your chest, which means “me” or “I,” compared to “my,” which is done with an open or flat hand.

Lauren: Oh, it’s a closed fist when I learnt it in Auslan, but I did go check to add the [Global] Signbank entry for this episode, and there is a version where you can have the open palm as well.

Gretchen: Ah, okay, so those are two signs that are virtually identical except for the hand shape, which is the thing that’s modified, compared to “you,” where you’re pointing out towards someone else, and that’s a difference in orientation and location because it’s the same hand, but at a different spot.

Lauren: Auslan and American Sign Language are from completely different sign families. They just happen to have the same forms there. But you can get hand shapes in some sign languages that aren’t in others. I think maybe it was the Taiwanese, Donkey-Kong-in-line president that made me think of this, but Taiwanese Sign has an extended ring finger as a shape that can get used in Taiwanese signs, but that’s not a hand shape you can use in Auslan.

Gretchen: I’ve never seen it in ASL either. You could do an extended index finger or extended pinky finger. Obviously, the extended middle finger in Western contexts has a certain additional semiotic value, which is also sometimes used in sign languages, but in this relatively restricted meaning. But the extended ring finger, I’ve never seen it. This is how and where the hands are positioned, how and where the mouth and the throat muscles and little flappy bits are positioned, it creates a finite set of ingredients that we can make into a much larger set of words.

Lauren: You can list all of the individual sounds in a language. In fact, for spoken languages, there’s the International Phonetic Alphabet, which maps out the whole possibility space of what we think human languages can do with the meat pipe of the human vocal tract. That’s why it hasn’t changed much in the recent couple of decades because we have a generally good sense of all the different things you can do with that system.

Gretchen: It really is constrained by human anatomy. Different languages will pick different subsets of that larger list.

Lauren: To be honest, there’s a lot of terminology in that set, but once you get past having an exam where you have to memorise IPA (if you have that for any undergraduate subject) – every linguist I know has a photocopy of the IPA on their wall.

Gretchen: On their wall or in the front of their planner or something like that that you can just refer to it to check on the ones that you need to know. We also made IPA posters a few years back that people can get that have some fun colours on them.

Lauren: We did.

Gretchen: But there are a few common symbols of the International Phonetic Alphabet that everyone’s pretty familiar with like the schwa. We did a whole episode about only the schwa sound, the /ə/, in “sofa,” or reduced forms, like if you say, “the linguistics professor,” the /ðə/ there, you’re not saying a full /ðɛ/.

Lauren: /təmaɹoʊ/. /tədɛɪ/.

Gretchen: “Tomorrow,” “Today.” Compared to /tʊmaɹoʊ/ and /tʊdɛɪ/.

Lauren: I like to think of them as – things like schwa and the glottal stop are like the charismatic megafauna of phonetic symbols.

Gretchen: The charismatic “megaphones.”

Lauren: Yes, actually, even better.

Gretchen: It really sounds like they’re out there screaming on the streets for their demands to be respected for a four-day work week, but, you know, they’re very charismatic. There’s a bunch of other sounds that if you don’t know a language that uses them, it’d be like, “Ah, well, yeah, I can look them up if I need them, but I don’t need to have them in active memory.”

Lauren: When it comes to phonetics, we can think about the way that people move their mouths, or we can think about the way that people hear the sounds that they’re perceiving. You can use things like spectrograms, which we’ve done in a previous episode, to look at the sound wave itself as it’s moving through the air between a mouth and someone’s ear, hopefully, if you’re speaking to someone, just moving through the air. They’re all different ways of coming at the same thing. With the International Phonetic Alphabet, there’re all these basic symbols, but then there’re all these additional language accent marks that you can use to add additional information. It all looks very sparkly by the time you add quite a few of those.

Gretchen: I like to think of the phonetic symbols as the Periodic Table of the Elements, like there’s a finite number of elements that scientists have catalogued, but using those, you can make all of these different things that are different from each other. You know, you and I are pretty much made out of the same elements. We’re all both humans. We have carbon and oxygen and stuff in us. But we have differences. I’m not a chemist. I’m pretty sure those are around. But we’re also different as people at this much more macro-level, which we’re gonna get to in a bit, but the building blocks are this very finite set of things.

Lauren: We need to start modifying those because, basically, as soon as you’re looking at how people actually use sounds, rather than thinking of them as these isolated little atoms, as soon as we combine them into little molecules of sound, they really start influencing each other in how they’re produced.

Gretchen: Right. The area of linguistics that talks about the rules and the patterns that explain how these sounds fit together is called “phonology,” which is our next micro-, slightly larger, area that we’re looking at because, not just sounds, we now have sound interactions.

Lauren: A lot of these rules are quite interesting because there’s this tension between, as a speaker, I want to be as efficient as possible, but I also want to maximise the chance that people will understand what I’m saying when I speak.

Gretchen: Yeah. Because it’s easier to keep my tongue in a very similar position and not move it as much. [Over-articulated] If I’m hyper articulating, then it takes more effort because I’m using my muscles [under-articulated] more than when I just sort of speak like this because everything is very close in the same position in my mouth and not going very far at all.

Lauren: It’s that efficiency, but it’s also the things in relationship to each other. If we think about something like that schwa popping up in a word like “today,” which is a word from one of our example sentences, that is really reduced because the “to” part of “today” is generally not stressed. Schwa, in English, likes to just slide on in there. It’s right in the middle of your mouth. It’s very easy to articulate. If it’s not stressed, we’re not stressing. We’re just throwing a schwa in there.

Gretchen: There’s not some other word like “tiday” and “tieday” and “taday” that we can get it confused with.

Lauren: “Toe-day” – that’s when I get a pedicure.

Gretchen: There’s also words like “can” from our example sentences, which, when I say it in isolation, I’m saying this very distinct /kæn/, but in the context of “Moons can have moons, and they’re called ‘moonmoons’,” I’m saying much more like /kən/ – “Moons /kən/ have moons – not “Moons /kæn/ have moons.”

Lauren: Oh, that was very articulated there. Good job.

Gretchen: Thank you.

Lauren: Sometimes, in order to make it easier for the mouth, it’s not removal of sound features. Sometimes we add things in without necessarily noticing that’s what we’re doing. In a word like “highest,” struggling to not add a /jə/ between the “high” and then the second syllable “-est.”

Gretchen: /hɑɪɛst/. You have to almost add a pause to not do it /hɑɪjəst/, which isn’t written, but it needs to be there to make the transition between the two vowels smoother. Or similarly with a word like “president,” as in “president of Taiwan,” you have S in the writing – “preside” – but /pɹɛzədɛnt/ is almost invariably pronounced with that S as a /z/ sound because it’s in between two vowels, and you just wanna keep using your vocal folds the whole time. It’s a little bit more challenging to say /pɹɛsɪdɛnt/ versus /pɹɛzədɛnt/.

Lauren: That’s a whole different word.

Gretchen: It’s also a whole different word, yeah.

Lauren: It’s a really good point that with phonology, the way you say things and the way you mentally think about them, especially when you’re being influenced by your writing system where that S /s/ sound, we just think of it as an S until we actually slow down and pay attention to what our voices are actually doing.

Gretchen: Another one of my favourites is all of the different forms of the T sound in English. When you take a word like “writing,” which in most types of speech, unless I’m being very, very hyper-articulated, I’m pronouncing, as a Canadian, /ɹəɪɾɪŋ/ not /ɹəɪtɪŋ/. Australian English has this as well.

Lauren: And if you had a horse, you would be –

Gretchen: I’d be /ɹɑɪɾɪŋ/ it.

Lauren: Right, so the /d/ that you’re using in “riding” and the one you’re using in “writing” when you say it quickly are not quite the same. They sound a little bit different.

Gretchen: “Writing” and “riding” – for me, the vowels are different, but the consonants are actually the same because they’re both in between vowels. It’s just that at some level in my brain I’m aware that one’s a T and one’s a D. I’ve produced the vowels the same way that I would in /ɹəɪt/ and /ɹɑɪd/ where I do have different consonants to influence what’s happening to the vowels next to them. “Write” and “ride” for me have different vowels, and so “writing” and “riding” have different vowels for me. This is a very characteristic feature of Canadian English.

Lauren: Very efficient. I like that.

Gretchen: But different applications of phonological processes are also some of the big things that produce what we think of as “accents.” When I’m saying, “Okay, you sound Australian to me,” it’s because you’re not producing this thing with “writing” and “riding,” but you are producing “writing” and “riding” with the /d/-ish sound, whereas if you were British, you might be more likely to say /ɹəɪʔɪŋ/ – a different sound in the middle there.

Lauren: Sometimes, two sounds will be treated the same in one language and very distinct in another language. Absolute classic 101 example is that what we think of as /l/ and /ɹ/ are treated as the same sound in Japanese. So many facts that I know about so many languages are classic first-year examples that we’re given. Then sometimes there are two sounds that might be the same in your language that you have to learn to articulate as different in another language, and you don’t perceive them as different. That’s a challenge as a language-learner. I often think about Nepali /pʰarsi/ “pumpkin” and /paɹsi/ “the day after tomorrow.”

Gretchen: Those really both just sounded like P to me.

Lauren: Yeah. You have them in the same part of your brain. I have had to learn to distinguish them in the way I hear and produce them.

Gretchen: This can change in the course of the history of a language. English speakers 1000-plus years ago treated F and V as simply versions of the same sound, like “wolf” and “wolves,” “life” and “lives.” Okay, well, it changes, but it’s only because you’ve added the plural there. But then after the Norman conquest, when a whole bunch of words from French were entering English, there were a lot of French words that had V at the beginning of the word. So, something like “vine,” which English already had a word “fine.” And so now, F and V are in the same position. They’re contrasting with each other. “Fine” and “vine” have very different meanings. English speakers collectively acquired a more important distinction between F and V at a word level, whereas previously they’d been at this subconscious, “Oh, yeah, this changes, but just to make it produced more efficiently.”

Lauren: It’s cute we’ve kind of fossilised “wolf/wolves,” “leaf/leaves” into our writing system in this way as a nice little record of that earlier sound process.

Gretchen: Right. Like, something that started off as this regular type of efficiency now becomes something that’s perceived as an irregular plural. You also see this efficiency happening in signed languages. For example, there’s an ASL sign for “student” which comes from “learn” which has the hand going up to the forehead, where the thinking happens, and then the sign for “person” which has the two hands side by side. We’ll link to videos. You can’t really talk about signs on a podcast. We’ll link to some videos. So, the very formal version of this sign really makes it evident that the information is going up into your brain and then your person who’s doing that. But then those are very big and distinct movements. Once you start doing it a lot, when people are producing “student” quickly, the hand doesn’t go all the way up to the forehead. Like, the hand barely goes part the chin. Because you can produce this slight upwards movement, which is enough to convey the meaning to someone who’s familiar with the concept, and you don’t actually have to do this big movement up to the forehead for “learn.” The same thing for “person” – you have this very quick movement to “person.” So, this gets lexicalised into a compound that just means “student” and isn’t obviously related anymore as much to “learn” plus “person,” which is the original root that it has. We’ll link to some video by Bill Vicars, who’s a d/Deaf teacher who posts a lot of videos online.

Lauren: I love that “person” is clearly two hands held in parallel and pulled down in the full version of the word “person,” but then when it’s put together with this reduced form, it’s just one hand straight down. But that’s enough to give you the sense of the same meaning. That’s how it’s been turned into this combined form for the word “student.”

Gretchen: This gets us into the next level as we keep zooming out of the parts of words that fit together that each contribute various aspects of their meaning. They can get smooshed together as time goes on or made more distinct if you’re trying to be really, really clear about what you’re saying.

Lauren: I mean, “What is a word?” is a major and endless topic in linguistics. Because if you think about something like “Donkey Kong,” in one of our example sentences, it’s technically two words if we’re thinking about spaces, but really, we treat it as one. It’s referring to one video game character. Linguists have a real challenge of defining what is a word.

Gretchen: Instead of trying to deal with this meaning of “word,” which has many meanings in a casual use, linguists have defined several different potential meanings with different words. One of those concepts is the smallest meaningful bit that can make up a word. For example, with a word like “moon,” “moon” is already its own smallest meaning unit. You can’t split “moon” into “moo” and “n” and each of those contributes part of the meaning.

Lauren: I mean, they have meaning on their own, but they don’t have meaning that relates to “moon.” You’re just breaking it into unmeaningful sound parts at this point.

Gretchen: Exactly. “Moo” is a word, but a “moon” does not have a meaning that’s some type of moo, despite the cow jumping over the moon, whereas “moon” and “moons,” you can break that up into two parts of the meaning. You have the “moon” part, and you have the /s/ part (plural), and, indeed, “moons” is in relation to the meaning of “moon,” which is, it is multiple moons.

Lauren: There is some sub word level vibes-based things with sound meaning. We’ve talked before about how words for “nose” tend to have a nasal of some kind, like in English, but that’s not the same as these elements that build up to make greater meaning from these compositional parts, like the /s/ in “moons.”

Gretchen: Both “moon” and the /s/ in “moons” are morphemes. “Moon” is a morpheme that can stand by itself. It can be its own word as well. The /s/ is not something that’s ever found by itself. It relies on the “moon” or whatever other word – you know, “dogs,” “cats,” “cows” – to attach it to in order for us to pronounce it or to use it independently.

Lauren: Then it creates this grammatical information that means “more than one.”

Gretchen: Right. There’s lots of these. You can have “highest” – “high” is a morpheme that can stand by itself; “-est,” the most high, and doesn’t stand by itself, even though it’s much more pronounceable than the /s/ in “moons.” Because we don’t find it by itself in context, because we don’t find it by itself in English, it’s considered bound to the root “high” or “smallest,” “largest,” etc.

Lauren: “Learn” and “learned” where the /d/ on the end – or “learnt,” that /t/ – can’t escape phonology when it comes to morphology because these sounds are smooshing up against each other as these affixes smash up against each other. You’ve got something there that’s adding that this thing happened in the past.

Gretchen: Exactly. It’s adding part of the meaning, and it’s this smallest pairing of form, whether that’s sound or sign, and a part that you can identify a meaning for.

Lauren: Those morphemes, those affixes, are adding grammatical information. I also like morphology where adding affixes changes the type of word that something is entirely. It’s like putting on a completely different outfit.

Gretchen: You can have something like “extreme” or “legal” and then make it into “extremely” or “legally,” which lets it occupy a different role in the sentence.

Lauren: Or “I am researching linguistics,” “I am a linguistic researcher,” one of those is a verb and one is – just by changing and adding that “-er” on the end, you’ve turned it into a person, a type of thing, a noun. So, changing word class by adding an affix there.

Gretchen: Then you have sort of “quasi morphemes,” which is not a technical term for them, but something like “report,” which is in one of our example sentences, we could compare to “import,” “export,” “transport.” It’s sort of its own morpheme in English. English speakers often have a vague sense that something “port-like” is carried, which is what the Latin root comes from, but it’s not something that’s live and acquiring new potential affixes, new potential morphemes added to it, the way that something like “moon” is doing in English already. You’re having stuff that’s a bit of a dubious morpheme status as well when you have words that are borrowed from other languages very consistently with the same languages. Sometimes, we start learning bits from them.

Lauren: Also, thanks to the phrase “world record holder” in one of our example sentences, I get to talk about one of my favourite morphological processes in English, which is where the word changes the type of word that it is depending on where the stress in “world” goes. So, “I have a world REcord,” or “I reCORDed the Lingthusiasm podcast with you right now.”

Gretchen: “You recorded your skills at Donkey Kong.”

Lauren: “REcord” and “reCORD,” the difference between them is whether the stress is on the first syllable or the second syllable. There’s a whole bunch of pairs in English like this where you have a stress-based change in the word to create the meaning rather than an additional affix.

Gretchen: Again, morphology can never completely escape phonology. Then you have the really fun stuff, which is novel coinages like “moonmoons” and “smallrus.” This is when we start beginning to see the edge of the infinite because there were this finite number of sounds, and you can sort of make a list of the morphemes that exist in a language like English, except insofar as they start becoming independent words. There’s a lot of independent words. But then you get people doing linguistic creativity and making novel compounds, like “moonmoons,” or making the “-rus” ending in “walrus,” which wasn’t originally a separate thing, into something that can correspond to, okay, you have a small walrus; it’s a “smallrus.”

Lauren: If you had a really big walrus, then you’d have a “bigrus”?

Gretchen: A “tallrus”?

Lauren: That’s much better. Maybe it’s not particularly productive yet.

Gretchen: Yeah, I think it’s really requiring the entire “-alrus” overlap.

Lauren: But we can add new morphemes to a language. I think we’d have to put a lot of work into creating “-rus” as a productive affix to denote “walrus-ness-ness.”

Gretchen: But this does happen sometimes. You have “marathon,” which started off as the original word was a place name in Greece. But now you have “telethon” and “skate-a-thon” or “walk-a-thon” or –

Lauren: “Wikipedia edit-a-thon,” which is one of the ways that we met.

Gretchen: Yes. You know, to refer to a particular type of group charitable activity. “-a-thon” was not originally a productive morpheme, but now, because it’s been extended to other types of circumstances, you could create a new type of “-a-thon,” and people would know what you meant.

Lauren: I’d say, in the scheme of things, English has a – what would we say – a medium, small-medium quantity of affixes. I feel like it’s got the right amount to teach an undergraduate morphology unit.

Gretchen: Yeah, it certainly has enough to teach an undergraduate morphology unit. There are languages that have very few, if any, affixes, and do it all with independent words instead – grammatical particles. There’re languages that have way more affixes than English.

Lauren: Indeed.

Gretchen: One of those languages that comes up a lot in intro linguistics classes is Turkish – or at least it came up a lot in my intro linguistics class because my instructor was, herself, Turkish. Whenever she needed an example of like, “Here’s some morphemes. Go do a problem set,” if she didn’t have another language already prepped, she’d be like, “Well, let’s just do Turkish. Turkish is easy. Lots of stuff in Turkish.”

Lauren: I feel like I had a lot of intro Turkish data sets as well because Turkish has really elegantly separate morphemes for all the different meanings. I love a language that mashes them up and makes things really intricate, but Turkish is very elegant in the way all these morphemes stack up very nicely.

Gretchen: Turkish is really more like a LEGO of language where you have these distinct morphemes that don’t bleed into each other, whereas some languages are more like plasticine or Play-Doh where you can have little bits of colours, and then when you start smooshing them together, your reds and your yellows and your blues start acquiring orange and purple tinges. But one of my Turkish linguistics professor’s favourite Turkish example sentences was – I don’t remember the words in Turkish – but it translated as “Are you one of those who we could not Europeanise?”

Lauren: What a lovely sentence in English-slash-word-in-Turkish.

Gretchen: This is a single word in Turkish. It’s one of the famous examples – it’s the “antidisestablishmentarianism” of Turkish of like – but this is a real word that’s been used in real contexts. Because you could imagine, you know, a news article-type thing, and you can start with this root of “Europe” becomes “European” becomes “Europeanise.” And then English switches from doing affixes to doing individual words – “not Europeanise,” “could not Europeanise,” “We could not Europeanise” – where Turkish is still adding more and more suffixes. That’s the type of thing where different languages have different levels of tolerance for how much of this is gonna be in prefixes and suffixes, various affixes, and how much of this is gonna be in more free-standing words.

Lauren: You can’t really talk about morphology without talking about word order and syntax because one language’s morphology (as we’ve just seen) is another language’s syntax.

Gretchen: You can go through an example of expressing the same meaning and various different types of strategies that a language uses for that. Let’s take questions – because questions are pretty straightforward.

Lauren: Sure. And let’s do that classic intro to linguistics thing where we make English pretend to do all the different types of structures.

Gretchen: If we put English with a whole bunch of hats on to pretend to be another language, which is an easier way to see the examples than trying to work in languages that people might not all know. One way of making questions, which English has, and many other languages have, is you can change your intonation. You can use question intonation. This is way back up in phonology.

Lauren: [Exaggerated question intonation] “Moons can have moons?”

Gretchen: Exactly. We can also do a more morphological strategy. We can add a little suffix onto something like the verb. Latin does this. There’s a “-ne” suffix in Latin that attaches onto the verb that makes something into a question.

Lauren: “Moons can-ne have moons?” I don’t know if that’s pseudo-Latin or a negative in Scots English.

Gretchen: That’s true. But in pseudo-Latin, “Moons can-ne have moons?” You can also have a related but slightly different question particle. This is a more free-standing word, sometimes at the beginning or the end of the sentence, that makes a statement into a question again. Chinese has this. In Mandarin, it’s “ma” which makes something into a question.

Lauren: “Moons can have moons ma?”

Gretchen: Right. There’s a question particle. English also kind of has question particles. “Moons can have moons, huh?”

Lauren: “Moons can have moons, yeah?”

Gretchen: If you’re Canadian, “Moons can have moons, eh?”

Lauren: Yes.

Gretchen: [Laughs] Finally, we can go to the most syntax-y and do it entirely with word order. English has this strategy.

Lauren: “Can moons have moons?”

Gretchen: Exactly. We’ve moved “can” from near the middle of the sentence, where it is in a statement, to at the beginning to make it a question.

Lauren: Once we start building words into sentences, we really start to expand the possibilities of what we can create.

Gretchen: Again, with the “A small amount of things can create a huge amount of results,” there aren’t that many syntactic rules and patterns in each given language. It’s just that when we start combining those with all of the morphemes and the words that we have that we create this explosion of possibilities.

Gretchen: We know that these rules exist for speakers because when we don’t use them, people get really confused. It’s not something you would expect a person speaking that language to say. To use English, a sentence like, “They ‘moonmoons’ are called,” does not fit what we expect for English sentences.

Gretchen: Maybe that’s a Yoda thing, but in English, I would say, “They are called ‘moonmoons’,” but I wouldn’t say, “They ‘moonmoons’ are called.”

Lauren: If you have a language where the verb goes at the end of the sentence – so if you translated this literally into Nepali, that would be a completely grammatical sentence in that language. But in English, English follows its own rules for grammatical structure.

Lauren: In a sentence like, “Today, I learned that there are smaller walrus ancestors, and I’m extremely happy to report that the research writing about this did, indeed, refer to them as the ‘smallrus’,” you also need syntax to do things like reported speech and embedding sentences into each other. This is actually quite a complex idea. “The researcher said that they call them the ‘smallrus’,” it’s not the person who’s actually saying the sentence that said this. Having grammatical patterns that let us convey, okay, one person said this, and then they said that something else happened, or someone else said this; this lets us nest things inside other things.

Lauren: The researcher could’ve said something that was itself an entire sentence inside that sentence. I still absolutely remember in my first year LING 101 class having a full galaxy-brain moment realising what this meant for the explosion of possible sentences that can be made with a very small number of rules.

Gretchen: You can also get ambiguity out of this. The sentence, “As the current record holder for the highest score in Donkey Kong, Hank Chien is legally fourth in line to be president of Taiwan,” has an implication that it’s his high scores in Donkey Kong that cause him to be fourth in line for the Taiwanese presidency, when it actually is that, presumably, some sort of coincidence that this person just happens to be particularly good at Donkey Kong and also have this particular political role – presumably these facts are unrelated to each other, but the syntax actually does not tell us this.

Lauren: Of course, this is presuming that you mean “current” as in “right now” and not “current” as in the electrically-charged individual who’s holding the record.

Gretchen: That’s true.

Lauren: Which I know is a very deliberately poor reading of that example sentence.

Gretchen: You do sometimes see actual meaning-level ambiguity like this. I remember my high school French teacher once told one of the other students that “I can tell you weren’t really paying attention to this homework because you’ve translated ‘get out of bed’ using the verb ‘obtenir’.”

Lauren: As in, in French, “obtenir,” I’m gonna guess is like “obtain” type of “get” rather than just a grammatical form that means “be in the process of.”

Gretchen: If you “get some apples,” and you “obtain some apples,” those are roughly the same thing. But if you “get out of bed,” and you “obtain out of bed” –

Lauren: Doesn’t work. They are two different words.

Gretchen: “Get” in that context is being used idiomatically, and it’s being used to make something a little bit verb-y-er. It’s not being used in its “obtain” meaning. Maybe “obtain out of bed-ness status.” Words can mean different things in different contexts. That’s another even further zooming-out level of meaning.

Lauren: There’re so many different tools when it comes to pinning down what we mean by “meaning” and how we describe meaning. Even keeping a list of words, I mean, dictionaries are trying, and they’re always chasing behind. You can keep a list of most of the words with some degree of explaining their meaning, but speakers of all languages are always innovating new words. It’s a lot easier to add words than it is to add morphemes or syntactic rules or sounds to a language.

Gretchen: Even within a sentence where you’re using relatively well-established words, you can have different potential meanings depending on how you interpret those meanings in relation to each other. Classic 101 example sentence – “Everyone loves someone.” What meaning do you get from this?

Lauren: Everyone loves – hang on. There is someone, and every single person loves that one person.

Gretchen: This most popular person in the word. “EVERYONE loves someone.”

Lauren: No, hang on, if you say it with that intonation, then it sounds like every person has one other individual person that they love. There’re two different meanings.

Gretchen: That’s the “Everyone loves SOMEONE” versus “EVERYONE loves someone.” Yeah. You could get everyone has their own potentially different person who they love, or there’s one incredibly lucky person who everybody loves and screw the rest of you.

Lauren: I feel like you can basically keep students at a low level of convivial disagreement about semantics for an entire semester if you want to.

Gretchen: Semantics and study of meaning is really that type of area where you can have so many different arguments. There’s a classic linguistic study where you get people to argue about the boundaries between a cup and a bowl, or, you know, “What’s a sandwich?” – perennial internet argument source.

Lauren: “How many is ‘several’?”

Gretchen: “How many is ‘a few’?” “How many is ‘several’?” We can zoom out even further though. I wanna go back to “The current record holder for the highest score in Donkey Kong” because this – I actually collected this sentence six years ago. I’ve now looked it up. Hank Chien no longer holds this record. It’s someone named Robbie Lakeman.

Lauren: Congratulations, Robbie Lakeman.

Gretchen: No word on what this means. I’ve looked up who’s the fourth in line for the presidency of Taiwan, and it’s not him.

Lauren: Is it Robbie Lakeman?

Gretchen: No! But also, I don’t know if it was ever Hank Chien because he does have a Wikipedia page, and he’s lived in the US for most of his life, so I just feel like he’s probably not a highly involved figure in the Taiwanese political system.

Lauren: I think this is one of those times where we can say a sentence can be grammatical without necessarily being true. Now you have two different properties that a sentence can have.

Gretchen: Right. We can create implications by juxtaposing particular sentences. There may have been – all I can think is maybe there was another person named “Hank Chien” who was involved in the Taiwanese presidency. Maybe someone just made it up for a fun stat. But the implications that you can get from juxtaposing two particular things or from implying that something is true now, that zooms us out to this larger area of pragmatics and discourse. A classic example, like saying, “Burr, it’s cold in here,” to hint to someone that maybe they should turn the heat up, maybe they should close the window, maybe they should turn the air conditioning down. Or “Would you like some coffee? Coffee would keep me awake,” which could mean that you do want coffee, or it could mean that you don’t want coffee, depending on what time of day it is because you have this implication from the context of why someone’s saying something in a particular environment.

Lauren: With pragmatics, it all comes down to context. And context is inevitably where we’re using language. We have to think about it in the wider context. So, again, pragmatics is something that is interacting with all of our languages.

Gretchen: This is another area where the meanings start expanding so much bigger. We can go even further to a level of discourse. It turns out that other people have also talked about the smallrus.

Lauren: Amazing.

Gretchen: Ursula Vernon, who’s a science fiction-fantasy writer, wrote a short vignette story about a smallrus in 2004 which is talking about “The smallrus is the tiniest of the seal family, not much larger […] than the garden slug.”

Lauren: Adorable.

Gretchen: “Any gardener is generally delighted to see the smallrus appear, as the occasional nibble of a leaf is more than made up for by their ability to keep down the number of mosquito larvae and other small aquatic nuances.” It comes with a charming illustration, which we will definitely link to. It is completely different from the real smallrus in the historical record, which is actually around the size of a sea lion and not the size of a slug, which is actually about half the size of a living walrus, but gives us this very charming nickname, “smallrus.”

Lauren: Fabulous. I like you’ve done a small “smallrus” corpus study there – shout out to corpus linguistics. It’s so wonderful that so much writing online and so many digital corpora now allow us to make those links between things that used to be very hard to make.

Gretchen: We can look at newspapers. We can look at people’s blogs and posts on social media from 2004 and draw connections between how people were talking about particular words or particular concepts at this much larger level.

Lauren: That brings us to what is usually the end of a little structural tour across an intro to linguistics, LING 101, subject that takes us through phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. Just a special shoutout to what I always think of as “Week 12,” which is just that last lecture, or that last seminar, where, if there’s time, professors love to touch on something that cuts across all of these topics. Maybe it’s something they’re passionate about like historical linguistics or child language acquisition.

Gretchen: Areas like historical linguistics, child language acquisition, sociolinguistics, linguistic fieldwork, they use all of these different levels – the macro-levels and the micro-levels. Like, children have to acquire all the different levels of language. Languages existed in history at all of the different levels of language. Languages exist in society at all of the different levels of language. Language exists in the brain at all the levels. There’s a distinction between the fields that look at one particular level and the fields that cut across and look at how all of those things relate to some particular aspect, whether that’s acquiring them or processing them or existing at a particular place and time.

Lauren: Even though we’ve not been following this micro-to-macro structural order in the last 100 episodes of Lingthusiasm, we have intentionally been covering topics from across these levels and topics that cut across them in so many different ways. That has been intentional because these are all important parts of what goes into making the structure of language and how it gets used.

Gretchen: Much in the way that we can learn about the world around us by looking at particular areas of it or by seeing connections between areas, zooming in macro to micro is this really interesting intellectual exercise or this lens for seeing things, but it’s also not the only way of seeing things, and in many cases, picking a less-dramatic shift can let us focus on the particular areas and the particular connections that we think are interesting in any given topic.

[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 all of the podcast platforms or lingthusiasm.com. You can get transcripts of every episode on lingthusiasm.com/transcripts. You can follow @lingthusiasm on all the social media sites. You can get scarves with lots of linguistics patterns on them including IPA, branching tree diagrams, bouba and kiki, and our favourite esoteric Unicode symbols, plus other Lingthusiasm merch at lingthusiasm.com/merch. My social media and blog is Superlinguo.

Gretchen: Links to my social media can be found at gretchenmcculloch.com. My blog is AllThingsLinguistic.com. My book about internet language is called Because Internet. Lingthusiasm is able to keep existing thanks to the support of our patrons. If you wanna get an extra Lingthusiasm episode to listen to every month, our entire archive of bonus episodes to listen to right now, or if you just wanna help keep the show running ad-free, go to patreon.com/lingthusiasm or follow the links from our website. Patrons can also get access to our Discord chatroom to talk with other linguistics fans and be the first to find out about new merch and other announcements. Recent bonus episode topics include a Lingthusiasm-slash-Let’s-Learn-Everything crossover episode, an interview with Julie Sedivy about language across the lifespan and beauty in language, and deleted scenes from our interviews with Jacq Jones, Emily Bender, and the Tom Scott Language Files team. Can’t afford to pledge? That’s okay, too. We also really appreciate it if you can recommend Lingthusiasm to anyone in your life who’s curious about language.

Lauren: Lingthusiasm is created and produced by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our Senior Producer is Claire Gawne, our Editorial Producer is Sarah Dopierala, our Production Assistant is Martha Tsutsui-Billins, our Technical Editor is Leah Velleman, and our Editorial Assistant is Jon Kruk. Our music is “Ancient City” by The Triangles.

Gretchen: Stay lingthusiastic!

[Music]