#n400

Gretchen: One of those ways is using these discourse particles like “My” or “Dang” or “Oh,” “Whoa,” “Wow,” “Wait” – these are one way of introducing surprise as long as they’re accompanied with the correct intonation, which we’ll get to in a sec.

Lauren: They all indicate some kind of newness or surprise, but they all have their own nuance as well.

Gretchen: I was really interested to read (while we were researching this episode) a paper by a linguist named Kelsey Kraus, who points out that in some contexts “Oh” and “Huh” are synonyms, and in some contexts, actually only one of them makes sense. If we have a context where you say:

Lauren: “It’s time to cut the cake!”

Gretchen: I could say, “Oh, they must’ve finished icing it.” I could also say, “Huh, they must’ve finished icing it.” Both of these are me expressing new information to me because now you’ve said it’s fine to cut the cake, so I can conclude, “Oh, this is me reflecting surprise to myself.” But in the same context:

Lauren: “It’s time to cut the cake!”

Gretchen: “Oh, no it isn’t. We’re doing presents first.”

Lauren: Okay, that’s fine. I mean, sure, if that’s your plan. I don’t wanna get in the way of your party.

Gretchen: But if you say:

Lauren: “It’s time to cut the cake!”

Gretchen: “Huh, no it isn’t. We’re doing presents first.”

Lauren: Okay, that doesn’t quite work for me.

Gretchen: This one with the “Huh” is sort of pragmatically weird for me because the “Oh, no it isn’t” implies knowledge that you have that I don’t. Because when I said “Oh” and “Huh” with the “They may have finished icing it,” that implies knowledge that you have that I don’t, which is fine. But when I say, “Oh, we’re doing presents first,” that implies I have knowledge that you don’t about us doing presents, which is fine. But then “Huh” doesn’t work for that context where I have knowledge that you don’t. It only works when you have knowledge that I don’t, or when I’ve just come to realise something.

Lauren: Yeah. The only way that would work is if you were absolutely running the party – if you weren’t in the control of the party, you’re not the one deciding that it’s time to do presents. It doesn’t work for me.

Gretchen: The “Huh” you mean?

Lauren: Yeah. Like, “Huh, no it isn’t. We’re doing presents first” could work if you were setting the pace of the party. But if you weren’t in control of what was happening, it doesn’t make sense.

Gretchen: Oh, if I wasn’t. Sorry, you were swallowing the negation so much that I mis-parsed what you said. [Laughter]

Lauren: Yeah, I think, “Huh, no it isn’t,” could work if you were absolutely the boss of the party.

Gretchen: To me that’s where it does not work. It works if someone else is already starting doing presents, and you’re like, “Oh, huh, no, someone else has started doing presents.”

Lauren: If I was like, “Huh, no it isn’t. We’re doing presents first,” I’m in control of this.

Gretchen: Okay, so I wasn’t mishearing you. I was just not (possibly) realising what you couldn’t say.

Lauren: Which is so interesting because it means that we both have slightly different judgements about what this “Huh” is doing here.

Gretchen: But we both agree that it feels a little bit different from the “They must’ve finished icing it” context.

Lauren: Yeah.

Gretchen: These particles are really subtle and there needs to be more research continually on them – including cross-dialectal variation.

Lauren: I also love that when Kraus defended her PhD on this topic, there was a cake that just says, “Oh!?”, as the celebratory cake, which I think is so delightful.

Gretchen: With, I wanna clarify, the little surprise intonation contour marked on the cake as well. So, you know the cake says, “oOoH.”

Lauren: The more that you poke at the idea of surprise, the more you realise there are multiple different nuances and flavours of “surprise,” but originally there was only one sense of “surprise.”

Gretchen: Like a surprise party?

Lauren: No. The original sense of “surprise” was military.

Gretchen: Oh! Now I’m surprised.

Lauren: A “sur-prize.”

Gretchen: Oh, “surprize” as in “to take; an unexpected attack or capture.” They didn’t have surprise parties in a military sense?

Lauren: They did. The original surprise party was a stealth military detachment in the 1820s who would come in an undertake an unexpected attack or capture.

Gretchen: Oh, no!

Lauren: It wasn’t until 30 years later in 1857 we get the first sense of “surprise party” as in “unexpected frivolities being thrown on someone.”

Gretchen: If your friends are throwing you a surprise party, make sure that they’re doing the correct kind of surprise party for you.

Lauren: Yeah, it really is a word that has undertaken a real journey.

Gretchen: I also enjoy the fun effect of saying really unsurprising things using surprise words and surprise intonation.

Lauren: So, something very obvious.

Gretchen: You can say something like, “Whoa, people eat CAKE at birthday parties?”

Lauren: So, something very obvious.

Gretchen: “I’ve never seen a chocolate-flavoured cake in my LIFE!” in the same tones as you use to say, “Whoa, this cake is BLUE.”

Lauren: “Whoa, this cake is CHOCOLATE flavoured!”

Gretchen: Amazing! It really gives this sort of alien-come-down-to-Earth being anthropologically like, “Oh, people eat cake at birthday parties.”

Lauren: Or it’s a bit like when I say Kelsey Kraus’s cake and was like, “Ah, this cake is LINGUISTICS!”

Gretchen: Or like sometimes young children will be like, “Wow, this cake is chocolate!” and you’re like, “Yeah, I’ve heard of chocolate cake. It’s new to you that you can combine chocolate and cake together, but I have encountered it before, in fact.”

Lauren: This is very not new information.I like also doing the flip side where you say something and completely remove all of that intonation and realise how much – alongside the particles – it’s the way that you say something that is also having an influence on it sounding surprised. If I was to say something like, [flat intonation] “I can’t believe it’s your birthday.”

Gretchen: [Flat intonation] “I can’t believe it’s your birthday.”

Lauren: Really comes across as “I have heard about nothing except your imminent birthday for the last three weeks.”

Gretchen: [Flat intonation] “Whoa, a whole cake – just for me.” That really sounds like, “None of my friends came to my birthday party.”

Lauren: None of your friends came, or I found the smallest possible cake to serve for your birthday.

Gretchen: [Flat intonation] “How sparkly these balloons are.”

Lauren: I deliberately chose the matte black version. That’s what you wanted.

Gretchen: You can get a really nice sarcastic effect there. The intonation is doing a lot. I feel like my non-surprise intonation (“I can’t believe it’s your birthday”) is a lot flatter. There’s a lot less peaks of highs and lows, whereas “I CAN’T beLEIVE it’s your BIRTHDAY!”, it’s got all these really spikey, like, “CAN’T beLEIVE,” like higher-pitched aspects of the intonation, but also lower lows to really contrast with them.

Lauren: Make it really stand out. When we look at those highs and lows, we see that there are recurring patterns in the way that people do them to mark surprise.

Gretchen: In particular, there’s a pitch contour known as the “surprise-redundancy contour.”

Lauren: [Surprised intonation] The surprise-redundancy contour?

Gretchen: Exactly. [Laughs] Which has some very delightful example sentences that are written with the words going up and down in the high and low peaks, so you can really read them. Like, “The blackboard’s painted ORange.”

Lauren: It looks like a little roller coaster of a sentence there.

Gretchen: The “black” part of “blackboard” is really low pitched, and then the “or-” part of “orange” is really high pitched, and then it goes back down at the end the sentence. You have this low-high-low thing. Or “Alice isn’t COming,” where “Alice” and “-ing” are lower and then the first syllable of “coming” – /kə/ – is the high-pitched one.

Lauren: Both of those, when you see them abstracted in this way, have the same roller coaster down-up-down pattern to them.

Gretchen: I particularly like how this paper points out that this requires a minimum of two syllables, but you can say it with a single syllable word, you just have to lengthen that word a bit longer. The example they give is, “Mother: Did you brush your teeth? Child: DuUuh.”

Lauren: Very elegant.

Gretchen: You can hear this really clear low-HIGH-low – DuUuh.

Lauren: A classic kid being told to do something, “MoOom.”

Gretchen: Exactly, “oOo,” low-HIGH-low.

Lauren: While the roller coaster transcription is really nifty for this example demonstration, that’s not actually how we write sentences, typically.

Gretchen: It’s a bit of a shame because I think it would be really fun, but it is admittedly hard to typeset. But we do use exclamation marks for a lot of these functions.

Lauren: True!

Gretchen: [Surprise intonation] Exclamation marks!

Lauren: We’ve kind of had to invent punctuation in writing to put some of this kind of information back into writing, which is, as always, the poor approximation of spoken or signed interaction.

Gretchen: The exclamation mark in its origin has several functions. I think the older one is this one that is surprise, or imperative, or shouting – the sort of “Stop!”, “Let’s eat!”, “Wow!”, “Boing!” – like making these really punchy, exclamatory things that, like, something like, “Oh!” with an exclamation mark can still be said in several different ways depending on the context, but at least it conveys that there’s some sort of interesting, exciting thing happening with intonation.

Lauren: Now, the exclamation mark is now about being upbeat and cheerful and friendly and not just about these much stronger things. It’s gone from being about surprise to just being about friendliness.

Gretchen: To some extent, friendliness is also something that potentially exaggerations the intonational contour a little bit, which is maybe one of things that links those two concepts.

Lauren: Now, in formal writing, because the exclamation mark has this really broad range of functions, the standard full stop is taking on almost an anti-surprise function when people use it in turn-based messaging.

Gretchen: [Eeyore intonation] “It’s my birthday” – the real Eeyore voice.

Lauren: Full stop.

Gretchen: Period. If you’d like to see how Sarah, our transcriber, copes with transferring spoken language intonation into written language, you can also check out the transcript to this episode.

Lauren: This is why we have a professional transcriber because capturing this kind of information in writing actually requires human skill and human judgement. I feel like we’re making it extra difficult for her this episode.

Gretchen: Thanks, Sarah. [I try <3]

Lauren: Alongside punctuation in informal writing, we now have a whole range of emoji that capture surprise.

Gretchen: From the default “Wow” surprised face with the rounded mouth to the face with open eyes and hand-over-mouth, maybe a cute surprise. I don’t really use that one that much.

Lauren: We also have (in the next batch of Unicode emoji coming to you) a face with bulging eyes, which is an incredibly disturbing-looking and disturbed kind of surprise. We’re adding more nuance to surprise all the time. Of course, my favourite surprise emoji – the exploding head emoji, which you can use it for good surprise and bad surprise, but it’s a very metaphorical and emphatic emoji to use when you don’t have intonation available to you.

Gretchen: Speaking of brains, we can also measure linguistic surprise in the brain directly using a stretchy mesh cap full of electrodes that can measure the electricity that’s coming in a very fuzzy way through your skull from your brain.

Lauren: Unfortunately, this requires us to think about the brain as a big, wet piece of electrical meat.

Gretchen: That’s a fun mental image for you. These devices are known as EEGs, which stands for “electroencephalogram,” but I never hear people use the long version of that.

Lauren: It just gets smooshed into EEG. I have never used one of these before. Have you seen an EEG machine before, Gretchen?

Gretchen: Oh, yeah, when I was an undergrad, I was a summer research assistant for a project. The other student who was the summer RA (the same summer for the same lab) was doing an EEG-based study. I ended up helping her with her study. She’d helped me with mine a bit. We’d trade off. I helped her get her first few participants set up when she was still pretty slow at setting it up. I would come in and help. You’ve seen the images with the caps of people with all the electrodes against their skull, right?

Lauren: Yeah, there’s like, hundreds of them.

Gretchen: What you may not realise if you have never been a participant or a researcher in these studies is that each of those has a sponge to it, and the way that it makes contact with your head and gets a good signal is that the sponge has to be wet.

Lauren: Okay, wet with what?

Gretchen: This solution that is mostly water, a bit of baby shampoo, and I think something to make it electrolytes. I didn’t have to make it. I just was responsible for helping literally eye-dropper it into each of the individual nodes because they all have to be sufficiently wet to be making the contact with the skull.

Lauren: I have so much respect for people who undertake EEG studies, but I have even more respect for the participants now. How tedious.

Gretchen: I can still smell the baby shampoo sometimes in my dreams. I’m just standing there squeegeeing this on to all the nodes. Because the computer would, like, display, “Oh, this one doesn’t have very good contact. Make sure you get that one in contact.”

Lauren: Does that mean the ideal person to work with is someone who has no hair on their head?

Gretchen: I was never a participant because I had too much hair on my head. I was like, “If you really need me, but also I think this would be a bad idea for all of us,” and they were like, “Yeah, we don’t really want you,” because I have very thick curly hair. We did actually like it when people had some hair because the other problem was that the nodes would sort of move around otherwise, and the hair helped them stay wedged into space. We didn’t really care whether it was long or short, but there was some problems if it was too thick.

Lauren: I had wondered what would happen for people who have really densely curly hair or braids or cornrows. I found this really interesting article about a researcher named Arnelle Etienne, who re-engineered the EEG to work as clips that sit underneath thick hair that’s been braided.

Gretchen: Oh, what a good idea.

Lauren: Yeah, because otherwise you’re potentially excluding a whole set of the population from doing these kind of EEG studies.

Gretchen: I’ve always been curious about what I would look like in an EEG study and been like, “I don’t know if I wanna go home with baby shampooed wet hair, but also I’m a little bit curious what my data would look like.” It’s good to know that just, like, use some hair clips would be an option for a future time. So, EEGs. The pro of an EEG is because you’re measuring the electricity that’s bouncing around from the cells in your brain out to the outskirts, you can get really precise measurements in terms of timing, in terms of when people are reacting to some sort of stimulus that you’re giving them. You can’t get really precise measurements in terms of location because you’re not going through the skull. You’re just getting like, “Well, in general, it’s over here on the left,” but you’re not exactly sure what that means. In order to get the really precise brain maps that people do from “Oh, this is in the cerebral cortex” or something like that, you need to do an MRI, which is a totally different type of study that we have done an episode about. For the skull cap ones, you can get precise timing. That’s pretty neat because if you play people a sentence like:

Lauren: “At the birthday party, they ate cake and ice cream.”

Gretchen: Pretty standard, unremarkable sentence, relatively expected. In comparison to:

Lauren: “At the birthday party, they ate cake and socks.”

Gretchen: This is more surprising. You might have felt somewhat surprised at this sentence.

Lauren: Not a typical thing that happens.

Gretchen: If we were scanning your brain of everyone who’s listening to this podcast at the point when Lauren said, “At the birthday party, they ate cake and socks,” we would expect to see a tiny negative dip at 400 milliseconds after the word “socks” because it’s unexpected.

Lauren: We get this clear, consistent signal across lots of different people if we put an EEG on them.

Gretchen: Yeah. Imagine you’ve had an EEG put on you. That’s probably what happened in the little bit of your brain.

Lauren: We deliberately chose “socks” for our surprise because I feel like “socks” is a recurring motif in studies of this n400 surprise information experiment type.

Gretchen: Why are there so many socks, Lauren?

Lauren: I had to pin this down. It turns out it’s because this canonical paper from 1980 for semantically inappropriate words the canonical example that is shown to demonstrate what kind of semantically inappropriate words might be is “He spread the warm bread with socks.”

Gretchen: Compared to “He spread the warm bread with jam” or “butter” or something like that.

Lauren: Or other really not surprising sentences like, “It was his first day at work.”

Gretchen: Seems like a pretty normal sentence to me. Not like, “It was his first day on Mars.”

Lauren: “Socks” has become at least a recurring motif when talking about n400. I thought we’d stick it into the example sentence for our own episode.

Gretchen: Just a subtle little sock tribute. “N400” is what this phenomenon is called because that’s sort of where and what happens. The “400” means that it happens 400 milliseconds after the surprising word, 400 milliseconds after the “socks” if you will.

Lauren: That’s very quick. The fastest human reactions happen at 100 milliseconds. 400 milliseconds is happening pretty quick in terms of cognitive processing.

Gretchen: This suggests that it seems to happen pretty automatically because it’s so fast. Then there’s the N. It’s really easy to find out that the N stands for “negative” because sometimes you also have a “p600,” which is a positive spike that happens 600 milliseconds after whatever you’re interested in studying. The thing that took me a little bit longer to figure out for this episode was what is the positive and the negative?

Lauren: What is the positive and the negative? I’ve never actually wondered this. I’ve just always heard it reported as “n400.”

Gretchen: First of all, you don’t actually have to know what the positive and negative is. Both of them are interesting. The way the literature gets reported, it’s like, “Ah, the interesting thing has happened that is consistent with the other interesting things that happened, and now we’ll move on.” But I like to know what things stand for.

Lauren: Great. [Laughs] Excellent.

Gretchen: I have an analogy for us. Do you want an analogy?

Lauren: I do want an analogy.

Gretchen: Imagine you have a sports stadium, and it’s filled with fans.

Lauren: Okay. What is your default stadium?

Gretchen: I’d say mine’s probably hockey.

Lauren: Okay. I think mine is probably Australian rules football, so a big oval stadium full of fans.

Gretchen: Mine’s also sort of an oval – but indoors. I imagine football’s played outdoors.

Lauren: Yes, very big – very big, big field. Very open stadiums.

Gretchen: I really think this analogy will work with any stadium-y sort of sport that you like – not like two people sitting there watching some kids play tennis, but like, big stadium. Whatever you like. Your stadium has thousands of people in it. Any big crowd of people has a baseline level of noise energy volume. People are talking with their neighbours. They’re moving around. There’s some rustling, some coughs. A big group of humans is very rarely completely silent. The default state to a big group of humans is not gonna be complete silence. If this crowd gets suddenly louder or quieter, you know that something interesting has happened in the game.

Lauren: Yeah, okay. Maybe a hush falls over the crowd if someone’s about to make a dramatic play or if there’s been some kind of injury and someone’s spread out on the field.

Gretchen: Exactly. Or maybe everyone’s getting loud and excited when there’s a goal scored or a favourite player comes out. You have this baseline level of noise in the stadium – everyone chatting with their neighbours. This is like the baseline energy levels in the brain. The body can’t just have zero electricity going through it.

Lauren: I think that means you’re dead.

Gretchen: I think so.

Lauren: So, a stadium is completely quiet if there is nobody in there.

Gretchen: That’s like you have no neurons at all.

Lauren: Okay, not the state we want.

Gretchen: Right. The body is always in some state of activity. But when we’re trying to study how the body’s reacting to various things, what we’re interested in is changes away from that baseline. When the stadium is either louder or quieter, when the brain cells are producing either more or less electricity because they’re communicating with each other more or less, both of these are signs that something interesting is going on that your cells are reacting to.

Lauren: As someone who has not done physics for a very long time, is it the same electricity that you use to turn a lamp on?

Gretchen: I asked some electricity friends about this for the episode.

Lauren: Shoutout to electricity friends.

Gretchen: Thanks to my electricity friends – the answer is yes. In fact, this is why you’re not supposed to stick your finger in the socket because, basically, that electricity will make all of your cells scream at each other very, very loudly, and they don’t like that.

Lauren: And electricity in cables is all set to a consistent standard so that my light bulbs don’t keep flickering or bursting. But do humans run to some kind of national grid standard?

Gretchen: Absolutely not. The UK humans do not run on twice as much electricity so they can make tea twice as fast. [Laughter] There is a general normal range that humans are within, otherwise you’re having problems. But within your body, there’s a lot of variation depending on what you’re doing, what cells are more active, what you’re paying attention to. That’s why we can measure this sort of stuff and find things out about how we think we’re thinking. It's also related to things like lie detecting tests that measure electricity on your skin depending on what you’re reacting to.

Lauren: Those sensors that you put on the head for an EEG don’t have to just go on the head. They could measure electricity elsewhere in the body.

Gretchen: Right. If you had the world’s teeniest tiniest most-efficient lightbulb, you could plug it directly into your body, and it would flicker maybe.

Lauren: Okay. But humans aren’t powerful enough to charge my phone off.

Gretchen: Not with the current state of technology, no. [Laughter]

Lauren: Excellent. Whether the crowd gets louder or quieter in the stadium, they’re always operating off some kind of baseline, and that’s what you’re measuring. That’s the positive and the negative.

Gretchen: You have to measure a boring expected sentence like, “It was his first day at work,” and then it’s the comparison of that sentence with “He spread the warm bread with socks” that enables you to say, “Ah, there’s something different happening with this particular type of sentence compared to a whole bunch of expected sentences with a whole bunch of sentences that have an unexpected word. Is there a particular thing that happens for different, unexpected words that’s different from a whole bunch of usual sentences?”

Lauren: Another place that surprise shows up in language is in the grammar of some languages.

Gretchen: Lauren, have you studied any languages that have a particular surprise marker? Because I understand there’s a little bit of controversy about whether surprise markers are a specific thing or whether they’re part of a more general thing. I want to know the gossip.

Lauren: I think this is one of those areas where it’s a complex feature of human interaction and, therefore, it’s a complex feature of grammar. Let’s look at an example that’s often cited as this grammatical surprise-marking. This is standard Tibetan where we have two sentences that can be translated as “I have that book.” The first is: “Ngar deb de yod.” And the second is: “Ngar deb de 'dug.” The difference between “yod” and “'dug” here is that “yod” is “I have that book,” and “'dug” is “Ah, I have that book, and I should have returned it to the library; I did not expect to find it on my bookshelf!”

Gretchen: Sort of like smacks own forehead “Ah, I have that book!”

Lauren: You could do it as a like, “Oh, I have that book,” where “Oh” is an optional particle you can add to indicate that surprise. The difference is that these are both forms of a verb that means it’s a grammatical choice that someone’s making – not an optional extra particle choice.

Gretchen: Or in English we’re really doing it primarily with intonation. You could be like, [surprised intonation] “I have that book,” like it’s showing up with intonation, which is certainly a lot of one language will do something with intonation that another language does with grammar. It wouldn’t be intrinsically surprising to find out (haha, part of the pun) – it wouldn’t be “surprising” to find out that languages have ways of grammatically marking surprise, but also surprise could be part of a larger category of things like irony or doubt or state of knowledge. Maybe they’re part of a bigger thing. Maybe they’re part of a smaller thing.

Lauren: When this was first observed in Tibetan, it was called a “mirative” form – on analogy with something that already had been described for Albanian, which is an “admirative.” This form can indicate surprise, but it can also do irony, doubt, or “I heard that,” kind of reported-ness. Albanian seems to be pretty unique in the Balkan context for having this form. But something similar has also been reported for Turkish “-mis,” in languages of the Amazon, and other Tibetan languages related to Standard Tibetan, which happens to be the area that I work in.

Gretchen: Do you have very specific thoughts about whether you think the variety of Tibetan that you worked on has a mirative form? Do you think that miratives are part of a general evidential category? What’s happening?

Lauren: What’s happening here? I think that surprise is a sense that can arise from something that is mostly about your access to information and your source of information.

Gretchen: How do you try to study surprise? How do you create a surprising circumstance to study how people talk about it?

Lauren: That’s a great question. Trying to set up something that’s more controlled is a great way to start trying to tease apart these distinctions.

Gretchen: You weren’t just throwing all of your participants surprise birthday parties.

Lauren: That would’ve been delightful to budget for. I used an experiment designed by Zuzana Vokurková, who was looking at this in Standard Tibetan (because once this got described, there’s been a whole bunch of back and forth trying to tease out what’s happening), which is a hidden object task. You get three or four objects (she got pretty big things like a motorbike helmet and a teapot, but I had to carry things around with me, so I settled for things like an apple and my glasses case and a small book) and put them underneath a scarf (once again, very convenient – a lot of scarf-wearing in Nepal; always had my gear with me), put them on a flat surface underneath the scarf and asked people, “What’s that?” Of course, when you’ve just got three lumps under a scarf, people are like, “As usual, Lauren has completely lost the plot, but I’ll answer her question because I’m very kind.”

Gretchen: It’s just like, “Look, I dunno, a lump?”

Lauren: It’s just like, “Uh, I dunno, a ball.”

Gretchen: But this is not the interesting part of the study.

Lauren: This is not the interesting part; this is the baseline. Then you ask people without looking to touch the items.

Gretchen: Like, touch them through the scarf.

Lauren: Touch them through the scarf. For some of the items, people will touch it and go, “Oh, that’s a packet of instant noodles,” because they can feel the crunchy packet.

Gretchen: Or “Oh, that’s an apple!” in the very surprised, new information contour that you’re trying to study.

Lauren: Yeah. Or the most diabolical one, which was a beany toque-style soft hat that I’d squished up into a ball. People would feel it and go, “Uh, it’s something soft?” And then the final thing – and again, this thing is very obvious, but I’d pull off the scarf, and people would go, “Oh, it’s your hat!” This sounds surprised, but what’s important here is not really that they’re surprised it’s a hat, it’s that they now have sufficient evidence of what it is.

Gretchen: They know that it’s your hat. They’re not surprised to see this hat around you. They’ve seen you wear this hat before. It’s just that, right now, they’re new to the information that it is your hat – that your hat is right here. That was what was hidden.

Lauren: And while I used surprised intonations for those examples in that controlled experiment, I also have lots of examples where people use exactly the same grammatical form, which is cognate with that Tibetan “'dug” (it’s “'du”). They use it in situations where it’s not surprising. They can just see “Oh, this is ready. This has happened.” Of course, they expect that after boiling a kettle, the kettle has boiled, and the water’s hot. They’re just saying, “Yeah, I can definitely see that’s ready.”

Gretchen: Right. “The cake’s ready.” “Tea’s on.”

Lauren: Surprise and newness are definitely elements of this, but what is more important and underlying it in these languages at least is that visual or tactile (felt) sensory evidence of what something is.

Gretchen: It’s not enough to come up with, “Oh, here’s this expression. It’s used in a lot of surprise contexts.” It’s like, “Okay, that’s cool. Can it be used in any other contexts?” This experiment is really a way of trying to say, “Are there other contexts you can also use it as well?” in which case, it might not be a mirative (if we even think that any languages have a mirative, which is kind of in doubt); it might be part of this broader category of which surprise is just one thing.

Lauren: This is part of the challenge of describing and pinning down something that is very interactional in much the same way it’s hard to explain intonation without that roller coaster of intonation, it’s very hard to explain a single sentence in isolation when it’s actually part of a larger conversational context. I think it’s part of why this is still very much an evolving category. People have said, “Oh, no, I don’t mean it as a mirative as surprise. I just mean it as ‘This is new information’.” New and surprise are related but not the same. There’s a lot of nuance and a lot of complexity to trying to map out the space of this grammatical category.

Gretchen: I think this messiness is particularly interesting because I feel like when we encounter language in a language classroom or in a school-based context, like an educational context, we often think of the grammatical categories as being really fixed. Like, all I have to do is have someone tell me what’s a noun and what’s a verb. There’s a lot of evidence around nouns and verbs existing in most if not all languages, but there are still grammatical categories and grammatical distinctions that don’t have a fixed consensus about whether this distinction is something that’s relevant to make or whether it’s part of a larger thing or part of a smaller thing. This is something where it’s still very active in terms of some people thinking that miratives are real and some people thinking that they’re part of something else.

Lauren: My favourite attempt to elicit surprise or unexpectedness or newness from people was that I purchased some very basic magical illusions and magic tricks, like a bag that made paper money disappear, and a colouring book that would magically colour itself. I taught these to – I did it a couple of times myself, but I was like, “I want this to be as natural as possible,” so I taught someone that I was working with how to do these magic tricks, so he could do them for other people. He thought they were so delightful that he actually did them for everyone before I had set up any recording equipment.

Gretchen: Oh, no!

Lauren: This is why one prepares many different strategies for eliciting things in the field. But I’ve never had something fail because it was so entertaining and so successful that I didn’t even get a chance to record it.

Gretchen: Do you feel impressionistically like you witnessed surprise? Or would you not feel confident in stating whether you did?

Lauren: Oh, no, I absolutely have some great anec-data that I absolutely cited in my analysis that people absolutely do use this visual evidence form to point to the extreme novelty of this moment.

Gretchen: I’m glad that you at least got to experience this even if it was never documented.

Lauren: It was fine. It was an absolute delightful failure.

Gretchen: Everybody had a great time.

Lauren: Yes.

Gretchen: Speaking of the importance of context, do you wanna hear about one of my favourite grammatical phenomena?

Lauren: Sure. One of – I understand we’re not picking favourites here.

Gretchen: Look, I love them all, but right now, I wanna talk about topic-comment. If you have a sentence in English like, “I like cake.”

Lauren: Sure: informative, grammatical, pretty neutral.

Gretchen: Delicious. In this sentence, we’re emphasising the “I” a bit, but this is also English’s default word order. We can also have a sentence like, “Cake, I like, but ice cream I don’t particularly care for.” That’s false, but it’s a valid example sentence. I just wanna make it quite clear that I am fond of both cake and ice cream.

Lauren: Grammatical if not factual.

Gretchen: Sometimes in linguistics we must tell lies.

Lauren: Something that doesn’t necessarily follow the standard subject then verb then object, something like, “As for surprise parties, they stress me out.”

Gretchen: “It’s the cake that’s the most important part of any birthday party.”

Lauren: No lies there.

Gretchen: Yeah. “From behind the couch jumped the attendees of the surprise party.” In sentences like these we can put a different word at the beginning or a different phrase at the beginning to emphasize how important it is to whatever we’re talking about. In “Cake, I like,” the topic is “cake” because we’ve emphasized it that way, or “It’s cake that I like the most,” or “As for cake, it’s my favourite,” in all of these cases, we’ve got some sort of reason from something else that’s going on in the conversation that we wanna emphasize the cake. We have a variety of grammatical structures. We can just put cake first and use some intonation. We can use constructions like, “as for,” or “it’s the” or “regarding cake” – “Regarding that cake you promised me last week, I still haven’t received it yet” – or you know, “re:” in a subject line of an email – “Re: Cake (Where is it? C’mon)” – we can use all these ways to topicalize the cake and make it the more important part of the sentence, or we can do other things to topicalize, to emphasize, the “I.” We can say, “I like cake, but you don’t have to. I’ll eat it all myself. It’s fine,” or “Personally, I like cake,” or I would say, “As for me, I like cake.” There’s lots of ways that we can add emphasis to one of the other parts of the sentence.

Lauren: What’s really interesting about all of these is that “Cake, I like, but ice cream I don’t care for” is a classic example of this kind of topic fronting (making cake more prominent). Whenever I hear these in isolation, I’m just like, “Oof, that’s not the word order I’m used to,” but then when I’m just listening out in the world, I hear this kind of putting the thing you wanna focus on at the front all the time.

Gretchen: Right, like in the types of example sentences that linguists tend to come up with, these are really weird because they actually make a lot more sense in a natural discourse context.

Lauren: A little bit like my challenge with trying to pin down if grammatical structures are mirative is sometimes we get in these big arguments about these examples in isolation when it’s just like, we actually have to go back to the context.

Gretchen: Even the linguist tendency – or the literary tendency – to write sentences that have several full nouns in them is actually very weird from a discourse perspective. Like, a normal linguist sentence would be like, “Michelle’s friends threw her a surprise birthday party.” In actuality, if you’re telling a story, you might be like, “Oh, you know my friend Michelle? Yeah, it was her birthday last week. Her friends threw a surprise party. She didn’t expect it at all.” We’re introducing one topic, which is “Michelle,” we’re linking that to the birthday, we’re linking that to the party, and each of these things are being introduced one by one in a storytelling structure rather than having a sentence that starts with all of this embedded information. It turns out in connected speech, sentences like that are super rare. We tend to have a lot more sentences that have pronouns in them which refer to previous information.

Lauren: Using a pronoun indicates something isn’t new. It shouldn’t be surprising.

Gretchen: Right. “You know my friend Michelle? Yeah, it was her birthday last week,” and the “her” refers back to Michelle. We’ve got this sort of topic-comment – the topic is Michelle; we’re commenting on various aspects of what happened with Michelle. But sometimes I see people, especially in language learning contexts, trying to be like, “Oh, let’s identify the topic given the sentence.” You can’t. You need the context of why it’s being said to be like, “Well, what is the most important part of the sentence, and how are we commenting on it?” I think one of the reasons why I am particularly fond of topic-comment as a grammatical construction is that, when I moved to Montreal, a linguist had said to me, just this passing comment, “Oh, yeah, written French has this fixed word order thing where it’s subject-verb-object, or subject-object-verb, depending on whether the object is a pronoun or not, but spoken French is topic-comment. It doesn’t do either of these things.” I was like, “Hang on, what? It’s got a completely different grammatical structure in the spoken variety?”

Lauren: In English we use it sometimes, but we don’t use it that frequently.

Gretchen: In English, we have a little bit more of an ability to do that emphasis with intonation. When we do constructions like, “It’s cake that I love,” we’re still keeping the same word order. French is much more likely to be able to pull stuff out of the sentence and use other words like pronouns or relativisers to refer back to them, to give them little anchors. The first time this knowledge became really useful to me, I was at the farmer’s market in the spring, and I was trying to buy rhubarb because –

Lauren: You were gonna make a rhubarb cake for a birthday.

Gretchen: Rhubarb fan? Me? Yeah. Keeping the theme of this episode. I wasn’t sure if it was rhubarb season yet, so I was going around to all the stalls trying to find out if anybody had the early rhubarb yet because I always start craving rhubarb a few weeks before it’s actually available. I was running through the same dialogue a lot of times because I was going up to each farmer’s market stall owner and saying the same thing. I started off saying, “Est-ce que vous avez de la rhubarbe?” (“Do you have any rhubarb?”), which is, I think, still how I would say it in English. People would sort of do a bit of a double take before they replied. Then I remembered that this linguist (who I can’t remember to thank, unfortunately, I can’t remember who said it to me to thank them) had said, “Spoken French is topic-comment.” I was like, “Everyone is pausing before they reply to my sentence. What would I be doing if this sentence was topic-comment?” I pulled out the rhubarb from the end of the sentence where it would normally live to say, “La rhubarbe, vous en avez?” Like, “Rhubarb – do you guys have any?”

Lauren: And how did that go?

Gretchen: Just – so much better. People just replied to me immediately. They were like, “Ah, rhubarb, that’s what you wanna know about.”

Lauren: Given this was a farmer’s market, would you say this was a bit of an organic experiment?

Gretchen: [Laughs] Certainly none of the people there realised they were participating in a linguistics example.

Lauren: That is absolutely not how I would do things in English either. I can see how that required a bit of a grammatical mental shift for you.

Gretchen: Recently, I’ve been in ASL classes, which is a language that is relatively well known to be topic-comment. In this case, the topic is marked with raised eyebrows and a bit of a head tilt.

Lauren: Oh, fun, grammatical marking of topic.

Gretchen: You have grammatical marking of topic, which is really fun, and I don’t wanna be that linguist in the class who’s like, “Secretly, we also have topic-comment in French. It’s not as hard as everybody is thinking it is.” But it’s fascinating which language’s topic-comment gets talked about more. Japanese and Korean also often come up in topic-comment because they literally have a postposition which is “-wa” or “-(n)eun” that comes after the part that has been topicalized, so it’s very easy to see that they’ve been topicalized grammatically – much like this raised eyebrows and head tilt in ASL. It’s very grammatical.

Lauren: I also feel like I see this idea of topic and comment come up a lot with languages that are described as having “free word order.” If you don’t have to decide whether your subject or object goes first because you’re using some very impressive morphology to do that work for you, when you look at where things turn up in this free word order, it normally is the topic that is fronted. I find topic-comment one of these really interesting features that is unlocking a second layer of grammar, or it’s this really subtle, context-dependent part of grammar.

Gretchen: English doesn’t have an obligatory topic-comment marking. We have the ability to mark it optionally if we want to, so sometimes it seems sort of exoticised from the languages that do have a topic marker, but really, it’s there all the time in discourse, we just don’t tend to write that way, so people don’t always notice it.

Lauren: I think I was a bit surprised by how many different parts of language surprise touches on.

Gretchen: I think that’s one of the delightful parts of surprise that there is a brain component; there’s a word component; there’s this sound intonation component; there’s a grammatical component. Surprise is something that really recruits all of the grammatical resources available to it because it’s an important part of the human experience, and we want to talk about things that are surprising to us.

Lauren: It’s such a complex mental state and a thing that we, personally, experience. Something that might be surprising to one person may not always be surprising to another, but we see these recurring elements of surprise in our grammar and in our brains.

Gretchen: The fact that there’re so many different ways that surprise pops up within a language and across languages speaks to how really compelled we are to share our mental states with other people. Next time you’re surprised, maybe think about how you’re expressing that linguistically.

[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 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 our Lingthusiasm logo on t-shirts, stickers, and mugs 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 to other linguistics fans and be the first to find out about new merch and other announcements. Recent bonus episodes include World Linguistics Day; synonyms, antonyms, and other -nyms; and an interview about the mysteries of the Voynich manuscript with Claire Bowern. As a reminder, Lingthusiasm memberships make great gifts for anyone who’s enthusiastic about linguistics in your life.

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Gretchen: 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 Editorial Assistant is Jon Kruk, and our Technical Editor is Leah Velleman. Our music is “Ancient City” by The Triangles.

Lauren: [Surprise intonation] Stay lingthusiastic!

Gretchen: [Surprise intonation] Oh, stay lingthusiastic!

[Music]