#spray-load constructions

Gretchen: Exactly. You could put in these different versions. And it was – I don’t 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 “Here’s a list of verbs. Here’s a list of nouns,” it seems like they don’t cross over much.

Lauren: And that you’re – 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, it’s 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 “Well, what does it mean to act like a verb?”

Lauren: That is the most circular definition I’ve ever heard. What do you do next if you’ve caught yourself in this circle? What is the definition of a verb?

Gretchen: When I’m trying to figure out “Okay, here’s this word that I’m encountering, is it acting like a verb? Can I make it act like a verb?” I put it in a sentence where it’s forced to act like a verb and see what happens.

Lauren: Okay.

Gretchen: If I wanna take – let’s take a brand-new fake word like “blorp.”

Lauren: Great fake word.

Gretchen: You know, here’s “blorp,” not a pre-existing English word. It sounds like it could be... If I wanna say, “Can ‘blorp’ be used as a verb,” then I might say something like “I blorped you” or “I’m blorping right now.”

Lauren: Okay. “I blorped out of the treehouse”?

Gretchen: “I blorped out of the treehouse and ran down the hill.” 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 “Okay, does this sound like the normal use of this word already or does this sound like it’s a new thing that I’m pushing that word into?”

Lauren: I like this idea of them providing the structure, but I worry, since we’re gonna talk a lot in this episode about rearranging the structure, that maybe using, like, a spine metaphor might be –

Gretchen: A little bit too Frankenstein?

Lauren: – a little bit too gross. Maybe we should go for a metaphor that’s 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 –

Lauren: Then different verbs come with different hooks.

Gretchen: Yeah.

Lauren: Yeah, that works.

Gretchen: I’m into this. Can you put a word in a place where it’s supporting a lot of different other parts of the sentence and does that sound normal, or does that sound like it’s an innovation? If you take a word like “internet,” for example, and you say, “I’m gonna internet right now” or “I’ve got a lot of internetting to do,” or “Let’s just internet that and see what the answer is,” that’s using “internet” like a verb. You have this feeling that that’s a novel thing to do or it’s a relatively new thing to do. And the canonical use of “internet” is more like “What’s on the internet right now” or –

Lauren: “The internet is messy,” which is, like, a very noun thing.

Gretchen: “The internet is a weird place.” You know, that’s a very “noun” use of “internet.” You could use it as a verb. You can use anything as a verb if you try hard enough. But the question of “Is it a verb?” is often “Is it a pre-established verb that lots of people use it as a verb or is this a new thing that you’re doing to it that’s verbing it?”

Lauren: Yeah.

Gretchen: You can verb “verb,” but the word “verb” is canonically a noun.

Lauren: People get really upset when you talk about verbing stuff.

Gretchen: Yeah, there’s this Calvin and Hobbes quote, “Verbing weirds language,” which of course is using “weird” 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 “blorp,” you said, “I’m blorping right now,” which is like – “I’m blorping.” So there’s one hook for “I’m.” Whereas I said, “I’m blorping out of the treehouse.” So I’ve got – “I’m” is one hook and “out of the treehouse” is another. So we’ve used the same – well, we’ve possibly used different made-up verbs because we don’t really know what “blorp” means yet. We’re doing this all backwards.

Gretchen: Well, yeah, more often you start with the meaning. Or if I say, “I’m blorping you” or “I blorped that to you,” then I’ve got two hooks, “I” and “you,” or three hooks “I’m blorping that to you.” We still don’t know what “blorping” is, but we know that it can support these – you know, if it’s our coat rack, it can support the hooks that contain “I” and “you” and “that.”

Lauren: We’ve already talked a little bit in Episode 9 about constituency, which is this idea that language isn’t just a random throwing-together of words. It’s not just a bucket of balls. It’s 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 they’re already there. It’s 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 you’re trying to figure out when you’re translating Latin poetry – because that’s what you do in intro Latin class. You don’t learn how to, like, ask Caesar where to buy pizza, much as maybe that would be useful. You’re translating Latin poetry. And you’re going through these lines and being like “Hey, I need figure out what the verbs are, how many of them there are” 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 what’s 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 world’s 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. There’s 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 it’s 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 that’s 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: There’s this really great example of that that uses the “I [heart] NY” thing you put on t-shirts.

Lauren: Oh, yeah. It’s as minimal as possible.

Gretchen: Exactly. So “I” is the subject. The “[heart]” is the verb. And “New York” is the object. English is “I [heart] NY,” and then other languages are “I NY [heart]” or “[Heart] I NY” 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 “number of hooks”? 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 “I’m sleeping,” that supports the “I.”

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 don’t need a coat rack.

Gretchen: Yeah, this metaphorical coat rack – like, often, a regular coat rack will actually let you hang six or eight coats. There aren’t 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. “I sleep,” “I’m sleeping,” “I dance,” “You dance,” “The dog is sleeping,” 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 “I ate” – you’ve got here the example “I ate the apple,” but I always use the example “I ate the cake” because it’s more real-life.

Gretchen: I support a diet that includes both cake and apples. “This message brought to you by…” So, “I ate the cake,” “I ate the apple,” both of those – so “cake” or “apple” is the kind of thing that can go on that second hook. Crucially, you can say, “I ate the cake and the apple,” and the “and” there lets you hang “cake” and “apple” on the same hook. But you can’t say something like “I ate the cake the apple.”

Lauren: No.

Gretchen: That just sounds weird.

Lauren: Because you’re trying to add another hook where it shouldn’t be.

Gretchen: You’re trying to cram two coats onto one hook but you’re not giving them any means of relating to each other. You’re just like “No, both of you go here!” And it’s like “No, we can’t fit here. I’m sorry.” But you could do something like “I ate” – “Have you eaten yet?” “Yeah, I ate.”

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, “I ate rocks as a child.”

Lauren: I mean, you could say that.

Gretchen: But if you just say, “I ate,” that doesn’t generally imply rocks. It generally implies a sort of food, unless you’re, like, a rock-eating creature from science fiction in which case maybe here it’s okay.

Lauren: So we’ve got some one-hooks. We’ve got some two-hooks. Can we get some more hooks happening?

Gretchen: Yeah, so we can get another hook if you have something like “give.” You can be like “I gave you the cake” because I’m a very nice person.

Lauren: Mmm, thank you, Gretchen.

Gretchen: “I gave you the cake” or “I gave the cake to you,” both of which have three hooks to put these three different objects.

Lauren: Or “I sent you a letter.”

Gretchen: “I sent you a letter.” Thank you.

Lauren: More realistically, “I sent you a text message.”

Gretchen: We’re updating examples for the 21st century. “I sent you a letter,” “I sent you a postcard,” “I sent you a DM on Twitter,” these are different kinds of hooks that you can have on “send” or “give.”

Lauren: It would be weird to say, “I sent you.” I mean you could say that, but it means something very different. I made you go somewhere.

Gretchen: Yeah, “I sent you,” or something like “I sent you to the store to buy more cake.” There’s “I sent you to the store” – “to the store” is kind of interesting here because I could just say, “I sent you,” but I also have this option of adding on something – “to the store,” “I sent you a message on Monday.”

Lauren: Yeah.

Gretchen: There’s these additional sorts of things you could add on, but they aren’t required.

Lauren: The hooks are very fixed into the coat rack. These are more like – just think extra hangers.

Gretchen: Yeah, okay. You can drape extra hangers on your coat rack. I like how this metaphor’s going.

Lauren: This is a much more realistic coat rack all of a sudden.

Gretchen: I’m really glad we didn’t do the Frankenstein thing. It becomes a bit of a messy coat rack like many of us probably have at home. The stuff like “on Monday,” “to the store,” “with great alacrity,” 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 there’s a few fixed things but then we can just keep adding and enriching.

Gretchen: And the same thing goes – you know, “I gave you a book cake.”

Lauren: “Book cake”? 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 “book cake,” like, maybe it’s a cake that looks like a book, then we can hang those both on the same hook. But if we can’t figure out how to bundle them together like “I gave you a book on cake…”

Lauren: No, I can’t even fabricate a meaning for that.

Gretchen: Then those aren’t 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: It’s an ungrammatical coat rack.

Gretchen: The anti-grammatical coat rack. The other one that I really love is coat racks – okay, you probably can’t get this at Ikea, but you can get a metaphorical sentence coat rack with no hook at all.

Lauren: Uh, okay? That’s just called a pole, Gretchen.

Gretchen: Definitely don’t try to buy this. It’s gonna be pretty useless for you. But sentence-wise it’s very interesting because you can get verbs like “It’s raining.”

Lauren: True.

Gretchen: If I say, “It’s a cake,” that one’s pretty good. We know what “it” is, “This is a cake” or something like this, or “You’re a cake,” which is probably an insult? I don’t know.

Lauren: I’m okay with being a cake.

Gretchen: But that’s a real “it” there. It’s doing something. But if I say, “It’s raining,” I can’t say, “You’re raining.”

Lauren: That is true.

Gretchen: Or “You’re snowing,” or, you know, “The dog is raining.”

Lauren: “It” is not a regular coat compared to “dog” or “you” or these other nouns that are proper coats that we can hang on a hook. But “it” is –

Gretchen: Maybe it’s like one of those fake rain-ponchos that doesn’t 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 – and we know that English is weird in terms of this using what I call “Dummy It.” I mean, not me personally, that’s just how I learnt about it. But this “Dummy It” form is just there because “rain” as a verb doesn’t have any hooks and English freaks out and goes “Oh, I’d better add something. It’s just a pole. I need to make it look like a coat rack.”

Gretchen: This is the thing that’s interesting about verbs in particular is that this is how we know that “rain” is still a verb even though it’s not actually supporting any real nouns because it has to support a fake noun because a verb’s like, “I just need a noun.”

Lauren: “I wouldn’t be a coat rack. I’d be a pole!”

Gretchen: “Just pretend that one’s there even if it’s not really there.” But you get all sorts of other things happening with words like this in other languages. In some languages that don’t actually require you to have a pronoun like “it” – so in Spanish you can say, “llueve,” which just means “rains.”

Lauren: Okay.

Gretchen: That’s all you need. And it’s still got that, like, it’s still got the ending that you’d have if it was “he” or “she” or “it rains.” It’s just that that “he” or “she” or “it” doesn’t actually refer to a specific person in the same way that “It’s raining” doesn’t refer to a specific person.

Lauren: Right. Whereas, I had the opposite when I learnt Nepali. I had to remember that to say, “It’s raining,” you have to say, “Pani pardaicha,” which is “Rain is falling” or “Rain is raining.”

Gretchen: Ah, “Rain is raining.” So you do need a real noun there. It just has to be always the same noun.

Lauren: Well, because you can also say, “It’s snowing” or “It’s some other” –

Gretchen: Is that like “Snow is snowing” or “snow is raining”?

Lauren: “Snow” is just a kind of general “falling/precipitating” verb. But you have to specify an actual – you have to have a real coat, a real noun there.

Gretchen: Kind of like “The sun is out” versus “The clouds are out.” Whereas, the “is out” isn’t doing much or something like that.

Lauren: And then you have the opposite. In English you could have a sentence like “Blood rains down on the city.”

Gretchen: That’s a very post-apocalyptic sentence.

Lauren: For someone who didn’t want the spine metaphor, I’ll just go straight into the emo dystopia.

Gretchen: That’s another reason you know that rain is a real verb sometimes because sometimes you could have something rain or like “Tears rained down my face.”

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 “Impersonal Constructions,” but for other verbs that aren’t weather verbs. So in German you can say, “es wurde getanzt,” which means something like “There was dancing” or “It danced.”

Lauren: Well, that’s nice.

Gretchen: And that means “People danced/We danced/There was dancing in the rain,” maybe. This doesn’t mean in the same way that – it’s kind of impersonal so when you translate it in English you use one of these various constructions. But in structure, it’s a lot more parallel to “Es regnet” – “It rains.”

Lauren: Hmm, cool. So, again, different languages have slightly different approaches to the coat rack and the number of hooks.

Gretchen: But they’re all reflecting this idea that there isn’t necessarily a real person happening here. You can do a similar thing, I’m thinking of your Nepali example with – 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, “I’m sleeping.” You can’t normally “sleep something.” Like, I can’t say, “I slept a nap.”

Lauren: No. I mean, you could, but I’m gonna flag that as not likely to be grammatical.

Gretchen: Yeah, maybe I could try. But you can say, “I slept the sleep of the just.”

Lauren: True.

Gretchen: Or “I dreamed a dream of infamy.” I don’t know why I’m really pretentious right now.

Lauren: Because that’s the only thing you can do if you wanna add more hooks to “sleep.”

Gretchen: Yeah, like “I dreamed a dream of times gone by,” which I think is a line from Les Mis. You can only “dream a dream.” You can “sleep a sleep.” Can I “nap a nap?” I don’t think so.

Lauren: I don’t think so.

Gretchen: There’s limitations on what you can do with it, but you can add this extra hook, but it’s a fake hook that only gets one thing on it.

Lauren: Okay, so we’ve got our one-hook, two-hook, three-hook – 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 “bet” as having four hooks. You could say, “I bet you five dollars on Usain Bolt that he’ll win the race.”

Lauren: Okay, he was the only sportsperson that both Gretchen and I could identify off the top of our heads where you would say, “Lauren bet five dollars on…”

Gretchen: I mean, I could bet you five dollars on Usain Bolt, but I think you would not take this bet because probably he’s 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 “bet” can maybe accomplish this.

Lauren: Because “I bet you” – so “I” and “you,” that’s two. “Five dollars” is another coat. I mean, it’s a cheap coat but, you know. And then “Usain Bolt” is a very fancy coat.

Gretchen: Very fast coat.

Lauren: Very fancy coat.

Gretchen: It seems like maybe up to four. Again, I wouldn’t 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 “bet” can potentially come with up to four other bits of information built into the structure.

Gretchen: Exactly. And, without “bet,” this whole sentence isn’t working. If I just say, “I you five dollars on Usain Bolt,” this is not working.

Lauren: Again, gonna point out, probably not grammatical.

Gretchen: Whereas, something like “I bet you five dollars” or “I bet five dollars on Usain Bolt” or “Betcha five dollars on Usain Bolt,” if you drop one of these nouns, it’s 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: We’ve been talking about coat racks and hooks, but you may actually recognise the terminology that all this refers to, which is “transitivity.” It’s a verb-y word that comes up when people learn grammar.

Gretchen: Yeah, “transitivity” takes as a metaphor that a sentence goes across because this is from the Latin word “to go across/to translate/to transport.” It goes across from the subject to the object. If you have a transitive sentence, it goes “I see the book,” or a sentence that doesn’t go across – “I slept.” That’s a core metaphor when it comes to transitivity. It’s 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 we’re 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 doesn’t mean we can’t 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 “I made you read the book.” In contrast to regular “I read the book/You read the book,” “I made you read the book,” this “make” is just introducing another hook. You have “I made you read the book.” Now you have three hooks on a verb that formerly only had two.

Lauren: We can add hooks that way. There’s another way to add a hook, which is to say, “I baked a cake for you, Gretchen.”

Gretchen: Oh, thank you. Thank you.

Lauren: By adding the “for” there, I’ve added another reason to have a hook.

Gretchen: “I made you bake a cake for me.”

Lauren: We’re adding hooks all over the place.

Gretchen: Now we’ve 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 we’re calling this “adding hooks” is because in other languages they don’t 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 – “I made you bake the cake” or “I caused you to bake the cake.” But when I bake the cake “for you,” I added that with a preposition.

Lauren: True.

Gretchen: Those look like they’re 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. We’re 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 we’re just gonna tell people what the terminology is.

Gretchen: So the terminology for this one – the other ones have complicated-sounding names like “causative” and “benefactive,” which, like, it’s fine. They’re useful if you know Latin. But these ones are called the “Spray/Load Alternation.” 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 “I sprayed the walls with paint” or “I sprayed paint onto the walls.”

Lauren: Hmm, yeah, true.

Gretchen: Or say something like “I loaded the truck with hay,” “I loaded hay onto the truck.” In both cases you have two main hooks.

Lauren: “I sprayed the walls” or “I sprayed paint.”

Gretchen: Yeah. And you have one additional hook that’s like our coat rack hook that’s being added on like “with paint” or “onto the walls.” But you can alternate which one you want to make the main hook that’s attached to the coat rack proper and the one that’s, like, the more peripheral one that’s your coat hanger one that’s further away with the preposition there. There’s a whole list of words that have this alternation. It’s kind of nifty that there’s 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 “I sprayed the walls with paint” versus “I sprayed paint onto the walls,” 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 what’s a hook and what’s a coat hanger. It is also possible to remove hooks from sentences. If I have something like “I broke the /vɑz/” – Gretchen would have “I broke the /veɪs/,” I believe.

Gretchen: Yeah, I think I’d say, “I broke the /veɪs/,”

Lauren: We’ll say that’s the same sentence. So “I broke the vase,” “I” and “the vase,” I’ve got two coats hanging up there. But if I had a sentence like “The vase was broken,” who knows how!

Gretchen: Maybe it was the dog. Maybe it was me.

Lauren: I can’t tell because I don’t have that second hook anymore. I’ve 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 “The /vɑz/ broke” – “The /veɪs/ broke.” I don’t know. I say both. “The vase broke,” 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 you’re building, Gretchen.

Gretchen: You know, I’m just saying… it wasn’t me. Yeah, so this ability to promote and demote things, which I think is super important because we don’t often say sentences in a complete vacuum. That’s 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, “What does this mean? Press a button.”

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 we’re 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 isn’t. If the story’s about, you know, “Here’s all these types of things about the vase” versus if the story’s about “Here’s all the trouble my dog got into,” 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 don’t know, like, a museum inscription is gonna be like “Well, this vase clearly broke a hundred years ago. We can tell that by the cracks on it. Blah blah blah…” But maybe the museum doesn’t know who broke it. So it wouldn’t make sense to be like “Someone clearly broke this vase. Someone or something unknown clearly broke this vase a hundred years ago. We can tell this by the cracks.” The important part here is this is the description of the vase. But in other circumstances, we might want to highlight that. I think there’s this bigger question, “Okay, 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?”

Lauren: I think it’s 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 “kill” and “die.” If someone dies, then you have one hook. And if someone kills another person, you have two hooks.

Gretchen: I can’t say, “I died you.”

Lauren: No.

Gretchen: Unless it means, like, I changed the colour of you. But that’s a completely different word.

Lauren: That’s a completely different coat rack this time.

Gretchen: Whereas, I can say, “I killed you.” It’s harder to say, “I killed.” That implies I killed someone or something.

Lauren: Yes, it always implies that there’s a second hook that’s 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. It’s okay with a handful. English can cope with a handful. Other languages might have a handful. Or we might have verbs that – in some languages “kill” and “die” 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 “I caused you to die” or “I made you die,” which then means “I killed you.”

Lauren: In Syuba, one of the languages I work with, the verb for “to scatter,” like “to scatter grains,” is just “I caused grain to fall.”

Gretchen: Okay, yeah. This works.

Lauren: Using that “I made it” 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 –

Gretchen: Every single verb had a completely different form like “kill” versus “die,” or like “push” versus “fall.” In some languages “to push something” is just “I caused it to fall.”

Lauren: Exactly.

Gretchen: And, again, imagine if every single pair of words instead of saying, “I caused it to fall,” “I caused you to bake a cake for me,” I had to say instead of “you bake a cake for me” – “You ‘blorp’ a cake for me.” That’s a completely different word.

Lauren: That is the best definition.

Gretchen: To “blorp” 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 “blorp” is sounding similar to “bake,” but we know that “push” and “fall,” and “kill” and “die” don’t sound at all similar to each other.

Lauren: Yeah.

Gretchen: This is gonna be like “florp” or something like this. So you were talking about earlier how the words in a sentence aren’t 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 I’ve 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 – 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, it’s been a long time since I’ve done chemistry so I’m probably just gonna agree with whatever you say here.

Gretchen: Yeah, it’s 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 that’s 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 I’m not the first person to notice this connection because there’s a term for this type of phenomenon, which is “valency,” which is used in both chemistry and linguistics.

Lauren: Huh. I mean, I know the word “valency” and I just never, ever thought about how that’s 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, “They’re doing all this stuff with valency about how little things connect with each other, but what if we borrowed this metaphor over here?” And now we’ve forgotten that these were once really connected.

Lauren: Who was that?

Gretchen: This was Charles S. Peirce –

Lauren: Ah, there we go.

Gretchen: – who wrote a paper in 1897 about the connection here. And then it comes up in linguistics again a few decades later. There’s this connection between, “Okay, how many other atoms can connect to this one” and “how many other words can glom onto this sentence? How many nouns can we have on this verb?”

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: That’s definitely what we’re 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. Can’t afford to pledge? That’s 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 “Ancient Cities” by The Triangles.

Gretchen: Stay lingthusiastic!

[Music]