Interview with Steven Pinker The Ling Space 2015-11-11 | We're really excited to have gotten to interview Steven Pinker recently! Dr. Pinker is a professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard, and a best-selling author whose books, including The Language Instinct, the Stuff of Thought, and the Sense of Style, help to broaden knowledge about linguistics, language, and cognitive psychology.We got to ask him about a lot of great topics, including:- the role of social media in promoting science- the unifying themes under all of his work- the ongoing resistance to the idea that language is innate- the role of emoticons and emoji in discourse- the videos he watches on YouTube- three questions from our followers on machine learning, advice for starting out in research, and social media's influence on languageAnd much more! We even have an extra video this week, posted Thursday, that has a book recommendation and news about Dr. Pinker's next book.Hope you all enjoy it!Some related videos:How will language change in the future?: youtu.be/5hibYoYwGkoHow do computers understand our speech?: youtu.be/FI9IJteS-5YHow do we interpret sentences?: youtu.be/2A-FDN7-gyoFind us on all the social media worlds:Tumblr: http://thelingspace.tumblr.comTwitter: twitter.com/TheLingSpaceFacebook: facebook.com/thelingspaceAnd at our website, http://www.thelingspace.com !You can also find our store at the website, http://www.thelingspace.com/storeWe also have forums to discuss this episode, and linguistics more generally.Sources:Steven Pinker's bookshelf ad: youtube.com/watch?v=tV-wgmLi1rEPinker with Kanye West: twitter.com/sapinker/status/656344464001118208Books mentioned:The Language Instinct: http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780061336461The Blank Slate: http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780142003343The Stuff of Thought: http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780143114246The Sense of Style: http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780670025855The Better Angels of Our Nature: http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780143122012Clear and Simple as the Truth: http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780691147437Style: http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780857191878Looking forward to next week!
How Does If Work? The Semantics of Conditionals The Ling Space 2019-03-06 | What's in our minds when we throw an if/then sentence out there? How do we work out what worlds we may be talking about? In this week's episode, we talk about the semantics of conditionals: what an "if" looks like logically, why a simple logical arrow isn't enough to capture the complexities of conditionals, and how we change what possibilities we allow ourselves to think of based on what our "if" clause holds.This is Topic #95!This week's tag language: Kyrgyz!Related videos:How Logical is Language? youtu.be/lw4ykgRtv3QHow Do We Capture the Truth of Beliefs? Type Theory: youtu.be/CWE9ycOxCEQCan we define "must"? Modality: youtu.be/vtYdrzdU2dYLast episode:How do we understand missing words? The syntax of Ellipsis: youtu.be/WXhn1tdZ_osOther of our semantics videos:Thinking vs. Knowing: Presuppositions and Anti-presuppositions: youtu.be/-iQ7XrehKdwHow Do We Signal What's Important When We Talk? Information Structure: youtu.be/gZ6o8yFvJYIHow Can One Greek Letter Help Us Understand Things? Lambda Calculus: youtu.be/BwWQDzXBuwgOur website also has extra content about this week's topic, on other kinds of conditional sentences, at: http://www.thelingspace.com/episode-95Find us on all the social media worlds:Tumblr: http://thelingspace.tumblr.comTwitter: http://twitter.com/TheLingSpaceFacebook: http://www.facebook.com/thelingspaceAnd at our website, http://www.thelingspace.com !You can also find our store at the website, thelingspace.storenvy.comWe also have forums to discuss this episode, and linguistics more generally.Sources:The theory of conditionals here dates back to Kratzer's 1986 paper "Conditionals," which is where that quote at the end comes from: http://semanticsarchive.net/Archive/ThkMjYxN/Conditionals.pdfThe idea of if-clauses as restrictors actually goes back to David Lewis' 1975 paper "Adverbs of Quantification," which you can find here: http://www.andrewmbailey.com/dkl/Adverbs_of_Quantification.pdf. The presentation was based mostly on some of the usual semantic suspects: http://web.mit.edu/fintel/fintel-heim-intensional.pdf, Seth Cable's course notes: http://people.umass.edu/scable/LING620-SP18/Handouts/12.Conditionals.pdfhttp://schoubye.org/teaching/Formal-Semantics/FormalSemanticsNotes2014.pdf. Crucial inspiration also from here http://books.google.ca/books?id=1NwWDgAAQBAJ&dq=frana+modality+in+the+nominal+domain&source=gbs_navlinks_s , in a chapter by Ilaria Frana titled "Modality in the Nominal Domain: The Case of Adnominal Conditionals." There's also a series of videos on YouTube that explores the topic from a more philosophical point-of-view, and arrives at a different conclusion, but might still be of interest, starting here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Zxp2-_pLCE#linguistics #semantics #TheLingSpaceLooking forward to next time!
How Do We Understand Missing Words? Ellipsis The Ling Space 2018-12-13 | What can silence tell us about the syntax of a sentence? How do we know what meaning to fill in when words are missing? In this week's episode, we talk about ellipsis: what rules are at work to tell us how to use it, how sentence structure plays into what words we can leave out, and whether words are even missing at all, or just hiding. This is Topic #94!This week's tag language: Scots Gaelic!Related videos:How Can Sentences Look Like Adjectives? Relative Clauses: youtu.be/Bra5gExyPbYWhat Makes a Basic Sentence? A History of Clauses: youtu.be/980meOhBGR8How Can We Tell What Roles Nouns Play? Case Theory: youtu.be/8Xi81H80J-wLast episode:Who Is She? The Syntax of Pronouns: youtu.be/fvohHpylRkYOther of our morphosyntax videos:What Does Possession Tell Us About Syntax? The DP Hypothesis: youtu.be/gWy7QdZJg9EWhat Kinds of Pieces Do We Use to Build Words? Derivation and Inflection: youtu.be/BTZCozhneKAWhat Changes in a Sentence When We Swap Verbs? Raising vs. Control: youtu.be/SYoYNeaSYrUOur website also has extra content about this week's topic, on why objects tend to stay put in English, at: http://www.thelingspace.com/episode-94Find us on all the social media worlds:Tumblr: http://thelingspace.tumblr.comTwitter: http://twitter.com/TheLingSpaceFacebook: http://www.facebook.com/thelingspaceAnd at our website, http://www.thelingspace.com !You can also find our store at the website, thelingspace.storenvy.comWe also have forums to discuss this episode, and linguistics more generally.Sources:Much of the discussion here is based on Andrew Carnie's Syntax: A Generative Introduction, 3rd edition, as well as his dissertation, which can be found at: http://dingo.sbs.arizona.edu/~carnie/publications/Thesishome.htmlWe also used Jason Merchant's survey of different approaches to ellipsis: http://home.uchicago.edu/merchant/pubs/ellipsis.revised.pdfWe also consulted Brendan Gillon's upcoming book, Natural Language Semantics: http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/natural-language-semanticsAnd the Wikipedia page on ellipsis is a pretty helpful place to start! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ellipsis_(linguistics)Looking forward to next time!
More People Have Learned about Linguistics than I Have: The Comparative Illusion The Ling Space 2018-03-07 | How do some sentences trick us into thinking they're good, when really they're not? And what can that tell us about how we process language? In this week's video, we take a look at the comparative illusion, a tricky kind of sentence that seems meaningful, but falls apart when we consider it further. And then we look at what exactly it is about them that confuses our minds.This is a shorter format video that we'd been toying with making for a while! Do you like this length? We'll be making more of our regular length videos coming up soon!Last episode:Who Is She? The Syntax and Semantics of Pronouns: youtu.be/fvohHpylRkYOther of our psycholinguistics videos:Why Are There So Many Meanings? Ambiguities: youtu.be/E5Pp_wE14HUDo Sounds Carry Their Own Meaning? Arbitrariness of the Sign: youtu.be/CcSCq8XDTaYWhat Can Our Eyes Tell Us about Language? Eye-Tracking: youtu.be/uXx73W0uyCgOur website also has extra content about this week's topic at: http://www.thelingspace.com/bonus-episode-1Find us on all the social media worlds:Tumblr: http://thelingspace.tumblr.comTwitter: http://twitter.com/TheLingSpaceFacebook: http://www.facebook.com/thelingspaceAnd at our website, http://www.thelingspace.com !You can also find our store at the website, thelingspace.storenvy.comWe also have forums to discuss this episode, and linguistics more generally.Sources:The material for this video came most from:http://faculty.wcas.northwestern.edu/wellwood/downloadables/wphp2017revised.pdfandhttp://ling.umd.edu/~wellwood/downloadables/whpp2009cuny.pdfBut also from:Articles:http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/000860.htmlhttp://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/000862.htmlhttp://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/000866.html#morehttp://facultyoflanguage.blogspot.ca/2013/02/acceptability-and-grammaticality.htmlhttp://thelousylinguist.blogspot.ca/2010/01/more-russion-illusions-than-i.htmlhttp://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=3928Papers:http://ling.umd.edu/~wellwood/downloadables/wphp2012ms.pdfhttp://semanticsarchive.net/sub2012/OConnorPanchevaKaiser.pdfhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/98919/pnkell.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=yhttp://www.colinphillips.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/phillips2013_bevervolume.pdfhttp://ling.umd.edu/~colin/research/papers/phillipswagerslau2011.pdfhttp://internal.psychology.illinois.edu/~jkbock/bockpubs/Bock%20Miller%201991.pdfFerreira & Patson (2007)http://www.ai.mit.edu/projects/dm/theses/montalbetti84.pdfAbstracts:http://www.ling.upenn.edu/Events/PLC/plc40/abstracts/DillonPLC40Keynote.pdfNotes:http://people.umass.edu/scable/LING753-SP12/Handouts/21.Event-Related-Readings.pdfLooking forward to next time!
Who Is She? The Syntax and Semantics of Pronouns The Ling Space 2017-11-29 | How do we know who "he" is? And how does "he" differ from "himself" when we interpret it? In this week's episode, we talk about the syntax and semantics of pronouns: how we can place them in sentences, how they link up to variables, and the role of context in how we interpret them.This is Topic #93!This week's tag language: Macedonian!Related videos:Referential Treatment: The Syntax of Binding - youtu.be/9sqm_cex4kAUp, Up and Away: The Verb Phrase-Internal Subject Hypothesis - youtu.be/EJoUyPIdu18Relatively Close: The Syntax of Relative Clauses - youtu.be/Bra5gExyPbYLast episode:The Main Event: Event Semantics - youtu.be/lsD0j708xNwOther of our semantics videos:Downward Spiral: Negative Polarity Items - youtu.be/vd8cjyxHQdwTopic of Focus: Information Structure - youtu.be/gZ6o8yFvJYIOperation Relevance: Relevance Theory - youtu.be/yRv1agt776cOur website also has extra content about this week's topic, on different kinds of events, at: http://www.thelingspace.com/episode-93Find us on all the social media worlds:Tumblr: http://thelingspace.tumblr.comTwitter: http://twitter.com/TheLingSpaceFacebook: http://www.facebook.com/thelingspaceAnd at our website, http://www.thelingspace.com !You can also find our store at the website, thelingspace.storenvy.comWe also have forums to discuss this episode, and linguistics more generally.Sources:Most of the information for this episode was taken from Heim and Kratzer's 1998 book, Semantics in Generative Grammar, and from Yasutaka Sudo's dissertation, available here: https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/77805Here's something else that is available online and is pretty accessible, Elizabeth Coppock's Semantics Boot Camp: http://eecoppock.info/semantics-boot-camp.pdfLooking forward to next time!
How Do We Match Verbs and Times? Event Semantics The Ling Space 2017-10-06 | How do events factor into our mental linguistics? How can we adjust our logic to capture different sentence permutations? In this week's episode, we take a look at event semantics: what problems they're meant to solve, how they help us limit time and place in our sentences, and what evidence we have that events are real.This is Topic #92!This week's tag language: Tswana!Related videos:Meaning Predicated on Logic: Predicate Logic - youtu.be/al5SJSbIyvMSplit Personality: The Syntax of VP Shells - youtu.be/lY1X2BnjmNIRelatively Close: The Syntax of Relative Clauses - youtu.be/Bra5gExyPbYLast episode:Bending the Truth: The Linguistics of Propaganda and Censorship - youtu.be/X82SFZ_eXOUOther of our semantics videos:Downward Spiral: Negative Polarity Items - youtu.be/vd8cjyxHQdwTopic of Focus: Information Structure - youtu.be/gZ6o8yFvJYIOperation Relevance: Relevance Theory - youtu.be/yRv1agt776cOur website also has extra content about this week's topic, on different kinds of events, at: http://www.thelingspace.com/episode-92Find us on all the social media worlds:Tumblr: http://thelingspace.tumblr.comTwitter: http://twitter.com/TheLingSpaceFacebook: http://www.facebook.com/thelingspaceAnd at our website, http://www.thelingspace.com !You can also find our store at the website, thelingspace.storenvy.comWe also have forums to discuss this episode, and linguistics more generally.Sources:Davidson's original paper on event semantics: http://verbs.colorado.edu/~mpalmer/Ling7800/Davidson.pdfA useful handout that gets into the entailment patterns: http://people.umass.edu/partee/RGGU_2005/RGGU05Lec12.pdfA handy and short summary of the topic: http://semanticsarchive.net/Archive/jFhNWM2M/eventbasedsemantics.pdfLooking forward to next time!
The Evolution of Language: An Interview with Dr. Tecumseh Fitch The Ling Space 2017-08-24 | We were really excited to get a chance to talk with Dr. Tecumseh Fitch! Dr. Fitch is an evolutionary biologist and cognitive scientist who received his PhD from Brown University, and is now a professor in the Department of Cognitive Biology at the University of Vienna. He’s published extensively on the evolution of speech, language, and music, and is the author of the 2010 book The Evolution of Language.In our interview, we discussed the following topics:- his recent research on whether it's anatomy or neurology holding back monkeys from speech- his thoughts on Darwin's hypotheses about how language may have evolved- how to come up with good hypotheses about how language evolved, given that it doesn't leave fossils- what he believes is different about humans that led to the development of language... and more! Thanks again to Dr. Fitch for speaking with us.His book, The Evolution of Language, can be found here: http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780521677363You can find links and PDFs to a lot of his work in the piece here on his website:http://homepage.univie.ac.at/tecumseh.fitch/publications/Fitch's article on monkey vocal tracts:http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/2/12/e1600723The Mark Liberman post on this topic: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=29735Fitch on Darwin's musical proto-language hypothesis:http://homepage.univie.ac.at/tecumseh.fitch/2010/08/05/musical-protolanguage-darwins-theory-of-language-evolution-revisited/Our previous interviews:Sali Tagliamonte: youtu.be/tapgQNcKuFoAnne Charity Hudley: youtu.be/xKjrnrsiKv4Lisa Pearl: youtu.be/EOfGgqPeeC4Daniel Dennett: youtu.be/30eOI6pL-lUSteven Pinker: youtu.be/piJBmPh5jFUFind us on all the social media worlds:Tumblr: http://thelingspace.tumblr.comTwitter: http://twitter.com/TheLingSpaceFacebook: http://www.facebook.com/thelingspaceAnd at our website, http://www.thelingspace.com !You can also find our store at the website, http://thelingspace.storenvy.comWe also have forums to discuss this interview, and linguistics more generally.Looking forward to next time!
How Do We Bend the Truth? The Linguistics of Propaganda and Censorship The Ling Space 2017-07-22 | How do we try influencing what other people think about the world? What techniques get used for bending the truth? In this week's episode, we take a look at some of the linguistics around propaganda and censorship: what people can try beyond just outright lying, how using conversational rules can get you to think things that aren't said, and how we can use bias to influence people's views.This is Topic #91!This week's tag language: Mongolian!Last episode:A Whole New World: The Semantics of Modality - youtu.be/vtYdrzdU2dYOther of our sociolinguistics videos:Linguistic Pride and Prejudice: Languages vs. Dialects - youtu.be/uEabSWeO02EWhen Tongues Collide: Pidgins and Creoles - youtu.be/Fjd5rj9Ata8Watch What You Say: Taboo and Euphemisms - youtu.be/Y4HW0tOCoQMOur website also has extra content about this week's topic, on the language of plausible deniability, at: http://www.thelingspace.com/episode-91Find us on all the social media worlds:Tumblr: http://thelingspace.tumblr.comTwitter: http://twitter.com/TheLingSpaceFacebook: http://www.facebook.com/thelingspaceAnd at our website, http://www.thelingspace.com !You can also find our store at the website, thelingspace.storenvy.comWe also have forums to discuss this episode, and linguistics more generally.Looking forward to next time!
Can We Define Must? The Semantics of Modality The Ling Space 2017-06-29 | How do we capture the meaning of "may" or "can"? What kinds of linguistic math do we need to understand them? In this week's episode, we take a look at modality: where words like "must" fit in our meanings; how we consider many ways the world could be to account for their semantics; and how the same string of sounds can have a lot of flavours.This is Topic #90!This week's tag language: Cornish!Related videos:Logical Connections: How Logical Is Language? youtu.be/lw4ykgRtv3QLet's Talk About Sets: How Do We Build Meaning with Math? youtu.be/M96aiDk2ePwQuantifying Sets and Toasters: What Does "Most" Even Mean? youtu.be/U1l3C_hmjqMLast episode:Relatively Close: How Can Sentences Work Like Adjectives? youtu.be/Bra5gExyPbYOther of our semantics and pragmatics videos:Topic of Focus: How Do We Signal What's Important When We Talk? youtu.be/gZ6o8yFvJYIDownward Spiral: Why Can't "Any" Go Just Anywhere? youtu.be/vd8cjyxHQdwBuilding Common Ground: How Do We Build Shared Worlds in Conversation? youtu.be/gQqXmhqM13UOur website also has extra content about this week's topic, on the syntax of modals, at: http://www.thelingspace.com/episode-90Find us on all the social media worlds:Tumblr: http://thelingspace.tumblr.comTwitter: http://twitter.com/TheLingSpaceFacebook: http://www.facebook.com/thelingspaceAnd at our website, http://www.thelingspace.com !You can also find our store at the website, thelingspace.storenvy.comWe also have forums to discuss this episode, and linguistics more generally.Sources:A good portion of the presentation was based off of Kai von Fintel's Intensional Semantics notes (http://web.mit.edu/fintel/fintel-heim-intensional.pdf)We also consulted Angelika Kratzer's papers from 1977, 1981, and 1991, where all these ideas about modality originally come from:The 1977 paper: http://semantics.uchicago.edu/kennedy/classes/s08/semantics2/kratzer77.pdfThe 1981 paper: http://semantics.uchicago.edu/kennedy/classes/s08/semantics2/kratzer81.pdfThe 1991 paper: https://udrive.oit.umass.edu/kratzer/kratzer-modality.pdfFor background -- historical and otherwise -- we consulted Basic Concepts in Modal Logic (https://mally.stanford.edu/notes.pdf) and William Starr's lecture notes: (http://williamstarr.net/teaching.html). Finally, we drew some inspiration from Seth Cable's recent (and wonderfully lucid) Formal Semantics notes: http://people.umass.edu/scable/LING620-SP17/Handouts/Looking forward to next time!
How Can Sentences Work Like Adjectives? The Syntax and Semantics of Relative Clauses The Ling Space 2017-06-01 | We can put whole clauses inside other phrases, but what does that do to their structure and their meaning? In this week's episode, we take a look at the syntax and semantics of relative clauses: how these clauses kind of look like adjectives; how using them creates islands from which words can't escape; and how moving things around in them throws semantic variables into the sentence setup.This is Topic #89!This week's tag language: Tajik!Related videos:What's the Structure Behind a Sentence? X' Theory: youtu.be/7UOcoQr0hvgHow Do We Build Meaning with Math? Set Theory and Adjectives: youtu.be/M96aiDk2ePwWhat Questions Can't We Ask? Syntactic Islands: youtu.be/01uH4XfJx3gLast episode:How Do Verbs Cause Things? Splitting the Verb Phrase: youtu.be/lY1X2BnjmNIOther of our syntax videos:How Can We Tell What Roles Nouns Play? Case Theory: youtu.be/8Xi81H80J-wWhat Changes in a Sentence When We Swap Verbs? Raising and Control Verbs: youtu.be/SYoYNeaSYrUHow Do Pronouns Even Work? Binding Theory: youtu.be/9sqm_cex4kAOur website also has extra content about this week's topic, on other kinds of relative clauses, at: http://www.thelingspace.com/episode-89Find us on all the social media worlds:Tumblr: http://thelingspace.tumblr.comTwitter: http://twitter.com/TheLingSpaceFacebook: http://www.facebook.com/thelingspaceAnd at our website, http://www.thelingspace.com !You can also find our store at the website, thelingspace.storenvy.comWe also have forums to discuss this episode, and linguistics more generally.Sources:Much of the material in this week's episode is based on Semantics in Generative Grammar, by Irene Heim and Angelika Kratzer.The material's also well-covered in Elizabeth Coppock's Semantics Boot Camp (http://eecoppock.info/semantics-boot-camp.pdf), and Anders Schoubye's Formal Semantics Notes (http://schoubye.org/teaching/Formal-Semantics/FormalSemanticsNotes2014.pdf).Looking forward to next time!
Interview with Sali Tagliamonte The Ling Space 2017-05-11 | We're really excited to have gotten to interview Sali Tagliamonte at the Linguistic Society of America meeting in January! Dr. Tagliamonte is a full professor at the University of Toronto, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. She's written a bunch of books and articles about sociolinguistics, and how languages shift and vary over time. You can find out more about her and her work at http://individual.utoronto.ca/tagliamonteIn our interview, we discussed the following topics:- why it's so important to investigate how teens use language, and what facets of adolescent speech she finds most interesting- what differences we can find in spoken vs. online language use- the Toronto English Project, and the changes we see in people's language use over the course of their lives- how language might look in the future- how to better inform people about how language variation works- the role of social media in telling people about linguistics, and in language change... and more! Thanks again to Dr. Tagliamonte for speaking with us.Her most recent book, Teen Talk: The Language of Adolescents, can be found here: http://www.indiebound.org/book/9781107676176Our previous interviews:Anne Charity Hudley: youtu.be/xKjrnrsiKv4Lisa Pearl: youtu.be/EOfGgqPeeC4Daniel Dennett: youtu.be/30eOI6pL-lUSteven Pinker: youtu.be/piJBmPh5jFUA couple of videos related to this interview:Linguistic Pride and Prejudice: Sociolinguistics, Languages, and Dialects - youtu.be/uEabSWeO02EWord Crimes and Misdemeanors: Linguistic Descriptivism vs. Prescriptivism - youtu.be/eFlBwBwL_iUFind us on all the social media worlds:Tumblr: http://thelingspace.tumblr.comTwitter: http://twitter.com/TheLingSpaceFacebook: http://www.facebook.com/thelingspaceAnd at our website, http://www.thelingspace.com !You can also find our store at the website, http://thelingspace.storenvy.comWe also have forums to discuss this interview, and linguistics more generally.Looking forward to next time!
How Do Verbs Cause Things? Splitting the Verb Phrase The Ling Space 2017-04-27 | How do verbs like "give" and "put" juggle more than one object? Is there an element that lets verbs cause things to happen? In this week's episode, we talk about splitting up the verb phrase: how our basic syntactic theory has a hard time with verbs with more than one object; how the syntax of causation shows us why we should expand our trees; and how once we break the phrase up, we can capture all sorts of facts, from two-object verbs to ambiguities.This is Topic #88!This week's tag language: Kajin M̧ajeļ!Related videos:Happy Little Trees: The Syntax of X' Theory - youtu.be/7UOcoQr0hvgReferential Treatment: Pronouns and Binding Theory - youtu.be/9sqm_cex4kAUp, Up, and Away: The Verb Phrase Initial Subject Hypothesis - youtu.be/EJoUyPIdu18Last episode:Worlds Between Us: The Pragmatics of Presuppositions - youtu.be/-iQ7XrehKdwOther of our syntax videos:Raising the Bar: Raising and Control Verbs - youtu.be/SYoYNeaSYrUDesert Island Words: Syntactic Islands - youtu.be/01uH4XfJx3gA Clause for Celebration: A History of Syntactic Clauses - youtu.be/980meOhBGR8Our website also has extra content about this week's topic, on how these ideas connect to the passive voice, at: http://www.thelingspace.com/episode-88Find us on all the social media worlds:Tumblr: http://thelingspace.tumblr.comTwitter: http://twitter.com/TheLingSpaceFacebook: http://www.facebook.com/thelingspaceAnd at our website, http://www.thelingspace.com !You can also find our store at the website, thelingspace.storenvy.comWe also have forums to discuss this episode, and linguistics more generally.Sources:Much of the basic argument found in the video can be found in this set of slides: https://apps.carleton.edu/people/cussery/assets/7._Introducing_little_v.pdfExamples were taken from Lisa Travis's 2010 book Inner Aspect (http://blogs.mcgill.ca/mcling/files/2012/01/Travis2010InnerAspect_Chpt6.pdf) and this paper by Heidi Harley: http://babel.ucsc.edu/~hank/mrg.readings/harley_06_On-the-causativ.pdfThere's also good stuff in the Wikipedia article on causatives: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causative#LexicalSome of the original work proposing splitting the VP includes Angelika Kratzer's 1996 paper "Severing the externalargument from its verb" in Rooryck & Zaring, eds., "Phrase structure and the lexicon, 109-137". (https://people.ucsc.edu/~mcclosk/Teaching/severing-external-arg.pdf) and Richard Larson's 1988 paper "On the double object construction" in Linguistic Inquiry 19(3), 335-391.Looking forward to next time!
Thinking vs. Knowing: The Semantics and Pragmatics of Presuppositions The Ling Space 2017-03-30 | What's the difference between "thinking" and "knowing"? What rules do we follow for adjusting our conversational worlds? In this week's episode, we delve into the semantics and pragmatics of presuppositions: which words come equipped with them, how presuppositions depend on the situation and our mental worlds, and what antipresuppositions can tell us about the mechanics of interpreting sentences.This is Topic #87!This week's tag language: Ewe!Related videos:How Do Conversations Work? Gricean Maxims - youtu.be/rzxyjFHh-y8How Do We Build Meaning With Math? Set Theory and Adjectives - youtu.be/M96aiDk2ePwHow Do We Capture the Truth of Beliefs? Type Theory - youtu.be/CWE9ycOxCEQLast episode:How Do We Put Sentences Inside Other Sentences? Complementizer Phrases - youtu.be/q9g77Wj5wr0Other of our semantics and pragmatics videos:How Do We Create a Shared World in Conversation? Common Ground - youtu.be/gQqXmhqM13UHow Does One Greek Letter Help Us Understand Language? Lambda Calculus - youtu.be/BwWQDzXBuwgHow Do We Signal What's Important in Conversation? Information Structure - youtu.be/gZ6o8yFvJYIOur website also has extra content about this week's topic, discussing why presuppositions are so resilient, at: http://www.thelingspace.com/episode-87Find us on all the social media worlds:Tumblr: http://thelingspace.tumblr.comTwitter: http://twitter.com/TheLingSpaceFacebook: http://www.facebook.com/thelingspaceAnd at our website, http://www.thelingspace.com !You can also find our store at the website, thelingspace.storenvy.comWe also have forums to discuss this episode, and linguistics more generally.Sources:Most information in this episode comes from this paper:http://semanticsarchive.net/Archive/GI3YzhlM/AntipresuppositionsVersion1.pdfFor more information on scalar implicatures, we also used: https://web.stanford.edu/class/linguist236/implicature/materials/ling236-handout-04-23-scalars.pdfLooking forward to next time!
How Do We Put Clauses Inside Other Clauses? Complementizer Phrases The Ling Space 2017-03-17 | How do sentences fit inside other sentences? Where can we put words like "that", "whether", and "if"? In this week's episode, we take a look at complementizer phrases: what exactly they are, how they account for embedded sentences and questions, and what they can let us do to capture word order in languages like German and Dutch.This is Topic #86!This week's tag language: Tok Pisin!Related videos:A Clause for Celebration: A History of Syntactic Clauses - youtu.be/980meOhBGR8Topic of Focus: Information Structure - youtu.be/gZ6o8yFvJYILast episode:Building Baby Trees: The Stages of Child Syntax - youtu.be/zmghbKNiI1kOther of our syntax videos:Just in Case: Case Theory and Where We Can Put Nouns - youtu.be/8Xi81H80J-wMark of Possession: Determiners, Nouns, and the DP Hypothesis - youtu.be/gWy7QdZJg9EDesert Island Words: Islands and Where You Can't Move - youtu.be/01uH4XfJx3gOur website also has extra content about this week's topic, discussing the nuts and bolts of how embedded clauses work, at: http://www.thelingspace.com/episode-86Find us on all the social media worlds:Tumblr: http://thelingspace.tumblr.comTwitter: http://twitter.com/TheLingSpaceFacebook: http://www.facebook.com/thelingspaceAnd at our website, http://www.thelingspace.com !You can also find our store at the website, thelingspace.storenvy.comWe also have forums to discuss this episode, and linguistics more generally.Sources:Most of the information for this episode came from Andrew McIntyre's short online syntax textbook (https://www.angl.hu-berlin.de/department/staff/1685901/unterrichtsmaterialien/fundamental-engl-syntax-2014-online-einseitig.pdf), David Adger's Core Syntax (which also talks about German), and Andrew Carnie's Syntax: A Generative Introduction (2nd Edition). There's also a good set of slides on the topic at http://www1.pu.edu.tw/~jason/UMS_i(DPs,%20CPs,%20NegPs%20&%20TPs).pdf .For the German section, we used this handout by Sten Vikner: http://www.hum.au.dk/engelsk/engsv/handouts/vikner-ho-2016-V2-cP-CP-Cambridge.pdfAnd there are more examples taken from the following:http://switchll.net/papers/2013AFLAhandout.pdfhttp://gagl.eldoc.ub.rug.nl/FILES/root/1999-43/03/GAGL-43-1999-03.pdfdegruyter.com/view/product/19650Looking forward to next time!
How Do Babies Build Sentences? The Stages of Child Syntax The Ling Space 2017-03-02 | What kinds of sentences do we hear from babies and toddlers? How much grammar can we find in their language use? In this week's episode, we take a look at child syntactic stages: what characteristics kids display as they progress from one to two to many words, whether their grammars are similar to those of adults, and how their linguistic interpretation may tell us more than just their speech.This is Topic #85!This week's tag language: Maltese!Related videos:The Youngest Experiments: Testing Language in Babies - youtu.be/3-A9TnuSVa8Last episode:Just in Case: The Syntax of Case - youtu.be/8Xi81H80J-wOther of our language acquisition videos:Conservative Babies: Why Kids Don't Speak Until They Know - youtu.be/IbyO2D1A83EFlipping Switches: Changing Your Grammar for a Second Language - youtu.be/2E839gb4OwQKids Be Frontin': Child Phonological Mistakes - youtu.be/EDymvzP0uacOur website also has extra content about this week's topic, discussing how kids learn how to use negation, at: http://www.thelingspace.com/episode-85(Or it will by Friday afternoon.)Find us on all the social media worlds:Tumblr: http://thelingspace.tumblr.comTwitter: http://twitter.com/TheLingSpaceFacebook: http://www.facebook.com/thelingspaceAnd at our website, http://www.thelingspace.com !You can also find our store at the website, thelingspace.storenvy.comWe also have forums to discuss this episode, and linguistics more generally.Sources:To be listed shortly!Looking forward to next time!
Interview with Anne Charity Hudley The Ling Space 2017-02-18 | We're really excited to have gotten to interview Anne Charity Hudley at the Linguistic Society of America meeting in January! Dr. Charity Hudley is an associate professor at the College of William and Mary, and the inaugural William and Mary Professor of Community Studies. She's co-authored two books on English language variation in classroom settings, and also wrote the section on language and racialization in the Oxford Handbook of Language and Society. She's a great sociolinguistic researcher who's doing a lot of work on dialectal variation, linguistic justice, and more. You can find out more about her and her work at annecharityhudley.comIn our interview, we discussed the following topics:- the importance of attending to language variation in the classroom- what teachers and students have to learn from linguists, and vice versa- the role language and linguistics has played in racialization, and how to get away from that- how to work to convince people of the importance of interacting with language variation and linguistic justice- why we should do more to get younger people involved in linguistics and research... and more! Thanks again to Dr. Charity Hudley for speaking with us.Our other interviews:Sali Tagliamonte: youtu.be/tapgQNcKuFoLisa Pearl: youtu.be/EOfGgqPeeC4Daniel Dennett: youtu.be/30eOI6pL-lUSteven Pinker: youtu.be/piJBmPh5jFUA couple of videos related to this interview:Linguistic Pride and Prejudice: Sociolinguistics, Languages, and Dialects - youtu.be/uEabSWeO02EWord Crimes and Misdemeanors: Linguistic Descriptivism vs. Prescriptivism - youtu.be/eFlBwBwL_iUFind us on all the social media worlds:Tumblr: http://thelingspace.tumblr.comTwitter: http://twitter.com/TheLingSpaceFacebook: http://www.facebook.com/thelingspaceAnd at our website, http://www.thelingspace.com !You can also find our store at the website, http://thelingspace.storenvy.comWe also have forums to discuss this interview, and linguistics more generally.Looking forward to next time!
How Can We Tell What Roles Nouns Play? Case Theory The Ling Space 2017-01-19 | What roles do nouns play in sentences? How can we figure out those roles when they get moved around? In this week's episode, we talk about case: how nouns get case, how it explains why some sentences are okay and others not, and how it can even help account for different word orders between languages.This is Topic #84!This week's tag language: Malayalam!Related videos:How Can We Tell How Sentences Are Built? Traces and Movement - youtu.be/x5iBbSkp8rkWhy Do Verbs Differ In Their Construction? Theta Theory - youtu.be/thFkoo1YmW0What Changes in a Sentence When We Swap Verbs? Raising and Control - youtu.be/SYoYNeaSYrULast episode:How Do We Capture the Truth of Beliefs? Type Theory - youtu.be/CWE9ycOxCEQOther of our syntax videos:What Does Possession Tell Us About Syntax? The DP Hypothesis - youtu.be/gWy7QdZJg9EWhere Do Subjects Start Out in Sentences? The VP Internal Subject Hypothesis - youtu.be/EJoUyPIdu18What Questions Can't We Ask? Syntactic Islands - youtu.be/01uH4XfJx3gOur website also has extra content about this week's topic, discussing how we deal with passive constructions, at: http://www.thelingspace.com/episode-84Find us on all the social media worlds:Tumblr: http://thelingspace.tumblr.comTwitter: http://twitter.com/TheLingSpaceFacebook: http://www.facebook.com/thelingspaceAnd at our website, http://www.thelingspace.com !You can also find our store at the website, thelingspace.storenvy.comWe also have forums to discuss this episode, and linguistics more generally.Sources:Most of the information for this episode came from Beatrice Santorini and Anthony Kroch's 2007 online textbook The Syntax of Natural Language: http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~beatrice/syntax-textbook/We also drew on Syntax: A Generative Introduction (2011) by Andrew Carnie. The Hungarian case # (about which there is some dispute) came from this paper: http://endeavour.essex.ac.uk/399/1/Comrie-Fest.pdf. The Irish data came from this paper: https://www.uni-due.de/~lan300/45_Modals_in_English_and_Irish_(Hickey).pdf. It's by Raymond Hickey, who is himself Irish.The inception of Case Theory can be attributed to Chomsky's Lectures on Government and Binding (1981).Looking forward to next time!
How Do We Capture the Truth of Beliefs? Type Theory The Ling Space 2016-12-15 | How do we combine words to build full propositions? How do we account for what people believe, not just what's definitely true? In this week's episode, we talk about type theory: how we can define terms by how they relate to the world and each other, what the difference is between sense and reference, and how we can use possible worlds to work out what people believe.This is Topic #83!This week's tag language: Estonian!Related videos:Quantifying Sets and Toasters: The Meaning of Most and More - youtu.be/U1l3C_hmjqMSheepish Semantics: Lambda Calculus - youtu.be/BwWQDzXBuwgDownward Spiral: Negative Polarity Items - youtu.be/vd8cjyxHQdwLast episode:The Optimal Solution: Constraints on Sounds and Optimality Theory - youtu.be/rxsbPDjL9dsOther of our semantics and pragmatics videos:Topic of Focus: How to Structure Information - youtu.be/gZ6o8yFvJYIBuilding Common Ground: Connecting in Conversation - youtu.be/gQqXmhqM13UScoping Out the Truth: Semantic Scope Ambiguities - youtu.be/XC-MGuj75zQOur website also has extra content about this week's topic, discussing how kids learn how to rank their constraints, at: http://www.thelingspace.com/episode-83(This link should be operating by Thursday evening.)Find us on all the social media worlds:Tumblr: http://thelingspace.tumblr.comTwitter: http://twitter.com/TheLingSpaceFacebook: http://www.facebook.com/thelingspaceAnd at our website, http://www.thelingspace.com !You can also find our store at the website, thelingspace.storenvy.comWe also have forums to discuss this episode, and linguistics more generally.Sources:The three main sources for this episode:Irene Heim & Angelica Kratzer's textbook, Semantics in Generative Grammar Anders Schoubye's online lecture notes (http://schoubye.org/teaching/Formal-Semantics/FormalSemanticsNotes2014.pdf)Kai von Fintel's Intensional Semantics online textbook/lecture notes (http://web.mit.edu/fintel/fintel-heim-intensional.pdf).Looking forward to next time!
The Language Conservancy - Project for Awesome 2016 The Ling Space 2016-12-09 | We're supporting the Language Conservancy this year in the Project for Awesome! You can click over here to go vote on our video: http://projectforawesome.com/watch?v=kIUgdyEcRvgIf you don't know about the Project for Awesome, it's a yearly charity and awareness raising campaign on YouTube aimed at decreasing world suck. Find out more at www.projectforawesome.com!The Language Conservancy does a lot of really interesting and amazing work for helping revitalize and raise awareness about Native American languages, and they're worthy of your time and support, even outside the P4A. Check out their website, which has a ton of info about their activities, at http://www.languageconservancy.orgHere's links to the stuff we mention in the video:Rising Voices film: http://www.risingvoicesfilm.comLakota Berenstain Bears: http://www.lakotabears.comMandan-English dictionary: http://www.mandanlanguage.org/dictionaryWater Protectors activity: donate.lakhota.org/mniCrow Summer Institute: http://crowlanguage.org/crow-summer-instituteLanguage learning apps and keyboard layouts: http://www.languageconservancy.org/programs/indigenous-language-program-support/language-materialsAnd we at the Ling Space make videos to help explain how language works, every Wednesday. Find out more at www.thelingspace.com, or watch the rest of our videos on this channel.DFTBA!
What Constraints Are There on Linguistic Sounds? Optimality Theory The Ling Space 2016-12-01 | How can we try to capture the commonalities and differences between linguistic sound systems? What makes one language sound different from another? In this week's episode, we take a look at Optimality Theory: how we can use constraints to describe how phonology behaves, how we rank which rules we care most about breaking, and how changing our priorities leads to totally different sound outcomes.This is Topic #82!This week's tag language: Hidatsa!Related videos:Rhymes and Reasons: The Shapes of Syllables - youtu.be/YON1pOcEhrALast episode:Words from Another World: The Linguistics of Alien Languages - youtu.be/QVqDpY-11UMOther of our phonology and phonetics videos:The Melody of Feet: Stress Patterns in Phonology - youtu.be/MdId9wnMNg8Phonation States: How We Vibrate to Make Sounds - youtu.be/edYLoMRgaFwNosing Around Phonetics: The Acoustics of Sonorants - youtu.be/g8BgfHEDbFYOur website also has extra content about this week's topic, discussing how kids learn how to rank their constraints, at: http://www.thelingspace.com/episode-82(This link should be operating by Thursday evening.)Find us on all the social media worlds:Tumblr: http://thelingspace.tumblr.comTwitter: http://twitter.com/TheLingSpaceFacebook: http://www.facebook.com/thelingspaceAnd at our website, http://www.thelingspace.com !You can also find our store at the website, thelingspace.storenvy.comWe also have forums to discuss this episode, and linguistics more generally.Sources:Most of this week's episode is based on information from Carlos Gussenhoven and Haike Jacobs's book, Understanding Phonology.There's a great archive of papers (albeit scholarly) on Optimality Theory at the Rutgers Optimality Archive: http://roa.rutgers.edu/Angus Grieve-Smith also has a good short introduction to OT here: scribd.com/document/25583046/A-Basic-Introduction-to-Optimality-TheoryThe World Atlas of Linguistic Structures Online is a great resource for learning more about linguistic typology! Our specific source on syllable structure is http://wals.info/chapter/12 , but it's a good place to poke around and learn things. Looking forward to next time!
The Linguistics of Arrival The Ling Space 2016-11-16 | The film Arrival came out last week, with a linguist as its hero! The movie deals with xenolinguistics and how we could learn to communicate with aliens. The studio asked linguists from McGill University to consult on the movie, and we recently got a chance to talk with professors Jessica Coon, Morgan Sonderegger, and Lisa Travis about their experiences! We discussed:- their involvement in the movie- their thoughts on analyzing alien speech and writing- the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis and linguistic determinism- linguistic fieldwork- language variation and finding it in sci-fiAnd much more! There are some spoilers for the movie, but nothing major.If you want to know more about what alien languages look like, check our previous video: youtu.be/QVqDpY-11UMIf you want to learn more about our interviewees, here are their websites:Jessica Coon: http://jessica.lingspace.orgMorgan Sonderegger: http://people.linguistics.mcgill.ca/~morganLisa Travis: http://people.linguistics.mcgill.ca/~lisa.travisCaptions coming soon! And we'll see you next time with a regular topic video.
What Could Alien Languages Look Like? The Ling Space 2016-11-03 | What basic properties do all human languages have in common? How might languages from other worlds differ? In this week's episode, we take a look at potential alien languages: how we can categorize them differently from how our languages work, how they could potentially make sounds and compose meanings, and how imaginative we may have to be to understand what other species might have to say to us.This is Topic #81!This week's tag language: Na'Vi!Last episode:Nosing Around Phonetics: The Acoustics of Sonorant Consonants - youtu.be/g8BgfHEDbFYOur previous Halloween videos:Braaaaaaains: The Basics of Neurolinguistics - youtu.be/Yq7ozVixqDsFuture Tense: Predictions for the Future of Language - youtu.be/5hibYoYwGkoOur website also has extra content about this week's topic, discussing how complex alien languages might be, at: http://www.thelingspace.com/episode-81Find us on all the social media worlds:Tumblr: http://thelingspace.tumblr.comTwitter: http://twitter.com/TheLingSpaceFacebook: http://www.facebook.com/thelingspaceAnd at our website, http://www.thelingspace.com !You can also find our store at the website, thelingspace.storenvy.comWe also have forums to discuss this episode, and linguistics more generally.Sources:On semiochemicals: http://www.nme.com/blogs/nme-blogs/the-science-of-music-why-do-songs-in-a-minor-key-sound-sad-760215http://www.psycho.hes.kyushu-u.ac.jp/~lab_miura/Kansei/Workshop/proceedings/O-205.pdfOn the number of languages in the world:http://www.linguisticsociety.org/content/how-many-languages-are-there-world.On bee dances:http://users.rcn.com/jkimball.ma.ultranet/BiologyPages/B/BeeDances.htmlOn vervet monkey calls:midnightmediamusings.wordpress.com/2015/02/04/which-species-has-a-language-most-like-human-languagebooks.google.ca/books?id=PQFuCgAAQBAJ&pg=PA5&lpg=PA5&dq=vervet+monkey+calls+productivityOn one-word grammars and context:https://ase.tufts.edu/cogstud/jackendoff/papers/simplersyntaxwritten.pdfOn posture and alien language:youtube.com/watch?v=j9pFA2XfVEcOn metaphor and alien language:youtube.com/watch?v=f3N0dlL2NU8youtube.com/watch?v=3-wzr74d7TIyoutube.com/watch?v=ANvlLcOTy6MCharles Hockett and language design features:These initially come from Hockett's books, The Origin of Speech (1960) and A Note on Design Features (1968). But for online sources, try:http://pages.uoregon.edu/redford/Courses/LING162/Handout_1.pdfen.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hockett%27s_design_featuresen.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_F._HockettChomsky's digital infinity quote:http://philpapers.org/rec/CHOLACMark Liberman and his speculation on the limits of alien language:http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=28159A discussion of novel quantifiers & the problems with schmevery:http://www.linguistics.ucla.edu/people/hunter/conservativity/journal.pdfhttps://www.ling.uni-potsdam.de/~zimmermann/teaching/ALS2009/Session%20III.pdfLooking forward to next week!
Interviews from NerdCon Stories 2016 The Ling Space 2016-10-27 | Our director Adele was at NerdCon: Stories in Minneapolis on October 14 and 15. She met a lot of cool authors and creators, and took the opportunity to interview some of them about their favourite words. They had some interesting choices to share!Thanks to all the people who appeared in our video:Paolo Bacigalupi, Writer: http://windupstories.comRachel Kann, Poet: http://rachelkann.comLiz Andrews, Comic artist: frequentlyfalling.comM.T. Anderson, Writer: http://mt-anderson.comBlue Delliquanti, Cartoonist: http://www.bluedelliquanti.comIf you liked this con report, you might also like our interviews from VidCon 2016: youtu.be/L0u3jBd3lFUOr last year's NerdCon: youtu.be/kgPhXI-kO7MOr maybe you are interested in other ways we use language, like for wordplay: youtu.be/AT7Xd2tC62kOr about actually how approach processing language: youtu.be/2A-FDN7-gyoAnd we'll be back next week with a regular episode! A regular Halloween episode, no less. ^_^Find us on all the social media worlds:Tumblr: http://thelingspace.tumblr.comTwitter: twitter.com/TheLingSpaceFacebook: facebook.com/thelingspaceAnd at our website, thelingspace.com !You can also check out our store: thelingspace.storenvy.comWe also have forums to discuss this episode, and linguistics more generally. Looking forward to next week!
What Do Nasal Sounds Look Like? Sonorant Acoustics The Ling Space 2016-10-19 | How can we tell apart different sonorant consonants - your [n]s and [m]s, [l]s and [ɹ]s? What do their sound waves look like? In this week's episode, we take a look at the acoustics of nasal and approximant consonants: how opening up your nose influences your speech, how close some consonants are to being vowels, and why it can be hard for some people to tell apart the English l and r.This is Topic #80!This week's tag language: Malagasy!The spectrogram for [ɴ] didn't quite turn out how we would have liked, although the science behind it still fits. For more on why, check here: http://thelingspace.tumblr.com/post/152130360604/high-nasalsRelated episodes:Minding Your Manners: Places and Manners of Articulation - youtu.be/zEaPQP3pXQcForming Formants: Acoustic Resonance and Formants - youtu.be/jl4zGRSYqkELast episode:Mark of Possession: The DP Hypothesis - youtu.be/gWy7QdZJg9EOther of our phonetics and phonology videos:The Melody of Feet: Stress and the Rhythm of Language - youtu.be/MdId9wnMNg8Good Vibration: Phonation States and Our Vocal Folds - youtu.be/edYLoMRgaFwUncommon Sounds: Making Consonants Without Your Lungs - youtu.be/JKP10ARLnzMFind us on all the social media worlds:Tumblr: http://thelingspace.tumblr.comTwitter: http://twitter.com/TheLingSpaceFacebook: http://www.facebook.com/thelingspaceAnd at our website, http://www.thelingspace.com !You can also find our store at the website, thelingspace.storenvy.comOur website also has extra content about this week's topic at http://www.thelingspace.com/episode-80(Or we will by Friday morning.)We also have forums to discuss this episode, and linguistics more generally.Sources:Much of the information in this episode came from Henry Rogers's book The Sounds of Language, and Kenneth Stevens's book Acoustic Phonetics.Looking forward to next week!
What Does Possession Tell Us About Syntax? Determiner Phrases The Ling Space 2016-10-05 | How do we show possession in our syntax? And what does that tell us about representing nouns in our trees? In this week's episode, we take a look at determiner phrases: why we need them on top of noun phrases, how they turn some of our ideas about syntax inside out, and what they let us display in trees that we couldn't before.This is Topic #79!This week's tag language: Danish!Related episodes:What's the Structure Beneath a Sentence? X' Theory - youtu.be/7UOcoQr0hvgWhat Makes a Basic Sentence? A History of Clauses - youtu.be/980meOhBGR8Last episode:What Do You Start with in a Third Language? L3 Acquisition - youtu.be/9F5Bq_uvbcMOther of our syntax videos:Where Do Subjects Start Off in Sentences? The VP Internal Subject Hypothesis - youtu.be/EJoUyPIdu18What Questions Can't We Ask? Syntactic Islands - youtu.be/01uH4XfJx3gWhat Changes in a Sentence When We Swap Verbs? Raising vs. Control Verbs - youtu.be/SYoYNeaSYrUFind us on all the social media worlds:Tumblr: http://thelingspace.tumblr.comTwitter: http://twitter.com/TheLingSpaceFacebook: http://www.facebook.com/thelingspaceAnd at our website, http://www.thelingspace.com !You can also find our store at the website, thelingspace.storenvy.comOur website also has extra content about this week's topic at http://www.thelingspace.com/episode-79We also have forums to discuss this episode, and linguistics more generally.Sources:Much of the inspiration for the episode comes from Andrew McIntyre's mini syntax textbook: https://www.angl.hu-berlin.de/department/staff/1685901/unterrichtsmaterialien/fundamental-engl-syntax-2014-online-einseitig.pdfThe DP hypothesis itself is usually attributed to Steven Abney's 1987 MIT thesis 'The English Noun Phrase and its Sentential Aspect' (http://www.ai.mit.edu/projects/dm/theses/abney87.pdf or http://www.vinartus.net/spa/87a.pdf)The Dutch example came from this paper here: the Dutch example, there's this chapter http://isites.harvard.edu/fs/docs/icb.topic66274.files/NPtoDP.pdf.See you all in two weeks!
What Do You Start with in a Third Language? L3 Acquisition The Ling Space 2016-09-21 | What knowledge do you start off with when you learn a third (or fourth, or fifth...) language? Do the languages you already have in your head help or interfere? In this week's episode, we talk about third language acquisition: whether you have to transfer from your first language, how you can build from the languages you already know, and what we still don't know about this new field.This is Topic #78!This week's tag language: Kazakh!Related episodes:What Do You Start with in a Second Language? L2 Acquisition - youtu.be/UB18y2ZYBiYLast episode:What Makes a Basic Sentence? A History of Clauses - youtu.be/980meOhBGR8Other of our language acquisition videos:How Do Kids Avoid Saying Things Incorrectly? Grammatical Conservatism - youtu.be/IbyO2D1A83EHow Much Do We Adjust Our Second Language Grammars? Parameter Resetting - youtu.be/2E839gb4OwQIs Correcting Your Kid's Mistakes Helpful? Negative Evidence - youtu.be/a7Un06tDOn0Find us on all the social media worlds:Tumblr: http://thelingspace.tumblr.comTwitter: http://twitter.com/TheLingSpaceFacebook: http://www.facebook.com/thelingspaceAnd at our website, http://www.thelingspace.com !You can also find our store at the website, thelingspace.storenvy.comOur website also has extra content about this week's topic at http://www.thelingspace.com/episode-78We also have forums to discuss this episode, and linguistics more generally.Sources:The Chinese/English/Norwegian study:Jin, F. (2009). Third Language Acquisition of Norwegian Objects: Interlanguage Transfer or L1 Influence? In Third Language Acquisition and Universal Grammar, Y.-K. I. Leung (ed), 144-161. Bristol: Multilingual Matters.The Romance/English aspect study:Foote, R. 2009. Transfer in L3 acquisition: The role of typology. In Third Language Acquisition and Universal Grammar, Y.-K. I. Leung (ed), 89-114. Bristol: Multilingual Matters.The English/Spanish/Brazilian Portuguese study:Montrul, S., Dias, R. & Santos, H. 2011. Clitics and object expression in the L3 acquisition of Brazilian Portuguese: Structural similarity matters for transfer. Second Language Research 27(1): 21-58.Other useful reading:Really, the whole book Third Language Acquisition and Universal Grammar, edited by Yan-Kit Ingrid Leung is worth it. Lots of good studies.We also consulted:Rothman, J., & Cabrelli Amaro, J. (2010). What variables condition syntactic transfer: A look at the L3 initial state. Second Language Research, 26, 189–218. Rothman, J. (2011). L3 syntactic transfer selectivity and typological determinacy: The Typological Primacy Model. Second Language Research, 27, 107–127. Rothman, J. (2015). Linguistic and cognitive motivation for the Typological Primacy Model of third language (l3) transfer: Considering the role of timing of acquisition and proficiency in the previous languages. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 18, 2, 179–190.Slabakova, R. (2016) The Scalpel Model of third language acquisition. International Journal of Bilingualism.Slabakova, Roumyana and Garcia Mayo, Maria del Pilar (2015) The L3 syntax-discourse interface. Bilingualism Language and Cognition, 18, (2), 208 -226. See you all in two weeks!
Outtakes #4 The Ling Space 2016-09-15 | Some outtakes from episodes 10-13 of the Ling Space! We hope you enjoy these - we think they're pretty fun!If you'd like to watch more of our outtakes videos, they're here:Outtakes #1 (Eps 1-2): youtu.be/bLoCCBlCLBEOuttakes #2 (Eps 3-5): youtu.be/Y3mVv-8EEE8Outtakes #3 (Eps 6-9): youtu.be/vrhc97q91AMOr maybe you're interested in some of our more recent episodes:What Makes a Basic Sentence? A History of Clauses - youtu.be/980meOhBGR8How Do We Signal What's Important When We Talk? Topic and Focus - youtu.be/gZ6o8yFvJYIWhy Are There So Many Meanings? Ambiguity - youtu.be/E5Pp_wE14HUFind us on all the social media worlds:Tumblr: http://thelingspace.tumblr.comTwitter: twitter.com/TheLingSpaceFacebook: facebook.com/thelingspaceAnd at our website, thelingspace.com !We also have forums to discuss this episode, and linguistics more generally.Looking forward to next week!
What Makes a Basic Sentence? A History of Clauses The Ling Space 2016-09-01 | What goes into making a sentence? How has our view of the sentence changed over time? In this week's episode, we look at the history of clauses: what our first conceptions of them were, how we came to view inflection as the key to the sentence, and why we then broke inflection down further and made tense central.This is Topic #77!This week's tag language: Nahuatl!Related episodes:Happy Little Trees: X' Theory of Syntax - youtu.be/7UOcoQr0hvgTrace Evidence: Syntactic Movement and Traces - youtu.be/x5iBbSkp8rkSome Assembly Required: Derivational and Inflectional Morphology - youtu.be/BTZCozhneKALast episode:A Productive Formula: Compound Nouns - youtu.be/nQElBnBWExcOther of our morphosyntax videos:Up, Up, and Away: the Verb Phrase-Internal Subject Hypothesis - youtu.be/EJoUyPIdu18Desert Island Words: Syntactic Islands - youtu.be/01uH4XfJx3gOrganizing Meanings: Morphological Typology - youtu.be/Ts2DS0ZsTyoFind us on all the social media worlds:Tumblr: http://thelingspace.tumblr.comTwitter: http://twitter.com/TheLingSpaceFacebook: http://www.facebook.com/thelingspaceAnd at our website, http://www.thelingspace.com !You can also find our store at the website, thelingspace.storenvy.comOur website also has extra content about this week's topic at http://www.thelingspace.com/episode-77We also have forums to discuss this episode, and linguistics more generally.Sources:Pollock, J-Y. (1989) Verb Movement, Universal Grammar, and the Structure of IP. Accessed from http://babel.ucsc.edu/~hank/pollock.pdfMuch of the presentation's structure was inspired by Paul Hagstrom's course notes: http://www.bu.edu/linguistics/UG/course/lx523-s01/handouts/SyntaxII.1.IP.Pollock.pdfAndrew McIntyre's condensed syntax text is also a big help: https://www.angl.hu-berlin.de/department/staff/1685901/unterrichtsmaterialien/fundamental-engl-syntax-2014-online-einseitig.pdfWe also consulted Denis Bouchard's The Semantics of Syntax: A Minimalist Approach to Grammar; and Lillian Haegeman's Introduction to Government and Binding Theory.See you all in two weeks!
How Do We Stack Up Our Nouns? Compound Nouns The Ling Space 2016-08-17 | How do we put words together to build more complex noun phrases? What do the structures of sentences and noun phrases have in common? In this week's episode, we talk about compound nouns: what they look and sound like, how big we can make them, and how they can let us delve into some deeper questions about syntax.This is Topic #76!This week's tag language: Polish!Related episodes:Goldilocks and the Three Nouns: Theta Roles - youtu.be/thFkoo1YmW0Some Assembly Required: Derivational and Inflectional Morphology - youtu.be/BTZCozhneKALast episode:Topic of Focus: Information Structure - youtu.be/gZ6o8yFvJYIOther of our morphosyntax videos:Up, Up, and Away: the Verb Phrase-Internal Subject Hypothesis - youtu.be/EJoUyPIdu18Desert Island Words: Syntactic Islands - youtu.be/01uH4XfJx3gOrganizing Meanings: Morphological Typology - youtu.be/Ts2DS0ZsTyoFind us on all the social media worlds:Tumblr: http://thelingspace.tumblr.comTwitter: http://twitter.com/TheLingSpaceFacebook: http://www.facebook.com/thelingspaceAnd at our website, http://www.thelingspace.com !You can also find our store at the website, thelingspace.storenvy.comOur website also has extra content about this week's topic at http://www.thelingspace.com/episode-76We also have forums to discuss this episode, and linguistics more generally.Sources:Most of the information for this episode came from Mark Baker and Jonathan Bobaljik's textbook on morphology.See you all in two weeks!
How Do We Signal Whats Important When We Talk? Information Structure The Ling Space 2016-07-27 | How do we focus on crucial information in our conversations? What methods do we have for moving things into the center of discussion? In this week's episode, we talk about information structure: how we build up the common ground in discussion, what we do to bring up topics and signal our focus, and how different languages use varying strategies to bring new ideas to the fore.This is Topic #75!This week's tag language: Lingala!Related episodes:The Rules of Conversation - Gricean Maxims: youtu.be/rzxyjFHh-y8Building Common Ground - youtu.be/gQqXmhqM13ULast episode:Why Can't Any Go Just Anywhere? NPIs: youtu.be/vd8cjyxHQdwOther of our semantics and pragmatics videos:Sheepish Semantics: The Lambda Calculus - youtu.be/BwWQDzXBuwgOperation Relevance: Relevance Theory - youtu.be/yRv1agt776cQuantifying Sets and Toasters: Generalized Quantifiers - youtu.be/U1l3C_hmjqMFind us on all the social media worlds:Tumblr: http://thelingspace.tumblr.comTwitter: http://twitter.com/TheLingSpaceFacebook: http://www.facebook.com/thelingspaceAnd at our website, http://www.thelingspace.com !You can also find our store at the website, thelingspace.storenvy.comOur website also has extra content about this week's topic at http://www.thelingspace.com/episode-75We also have forums to discuss this episode, and linguistics more generally.Sources:A couple of papers:Krifka (2006): http://amor.cms.hu-berlin.de/~h2816i3x/Publications/Krifka_InformationStructure.pdfFéry and Krifka: http://amor.cms.hu-berlin.de/~h2816i3x/Publications/Fery_Krifka_InformationStructure.pdfSome slides and notes:From Andrew McIntyre: https://www.angl.hu-berlin.de/department/staff/1685901/unterrichtsmaterialien/infostr.adv.lecture.pdfFrom Richard Xiao: http://www.lancaster.ac.uk/staff/xiaoz/papers/FCUHK-lecture.pptFrom Kordula De Kuthy and Arndt Riester: http://www.sfs.uni-tuebingen.de/~kdk/esslli14/intro-slides.pdfFrom Frank Kügler: http://www.ling.uni-potsdam.de/~kuegler/docs/2014.Koeln.IS.kuegler.pdfAlso, the Wikipedia pages for these topics are pretty good:en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_structureen.wikipedia.org/wiki/Focus_(linguistics)en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topic_and_commentSee you all in two weeks!
Interviews from VidCon 2016 The Ling Space 2016-07-20 | We had a great time again at VidCon this year! And we talked with a bunch of other YouTubers about their favourite language stories, or their favourite facts about language. We got a lot of great replies, and we're happy to share them with you here! ^_^Here's our video on whether correcting kids' mistakes is helpful: youtu.be/a7Un06tDOn0Thanks to all the people we interviewed!Cassie: youtube.com/c/CassieVeeSarah Urist Green: youtube.com/user/TheArtAssignmentJoan Goodspeed: youtube.com/channel/UCOhexBb29dNc2vH4TrqrhIQAli Mattu: youtube.com/thepsychshowSevy: youtube.com/c/sevyssecretchannelMalinda Kathleen Reese: youtube.com/c/malindakathleenreeseCory Arnold: youtube.com/c/12tonevideosKevin O’Sullivan: youtube.com/channel/UCRyN60LDdhrXYHtjw8v20GQStephanie Brown: youtube.com/offbeatworldsFind us on all the social media worlds:Tumblr: http://thelingspace.tumblr.comTwitter: twitter.com/TheLingSpaceFacebook: facebook.com/thelingspaceAnd at our website, thelingspace.com !You can also find our store at the website, thelingspace.storenvy.comWe also have forums to discuss linguistics more generally.Looking forward to next week!
Why Cant Any Go Just Anywhere? NPIs The Ling Space 2016-07-14 | Why can't we just use "ever" or "at all" in any sentence we want? What do we have to change about how a sentence works to let words like those in? In this week's episode, we talk about negative polarity items, or NPIs: when they can show up, why their name is misleading, and how changing what a sentence entails changes everything for these little terms.This is Topic #74!This week's tag language: Khmer!Related episodes:Clues to Meaning: Implicatures, Entailments, and Presuppositions - youtu.be/N9OdeDQKnR4Let's Talk about Sets: Set Theory and Adjectives - youtu.be/M96aiDk2ePwQuantifying Sets and Toasters: Generalized Quantifiers - youtu.be/U1l3C_hmjqMLast episode:So Many Meanings, So Little Time: Ambiguities - youtu.be/E5Pp_wE14HUOther of our semantics and pragmatics videos:Sheepish Semantics: The Lambda Calculus - youtu.be/BwWQDzXBuwgOperation Relevance: Relevance Theory - youtu.be/yRv1agt776cBuilding Common Ground - youtu.be/gQqXmhqM13UFind us on all the social media worlds:Tumblr: http://thelingspace.tumblr.comTwitter: http://twitter.com/TheLingSpaceFacebook: http://www.facebook.com/thelingspaceAnd at our website, http://www.thelingspace.com !You can also find our store at the website, thelingspace.storenvy.comOur website also has extra content about this week's topic at http://www.thelingspace.com/episode-74We also have forums to discuss this episode, and linguistics more generally.Sources:Most of the information for this episode comes from Anders Schoubye's lecture notes, Formal Semantics for Philosophers:http://schoubye.org/teaching/Formal-Semantics/FormalSemanticsNotes2014.pdfSee you all in two weeks!
Why Are There So Many Meanings? Ambiguity The Ling Space 2016-06-30 | Why do so many words and sentences have multiple meanings? How do we deal with all of the overlaps? In this week's episode, we talk about ambiguity: where it comes from, how we deal with processing it, and how children pick meanings from the menu of semantic possibilities they're presented with.This is Topic #73!This week's tag language: Tongan!Related episodes:Scoping Out the Truth: Scope Ambiguity - youtu.be/XC-MGuj75zQWalking the Garden Path: How We Parse Sentences - youtu.be/2A-FDN7-gyoSome Assembly Required: Derivational and Inflectional Morphology - youtu.be/BTZCozhneKALast episode:Some Assembly Required: Derivational and Inflectional Morphology - youtu.be/BTZCozhneKAOther of our psycholinguistics videos:Finding Sense in Sounds: The Arbitrariness of the Sign - youtu.be/CcSCq8XDTaYFollow My Eyes: Eye Tracking - youtu.be/uXx73W0uyCgPrime Time: Priming Experiments - youtu.be/NGrxUp0pvVoFind us on all the social media worlds:Tumblr: http://thelingspace.tumblr.comTwitter: http://twitter.com/TheLingSpaceFacebook: http://www.facebook.com/thelingspaceAnd at our website, http://www.thelingspace.com !You can also find our store at the website, thelingspace.storenvy.comOur website also has extra content about this week's topic at http://www.thelingspace.com/episode-73(Or we will by Friday evening.)We also have forums to discuss this episode, and linguistics more generally.For a discussion of kids and semantic scope ambiguity, check out the extra materials from Episode 8: http://www.thelingspace.com/episode-8Sources:The basis for much of this episode are various discussions of ambiguity in Eva Fernández and Helen Smith Cairns's book, Fundamentals of Psycholinguistics.The linked meanings vs. different meanings lexical ambiguity study:Rodd, J., G. Gaskell, and W. Marslen-Wilson. (2002). Making sense of semantic ambiguity: Semantic competition in lexical access. Journal of Memory and Language 46: 245-66. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0749596X01928104On kids' difficulties in recovering from erroneous or weird interpretations:Trueswell, J.C. (2008). Using eye movements as a developmental measure within psycholinguistics. In Sekerina, Fernandez, and Clahsen (eds), Developmental Psycholinguistics: On-line Methods in Children's Language Processing, 73-96.Kidd, E., A. Stewart, & L. Serratrice (2011). Children do not overcome lexical biases where adults do: The role of the referential scene in garden path recovery. Journal of Child Language, 38, 222 - 234. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0305000909990316Kids and ambiguity detection:Hirsh-Pasek, K., L.R. Gleitman, & H. Gleitman. (1978). What did the brain say to the mind? A study of the detection and report of ambiguity by young children. In Sinclair, Jervella, and Levelt (eds), The Child's Conception of Language, 97-132.Peters, A.M. & E. Zaidel. (1980). The acquisition of homonymy. Cognition 8, 187-207. doi:10.1016/0010-0277(80)90012-8It's worth noting that kids' ability to learn and recognize homonyms is still a matter of ongoing research, although there does seem to be something there. For more discussion, see:Backscheider, A.G. & Susan A. Gelman. (1995). Children's understanding of homonyms. Journal of Child Language, 22, 107-127. doi:10.1017/S030500090000965X. Doherty, M.J. (2004). Children's difficulty in learning homonyms. Journal of Child Language, 31, 203-214. doi:10.1017/S030500090300583X. Kids' reading skills and ambiguity detection:Wankoff, L. & H. Cairns. (2009). Why ambiguity detection is a predictor of reading skill. Communication Disorders Quarterly 30 (3), 183-92.Cairns, H.S., D. Waltzman, & G. Schlisselberg. (2004). Detecting the ambiguity of sentences: Relationship to early reading skill. Communication Disorders Quarterly 27 (4), 213-20.Relative clause processing:Jun, S.-A. (2003). Prosodic phrasing and attachment preferences. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 32: 219-249.Fernández, E. (2002). Bilingual sentence processing: relative clause attachment in English and Spanish. See you all in two weeks!
What Kinds of Pieces Do We Use to Build Words? Derivational and Inflectional Morphology The Ling Space 2016-06-15 | How do we put our words together? What varieties of building blocks do we stack up to create bigger meanings? In this week's episode, we talk about derivational and inflectional morphology: what roles each of them play, how to tell them apart, and how differences in how we string them together can lead to ambiguity.This is Topic #72!This week's tag language: Estonian!Related episodes:What's the Smallest Unit of Meaning? Morphemes - youtu.be/nduDAN9sKx4How Do You Build a Word? Roots and Affixes - youtu.be/PN1DxuVt4hILast episode:Up, Up, and Away: VPISH and Word Order - youtu.be/EJoUyPIdu18Other of our morphology and syntax videos:Why Do Some Words Change So Much? Allomorphy - youtu.be/UyDsU_wqk5gHow Do Languages Organize Their Words? Morphological Typologies - youtu.be/Ts2DS0ZsTyoFind us on all the social media worlds:Tumblr: http://thelingspace.tumblr.comTwitter: http://twitter.com/TheLingSpaceFacebook: http://www.facebook.com/thelingspaceAnd at our website, http://www.thelingspace.com !You can also find our store at the website, thelingspace.storenvy.comOur website also has extra content about this week's topic at http://www.thelingspace.com/episode-72We also have forums to discuss this episode, and linguistics more generally.Sources:This work was mainly derived from Mark Baker and Jonathan Bobaljik's textbook / course notes, Introduction to Morphology.See you all in two weeks!
Where Do Subjects Start Out in Sentences? Word Order and VPISH The Ling Space 2016-06-01 | Why do different languages slot their words into sentences in different sequences? Do the subjects of sentences have to start off at the beginning of the sentence? In this week's episode, we talk about word order and the Verb Phrase-Internal Subject Hypothesis, or VPISH: how much variation in orders we see across languages, why having the subject start out lower down in the syntactic tree helps us capture these differences, and what other evidence we have that the subject might not start exactly where it appears.This is Topic #71!This week's tag language: Amharic!Related episodes:Happy Little Trees: Syntactic Trees and X' Theory - youtu.be/7UOcoQr0hvgGoldilocks and the Three Nouns: Theta Roles - youtu.be/thFkoo1YmW0Desert Island Words: Syntactic Islands - youtu.be/01uH4XfJx3gLast episode:Sound Wave Hissy Fit: The Acoustics of Stops and Fricatives - youtu.be/iEc8nZkn258 Other of our syntax videos:Raising the Bar: Raising and Control Verbs - youtu.be/SYoYNeaSYrUReferential Treatment: Binding Theory - youtu.be/9sqm_cex4kATrace Evidence: Syntactic Movement and Traces - youtu.be/x5iBbSkp8rkFind us on all the social media worlds:Tumblr: http://thelingspace.tumblr.comTwitter: http://twitter.com/TheLingSpaceFacebook: http://www.facebook.com/thelingspaceAnd at our website, http://www.thelingspace.com !You can also find our store at the website, thelingspace.storenvy.comOur website also has extra content about this week's topic at http://www.thelingspace.com/episode-71We also have forums to discuss this episode, and linguistics more generally.Sources:You can find a good discussion of this topic in Andrew Carnie's Syntax: A Generative Introduction (3rd edition). The specific examples from Irish are taken from Carnie's dissertation, which you can find here: http://dingo.sbs.arizona.edu/~carnie/publications/Thesishome.htmlThe Malagasy data is from Ileana Paul's thesis (cited to work by Ed Keenan, 1976, "Remarkable Subjects in Malagasy"). You can find her thesis here: http://publish.uwo.ca/~ileana/papers/dissertation.pdfLooking forward to next week!
How Do We Tell Apart Consonants? Obstruent Acoustics The Ling Space 2016-05-11 | How do we wade through hissing or silence to tell consonants apart? Which cues do we grab onto to get us on top of these sound waves? In this week's episode, we take a look at obstruent acoustics: how they differ from vowels or other sonorous sounds, how the way we make fricatives influences the way they sound to us, and how we latch onto lightning-quick changes to tell us what stop we just heard.This is Topic #70!This week's tag language: Nepali!Related episodes:Minding Your Manners: Places and Manners of Articulation - youtu.be/zEaPQP3pXQcForming Formants: Acoustic Resonance and Formants - youtu.be/jl4zGRSYqkELast episode:Sheepish Semantics: Lambda Calculus - youtu.be/BwWQDzXBuwgOther of our phonetics and phonology videos:The Melody of Feet: Stress, Iambs, and Trochees - youtu.be/MdId9wnMNg8Good Vibrations: Phonation States, Breathy and Creaky Voice - youtu.be/edYLoMRgaFwUncommon Sounds: Ejectives, Implosives, and Clicks - youtu.be/JKP10ARLnzMFind us on all the social media worlds:Tumblr: http://thelingspace.tumblr.comTwitter: http://twitter.com/TheLingSpaceFacebook: http://www.facebook.com/thelingspaceAnd at our website, http://www.thelingspace.com !You can also find our store at the website, thelingspace.storenvy.comOur website also has extra content about this week's topic at http://www.thelingspace.com/episode-70We also have forums to discuss this episode, and linguistics more generally.Sources:Much of the information in this episode comes from Henry Rogers's book The Sounds of Language, and Peter Ladefoged's book A Course in Phonetics.Here are some webpages that are helpful for getting more info:Robert Mannell and Felicity Cox:http://clas.mq.edu.au/speech/acoustics/speech_spectra/fricatives.htmlhttp://clas.mq.edu.au/speech/acoustics/speech_spectra/oral_stops.htmlRob Hagiwara's page is also helpful:http://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~robh/howto.html#figstopsAnd some from Kevin Russell, as well:http://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~krussll/phonetics/acoustic/spectrogram-sounds.htmlFinally, we really encourage you to download Praat, and just talk into it so you can look at your own spectrograms! Praat's free and powerful, and it's always more fun when it's your own voice:http://www.fon.hum.uva.nl/praat/download_win.htmlWe're taking a couple of weeks off, but we'll be back posting videos on June 1. Looking forward to seeing you then!
How Can One Greek Letter Help Us Understand Language? Lambda Calculus The Ling Space 2016-05-04 | How can we capture the meanings of transitive sentences? How do we match our syntax trees to our semantics? In this week's episode, we talk about lambda calculus: why we need it to explain what our other semantic machinery can't, how to work out its math, and what it can show us about how words move around in sentences.This is Topic #69!This week's tag language: Lakota!Related episodes:Meaning Predicated on Logic: What Makes a Sentence True or False? - youtu.be/al5SJSbIyvMLet's Talk About Sets: How Do We Build Meaning with Math? - youtu.be/M96aiDk2ePwQuantifying Sets and Toasters: What Does "Most" Even Mean? - youtu.be/U1l3C_hmjqMLast episode:Watch What You Say: What Makes Bad Words Bad? - youtu.be/Y4HW0tOCoQMOther of our semantics and pragmatics videos:Operation Relevance: How Do We Decide What's Relevant in Conversations? - youtu.be/yRv1agt776cBuilding Common Ground: How Do We Create a Shared World in Conversation? - youtu.be/gQqXmhqM13ULogical Connections: How Logical is Language? - youtu.be/lw4ykgRtv3QFind us on all the social media worlds:Tumblr: http://thelingspace.tumblr.comTwitter: http://twitter.com/TheLingSpaceFacebook: http://www.facebook.com/thelingspaceAnd at our website, http://www.thelingspace.com !You can also find our store at the website, thelingspace.storenvy.comOur website also has extra content about this week's topic at http://www.thelingspace.com/episode-69We also have forums to discuss this episode, and linguistics more generally.Sources:Most of the information for this episode came from Irene Heim and Angelika Kratzer's 1998 book, Semantics in Generative Grammar. Also, the Wikipedia page on Lambda Calculus is pretty good:en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lambda_calculusWe also recommend Anders Schoubye's lecture notes, Formal Semantics for Philosophers:http://schoubye.org/teaching/Formal-Semantics/FormalSemanticsNotes2014.pdfLooking forward to next week!
What Makes Bad Words Bad? Taboo Language and Euphemisms The Ling Space 2016-04-20 | What kinds of words are off-limits in different languages? How deeply does profanity affect us? In this week's episode, we talk about taboo language and euphemisms: how they work, when we're allowed to use what, how psychologically deep they go, and why we can't run on the same euphemisms forever.This is Topic #68!This week's tag language: Romansh!If you want the information, but you don't want the swearing, please check the companion post on our Tumblr: http://thelingspace.tumblr.com/post/143132629704/taboo-language-and-euphemisms-companion-postLast episode:Finding Sense in Sounds: Do Sounds Carry Their Own Meanings? - youtu.be/CcSCq8XDTaYOther of our socio- and historical linguistics videos:Recovering History: How Can We Know What Language Used to Look Like? - youtu.be/p7ppktfdNCkGender on the Brain: How Do We Process Language and Gender? - youtu.be/jtMUE-RLeIILinguistic Pride and Prejudice: What's the Difference between a Dialect and a Language? - youtu.be/uEabSWeO02EFind us on all the social media worlds:Tumblr: http://thelingspace.tumblr.comTwitter: http://twitter.com/TheLingSpaceFacebook: http://www.facebook.com/thelingspaceAnd at our website, http://www.thelingspace.com !You can also find our store at the website, thelingspace.storenvy.comOur website also has extra content about this week's topic at http://www.thelingspace.com/episode-68(Or we will by Thursday afternoon.)We also have forums to discuss this episode, and linguistics more generally.Sources:More detailed sources to come tonight, but much of the information contained in this video comes from Steven Pinker's The Stuff of Thought, and Ronald Wardhaugh's An Introduction to Sociolinguistics, Fifth Edition.Looking forward to next week!
Interview with Lisa Pearl The Ling Space 2016-04-13 | We're really excited to have gotten to interview Lisa Pearl recently! Dr. Pearl is an Associate Professor at the University of California, Irvine, and the director of their Computation of Language Laboratory. She’s published numerous articles on how to use statistical models to check different hypotheses about what kids do to learn language, as well as about natural language processing and textual analysis. We’ve been talking about her work since our very first episode!We got to ask her about a lot of great topics, including:- what statistical models can tell us about how kids acquire language- what's under our control in our writing, and what we unconsciously show as our write-print- why computers are so bad at detecting tone and picking out the right meanings of words- how statistical models and Universal Grammar interact- a question from one of our viewers about how to approach modeling for second language acquisitionAnd more! Hope you all enjoy it, and thanks to Dr. Lisa Travis and the Department of Linguistics at McGill University for letting us film there.Our previous interviews:Daniel Dennett: youtu.be/30eOI6pL-lUSteven Pinker: youtu.be/piJBmPh5jFUSome related videos:How do computers understand our speech?: youtu.be/FI9IJteS-5YdaWhat principles and parameters lie at the core of our language?: youtu.be/GbK0ls7YVN4Why are babies so good at language learning?: youtu.be/MLNFGWJOXjAFind us on all the social media worlds:Tumblr: http://thelingspace.tumblr.comTwitter: http://twitter.com/TheLingSpaceFacebook: http://www.facebook.com/thelingspaceAnd at our website, http://www.thelingspace.com !You can also find our store at the website, http://thelingspace.storenvy.comWe also have forums to discuss this interview, and linguistics more generally.Looking forward to next week!
Do Sounds Carry Their Own Meanings? Onomatopoeia and Arbitrariness of the Sign The Ling Space 2016-04-06 | How much meaning is there just in sounds? How much are words alike across languages? In this week's episode, we talk about the arbitrariness of the sign: how our sounds don't have to connect to the meanings they do, how much cases like onomatopoeia serve as a counter to the random matching of words, and whether individual sounds or syllables carry their own semantic punch.This is Topic #67!This week's tag language: Māori!Related videos:Following the Signs: How Do We Learn Words? - youtu.be/Ci-5dVVvf0ULast episode:Desert Island Words: What Questions Can't You Ask? - youtu.be/01uH4XfJx3gOther of our psycholinguistics videos:Follow My Eyes: What Can Our Eyes Tell Us About Language? - youtu.be/uXx73W0uyCgWalking the Garden Path: How Do We Interpret Sentences? - youtu.be/2A-FDN7-gyoPrime Time: How Are Words Connected in Our Minds? - youtu.be/NGrxUp0pvVoFind us on all the social media worlds:Tumblr: http://thelingspace.tumblr.comTwitter: http://twitter.com/TheLingSpaceFacebook: http://www.facebook.com/thelingspaceAnd at our website, http://www.thelingspace.com !You can also find our store at the website, thelingspace.storenvy.comOur website also has extra content about this week's topic at http://www.thelingspace.com/episode-67We also have forums to discuss this episode, and linguistics more generally.Spanish subtitles by Federico FallettiSources:The initial discussion of the arbitrariness of the sign is from:de Saussure, F. (1916). Course in General Linguistics. Translated by Roy Harris, 1983.There's a good discussion of the concepts on the Wikipedia page regarding the book:en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Course_in_General_LinguisticsIf you are interested in cross-linguistic onomatopoeia and also very cute pictures, try:http://soundimals.tumblr.comhttp://chapmangamo.tumblr.comThe Dutch/Japanese ideophone study:Lockwood, G., M. Dingemanse, & P. Hagoort (2016). Sound-symbolism boosts novel word learning. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition.(Full paper available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/xlm0000235)The initial studies for the sound symbolism / phonesthetics with molmo and ikitik:Köhler, W (1929). Gestalt Psychology. (We consulted the 1947 second edition.)These shapes are often known as "kiki" and "bouba", from the following study:Ramachandran, V. S., and E. M. Hubbard. (2001). Synaesthesia—a window into perception, thought and language. Journal of Consciousness Studies 8, 3–34.There's a good and accessible overview of the state of this research in:Lockwood, G. & M. Dingemanse. (2015). Iconicity in the Lab: A Review of Behavioral, Developmental, and Neuroimaging Research into Sound-Symbolism. Language Sciences, 1246. (full paper to be found at: http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.01246)An interesting article about product names and how they happen: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/10/03/famous-namesLooking forward to next week!
What Questions Cant We Ask? Syntactic Islands The Ling Space 2016-03-30 | How do we know what questions we can ask? What keeps us from moving words around into whatever order we want? In this week's episode, we talk about syntactic islands: what they are, what rules can allow us to move some words across long distances in a sentence and not others, and what evidence we have from different languages to back these rules up.This is Topic #66!This week's tag language: Sinhala!Related videos:Trace Evidence: Syntactic Movement - youtu.be/x5iBbSkp8rkA Principled Approach: Principles and Parameters in Universal Grammar - youtu.be/GbK0ls7YVN4Last episode:The Magic of Words: Performative Language - youtu.be/uCR3_7-lun4Other of our morphology and syntax videos:Raising the Bar: What Changes in a Sentence When We Swap Verbs? - youtu.be/SYoYNeaSYrUOrganizing Meanings: Morphological Typology - youtu.be/Ts2DS0ZsTyoReferential Treatment: Pronouns and Binding Theory - youtu.be/9sqm_cex4kAIf you're taking part in our little April 1st quiz, try to tell us where Kanji has gone - the first person who tells us in the comments will get a free mug of their choice!Find us on all the social media worlds:Tumblr: http://thelingspace.tumblr.comTwitter: http://twitter.com/TheLingSpaceFacebook: http://www.facebook.com/thelingspaceAnd at our website, http://www.thelingspace.com !You can also find our store at the website, thelingspace.storenvy.comOur website also has extra content about this week's topic at http://www.thelingspace.com/episode-66We also have forums to discuss this episode, and linguistics more generally.Sources:Most of the information in this episode comes from Andrew Radford's Minimalist Syntax -- Exploring the Structure of English (2004) & Andrew Carnie's Syntax -- A Generative Introduction (2007). We also refer to John R. Ross's dissertation from 1967, Constraints on Variables in Syntax, as well as Noam Chomsky's Conditions on Transformations (1973) and The Minimalist Program (1995).Looking forward to next week!
Outtakes #3 The Ling Space 2016-03-24 | Some outtakes from episodes 6-9 of the Ling Space! We hope you enjoy these. We think they're pretty fun. Particularly the zombie parts.If you'd like to watch more of our outtakes videos, they're here:Outtakes #1 (Eps 1-2): youtu.be/bLoCCBlCLBEOuttakes #2 (Eps 3-5): youtu.be/Y3mVv-8EEE8Or maybe you're interested in some of our more recent episodes:The Magic of Words: Performative Language - youtu.be/uCR3_7-lun4Conservative Babies: Why Do Kids Make So Few Mistakes? - youtu.be/IbyO2D1A83EA Finite State of Affairs: How Complex is Natural Language? - youtu.be/5-uOijZ5mRoFind us on all the social media worlds:Tumblr: http://thelingspace.tumblr.comTwitter: twitter.com/TheLingSpaceFacebook: facebook.com/thelingspaceAnd at our website, thelingspace.com !We also have our store at http://thelingspace.storenvy.com, with 20% off using the code 7500SUBS until March 26.We also have forums to discuss this episode, and linguistics more generally.Looking forward to next week!
How Can Words Change the World? Performative Language The Ling Space 2016-03-16 | How does our speech affect the world around us? How can we measure the changes that our words make? In this week's episode, we take a look at performative language: what you need for your words to work their magic, what different parts make up our speech acts, and how our word choices can change the way we perceive and remember events.This is Topic #65!This week's tag language: Hausa!Last episode:Conservative Babies: How Do Kids Avoid Saying Things Wrong? - youtu.be/IbyO2D1A83EOther of our general linguistics videos:Future Tense: How Will Language Change in the Future? - youtu.be/5hibYoYwGkoWhy So Sirious: How Do Computers Understand Our Speech? - youtu.be/FI9IJteS-5YPlays on Words: Is Wordplay Universal? - youtu.be/AT7Xd2tC62kFind us on all the social media worlds:Tumblr: http://thelingspace.tumblr.comTwitter: http://twitter.com/TheLingSpaceFacebook: http://www.facebook.com/thelingspaceAnd at our website, http://www.thelingspace.com !You can also find our store at the website, thelingspace.storenvy.comOur website also has extra content about this week's topic at http://www.thelingspace.com/episode-65(Or we will by Thursday morning.)We also have forums to discuss this episode, and linguistics more generally.Sources:Austin, J.L. (1962). How to Do Things with Words.Hall, S. (2000). "Who Needs Identity?" In du Gay, P., Evans, J., and Redman, P. (eds), Identity: A Reader.Holten, L. (2013). Mothers, Medicine, and Morality in Rural Mali. books.google.ca/books?id=5MTA9-ru-4oC&pg=PA35&lpg=PA35Sommerstein, A. H., and Torrance, I.C. (2014). Oaths and Swearing in Ancient Greece. de Gruyter.http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/the-power-of-nameshttp://www.simplypsychology.org/loftus-palmer.htmlen.wikipedia.org/wiki/True_nameen.wikipedia.org/wiki/Performative_utteranceen.wikipedia.org/wiki/Performativityhttp://www.thebuddhacenter.org/buddhism/mantrasualberta.ca/~francisp/NewPhil448/SearleOnAustinonLocutionaryIllocutionActs.pdfhttp://plato.stanford.edu/entries/speech-acts/Looking forward to next week!
How Do Kids Avoid Saying Things Incorrectly? Grammatical Conservatism The Ling Space 2016-03-09 | What kinds of mistakes do kids make in their sentences? Why do we see them leaving things out so much more often than putting things in wrong? In this week's episode, we talk about grammatical conservatism: what it means, some ways it shows up, and what it can tell us about language and how kids use it.This is Topic #64!This week's tag language: Mongolian!Related topics:Negative Space: Is Correcting Your Kid's Language Helpful? - youtu.be/a7Un06tDOn0 Last episode:A Finite State of Affairs: The Chomsky Hierarchy and the Complexity of Language - youtu.be/5-uOijZ5mRoOther of our language acquisition videos:Flipping Switches: Parameter Resetting and Second Language Acquisition - youtu.be/2E839gb4OwQKids Be Frontin': Children's Phonological Mistakes - youtu.be/EDymvzP0uacChild Actors and Child Judges: How To Test Young Kids' Language - youtu.be/NJ5lLNBabGcFind us on all the social media worlds:Tumblr: http://thelingspace.tumblr.comTwitter: http://twitter.com/TheLingSpaceFacebook: http://www.facebook.com/thelingspaceAnd at our website, http://www.thelingspace.com !You can also find our store at the website, thelingspace.storenvy.comOur website also has extra content about this week's topic at http://www.thelingspace.com/episode-64(Or we will by Thursday morning.)We also have forums to discuss this episode, and linguistics more generally.If you're curious about the analysis of the Compounding Parameter and what underlies it that lets it capture both verb-particle constructions and creative compounding, take a look at section 5 of William Snyder's 2011 paper here: http://web.uconn.edu/snyder/papers/BUCLD35_Plenary.pdfSources:Much of the discussion of grammatical conservatism comes from William Snyder's work, on his own and with various colleagues. We used the following sources:- Maratsos, Michael (1998). The acquisition of grammar. In Handbook of Child Psychology, Vol. 2, 421–466.- Rodríguez-Mondoñedo, Miguel (2008). The acquisition of Differential Object Marking in Spanish. Probus 20:111–145. - Snyder, William (2001). On the nature of syntactic variation: Evidence from complex predicates and complex word-formation. Language 77: 324-342. - Snyder, William (2007). Child Language: The Parametric Approach. OUP. - Snyder, William (2008). Children’s Grammatical Conservatism: Implications for linguistic theory. In T. Sano et al. (eds.), An Enterprise in the Cognitive Science of Language: A Festschrift for Yukio Otsu. Tokyo: Hituzi Shobu. - Snyder, William. (2011). Children's Grammatical Conservatism: Implications for syntactic theory [Plenary Address]. In Nick Danis, Kate Mesh & Hyunsuk Sung (eds.) BUCLD 35: Proceedings of the 35th annual Boston University Conference on Language Development, Volume I, 1-20. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.- Sugisaki, Koji and Miwa Isobe (2000). Resultatives result from the compounding parameter: On the acquisitional correlation between resultatives and N-N compounds in Japanese. In Proceedings of the 19th West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics, 493-506. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press. - Sugisaki, Koji & William Snyder. (2003) Do parameters have default values? Evidence from the acquisition of English and Spanish. In Yukio Otsu (ed.), Proceedings of the Fourth Tokyo Conference on Psycholinguistics, 215-237. Tokyo: Hituzi Shobo.Looking forward to next week!
How Complex is Natural Language? The Chomsky Hierarchy The Ling Space 2016-03-02 | How can we describe the complexity of linguistic systems? Where does natural language fit in? In this week's episode, we talk about the Chomsky hierarchy: what it captures, what characterizes different kinds of grammars on the hierarchy, and whether we can find grammars that sit higher on the scale than human language.This is Topic #63!This week's tag language: Croatian!Related topics:Happy Little Trees: X' Theory - youtu.be/7UOcoQr0hvgTrace Evidence: Syntactic Movement - youtu.be/x5iBbSkp8rkLast episode:Quantifying Sets and Toasters: Generalized Quantifiers - youtu.be/U1l3C_hmjqMOther of our syntax and morphology videos:Raising the Bar: Raising and Control Verbs - youtu.be/SYoYNeaSYrUOrganizing Meanings: Morphological Typology - youtu.be/Ts2DS0ZsTyoReferential Treatment: Binding Theory - youtu.be/9sqm_cex4kAAlso, if you'd like to know more about the Chomsky Hierarchy and its impact on computer science, Computerphile's had a few videos about them:- Their episode on the hierarchy: youtube.com/watch?v=224plb3bCog.- Their episode about finite-state machines: youtube.com/watch?v=vhiiia1_hC4.- And their episode about how finite-state machines relate to grammar: youtube.com/watch?v=RjOCRYdg8BY.Find us on all the social media worlds:Tumblr: http://thelingspace.tumblr.comTwitter: http://twitter.com/TheLingSpaceFacebook: http://www.facebook.com/thelingspaceAnd at our website, http://www.thelingspace.com !You can also find our store at the website, thelingspace.storenvy.comOur website also has extra content about this week's topic at http://www.thelingspace.com/episode-63We also have forums to discuss this episode, and linguistics more generally.Sources:(1) I-Language (1st Edition, Daniela isac & Charles Reiss)(2) Introduction to the Theory of Computation (3rd Edition, Michael Sipser)(3) Mathematical Logic for Computer Science (3rd Edition, Mordechai Ben-Ari)(4) Evidence Against the Context-Freeness of Natural Language (Stuart Shieber - http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~shieber/Biblio/Papers/shieber85.pdf)(5) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chomsky_hierarchy(6) Syntactic Structures (Noam Chomsky)(7) Mathematical Methods in Linguistics (Barbara Partee, Alice G. ter Meulen, Robert Wall) Proof regarding crossing dependencies (adapted from the first edition of Introduction to Automata Theory, Languages, and Computation, by John Hopcroft and Jeffrey Ullman. Note where carets appear that the following character should be taken as superscript):We first capture the general pattern of embedded clauses in Swiss German with the language a^nb^mc^nd^m . We then treat this as the result of intersecting Swiss German with the regular language a*b*c*d*.Now, let L = {a^nb^mc^nd^m | n ≥ 1 and m ≥ 1}. Suppose L is a context-free language, and let p be the pumping length referred to in the pumping lemma for context-free languages (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumping_lemma_for_context-free_languages). Consider the string z = a^pb^pc^pd^p. Let z = uvwxy satisfy the conditions of the pumping lemma. Then as |vwx| ≤ p, vx can contain at most two different symbols. Furthermore, if vx contains two different symbols, they must be consecutive, for example, a and b. If vx has only a’s, then uwy has fewer a’s than c’s and is not in L, a contradiction. We proceed similarly if vx consists of only b’s, only c’s, or only d’s. Now suppose that vx has a’s and b’s. Then uwy still has fewer a’s than c’s. A similar contradiction occurs if vx consist of b’s and c’s or c’s and d’s. Since these are the only possibilities, we conclude that L is not context-free.Since context-free languages are closed under intersection with regular languages, and the above intersection is not context-free, Swiss German must be non-context-free.Q.E.D.A proof of the pumping lemma itself can be found in Introduction to the Theory of Computation (among other places). For a discussion of the closure properties of context-free languages, see Mathematical Methods in Linguistics (among other places).Looking forward to next week!
What Does Most Even Mean? Generalized Quantifiers The Ling Space 2016-02-24 | How can we tell what words like "few" and "many" do in our sentences? What's the right way to represent these words in our minds? This week, we talk about generalized quantifier theory: what the math for quantifiers should look like, what properties natural language quantifiers seem to all share, and what that means for how kids can learn them. This is Topic #62!This week's tag language: Tshiluba!Related topics:Meaning Predicated on Logic: Predicate Logic - youtu.be/al5SJSbIyvMLet's Talk About Sets: Set Theory and Adjectives - youtu.be/M96aiDk2ePwLast episode:Operation Relevance: Relevance Theory - youtu.be/yRv1agt776cOther of our semantics and pragmatics videos:Building Common Ground: Shared Worlds in Conversation - youtu.be/gQqXmhqM13UClues to Meaning: Implicatures, Entailments, and Presuppositions - youtu.be/N9OdeDQKnR4Scoping Out the Truth: Semantic Scope Ambiguity - youtu.be/XC-MGuj75zQFind us on all the social media worlds:Tumblr: http://thelingspace.tumblr.comTwitter: http://twitter.com/TheLingSpaceFacebook: http://www.facebook.com/thelingspaceAnd at our website, http://www.thelingspace.com !You can also find our store at the website, thelingspace.storenvy.comOur website also has extra content about this week's topic at http://www.thelingspace.com/episode-62We also have forums to discuss this episode, and linguistics more generally.Sources:Barwise, J. and R. Cooper. (1981). Generalized quantifiers and natural language. Linguistics and Philosophy, 4:159–219.von Fintel, K. (1994). Restrictions on Quantifier Domains. PhD Thesis, University of Massachusetts Amherst.Hunter, T. and A. Conroy. (2009). Children's restrictions on the meanings of novel determiners. Proceedings of BUCLD 2008; file found here: http://www.tc.umn.edu/~timh/conservativity/bu2008-paper.pdfWesterståhl, Dag, "Generalized Quantifiers", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2015 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2015/entries/generalized-quantifiers/Looking forward to next week!
How Do We Decide Whats Relevant in Our Conversations? Relevance Theory The Ling Space 2016-02-17 | How can we tell what's relevant when we try to work out what other people mean? What can experiments tell us about how much we'll consider when puzzling out meaning? In this week's episode, we talk about relevance theory: how it can help us more scientifically approach relevance in our discussions, how it interacts with the rest of our understanding of the rules of conversations, and how we can play with relevance in experiments to make people more or less likely to behave in logical ways.This is Topic #61!This week's tag language: Quechua!Related topics:The Rules of Conversation: Gricean Maxims - youtu.be/rzxyjFHh-y8Speaking of Science: Linguistics as a Science - youtu.be/25I2Nja6mekLast episode:The Melody of Feet: Stress in Words - youtu.be/MdId9wnMNg8Other of our semantics and pragmatics videos:Building Common Ground: Shared Worlds in Conversation - youtu.be/gQqXmhqM13ULet's Talk about Sets: Set Theory and Adjectives - youtu.be/M96aiDk2ePwClues to Meaning: Implicatures, Entailments, and Presuppositions - youtu.be/N9OdeDQKnR4Find us on all the social media worlds:Tumblr: http://thelingspace.tumblr.comTwitter: http://twitter.com/TheLingSpaceFacebook: http://www.facebook.com/thelingspaceAnd at our website, http://www.thelingspace.com !You can also find our store at the website, thelingspace.storenvy.comOur website also has extra content about this week's topic at http://www.thelingspace.com/episode-61We also have forums to discuss this episode, and linguistics more generally.Sources:The information for this video was largely taken from Ira Noveck and Daniel Sperber's 2006 book entitled Experimental Pragmatics, primarily chapters 1 and 7, and Paul Grice's 1975 paper, Logic and Conversation.Looking forward to next week!
Interview with Daniel Dennett - Remastered The Ling Space 2016-02-11 | This is an updated version of our interview with Daniel Dennett from last month, now with remastered audio! The original video is here: youtu.be/U57TQEOWxg8We're really excited to have gotten to interview Dr. Dennett recently! He holds the title of University Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Tufts University, as well as the co-director of their Center for Cognitive Studies. He's also the author of a number of books on evolution, consciousness, memes, language, and more, including Consciousness Explained, Darwin's Dangerous Idea, and Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking.We got to ask him about a lot of great topics, including:- the role of language in spreading culture- what linguists and philosophers can learn from each other- whether the gap between linguists and the general public is closing- computers and whether they'll be able to use language in a human-like way- a question from one of our followers about whether we have a dedicated mental languageAnd more! Hope you all enjoy it.Some related videos:Our previous interview with Steven Pinker: youtu.be/piJBmPh5jFUHow do computers understand our speech?: youtu.be/FI9IJteS-5YdaHow logical is language?: youtu.be/lw4ykgRtv3QFind us on all the social media worlds:Tumblr: http://thelingspace.tumblr.comTwitter: http://twitter.com/TheLingSpaceFacebook: http://www.facebook.com/thelingspaceAnd at our website, http://www.thelingspace.com !You can also find our store at the website, http://thelingspace.storenvy.comWe also have forums to discuss this episode, and linguistics more generally.Looking forward to next week!
How Do We Stress Our Words? Foot Structure The Ling Space 2016-02-03 | How do different languages play with pitch to create differences in meaning? How do we tell where stress falls? In this week's episode, we look at stress and foot structure: how languages use tone, pitch, and stress; how we can build different kinds of feet; and how where we place our stress can change the way we emphasize our sounds.This is Topic #60!This week's tag language: Icelandic!Related topics:Rhymes and Reasons: Syllable Structure - youtu.be/YON1pOcEhrALast episode:Follow My Eyes: Eye Tracking - youtu.be/uXx73W0uyCgOther of our phonetics and phonology videos:Good Vibrations: Phonation States - youtu.be/edYLoMRgaFwForming Formants: Resonance and Sound Waves - youtu.be/jl4zGRSYqkEUncommon Sounds: Consonants without Using Our Lungs - youtu.be/JKP10ARLnzMFind us on all the social media worlds:Tumblr: http://thelingspace.tumblr.comTwitter: http://twitter.com/TheLingSpaceFacebook: http://www.facebook.com/thelingspaceAnd at our website, http://www.thelingspace.com !You can also find our store at the website, thelingspace.storenvy.comOur website also has extra content about this week's topic at http://www.thelingspace.com/episode-60(It'll be posted later on Thursday morning.)We also have forums to discuss this episode, and linguistics more generally.Looking forward to next week!
What Can Our Eyes Tell Us About Language? Eye Tracking The Ling Space 2016-01-27 | What do our eyes do while we read written language? What can their movements tell us about our processing? In this week's episode, we look at eye tracking: how we can measure these small movements, what following how people read shows us about processing, and how even just studying how we look at pictures can unlock how our brains approach incoming words.This is Topic #59!This week's tag language: Malay!Related topics:Walking the Garden Path: Parsing Strategies - youtu.be/2A-FDN7-gyoLast episode:Building Common Ground - youtu.be/gQqXmhqM13UOther of our psycholinguistics videos:Prime Time: Priming - youtu.be/NGrxUp0pvVoJust Hearing Things: Phonological Illusions - youtu.be/Czvgf-Xc-A4Gender on the Brain: Gender and Language Processing - youtu.be/jtMUE-RLeIIFind us on all the social media worlds:Tumblr: http://thelingspace.tumblr.comTwitter: http://twitter.com/TheLingSpaceFacebook: http://www.facebook.com/thelingspaceAnd at our website, http://www.thelingspace.com !You can also find our store at the website, thelingspace.storenvy.comOur website also has extra content about this week's topic at http://www.thelingspace.com/episode-59(It'll be posted later on Thursday morning.)We also have forums to discuss this episode, and linguistics more generally.Looking forward to next week!
Interview with Daniel Dennett The Ling Space 2016-01-20 | We have an updated version of this interview with Daniel Dennett, now with remastered audio: youtu.be/30eOI6pL-lUWe're really excited to have gotten to interview Daniel Dennett recently! Dr. Dennett is a University Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Tufts University, as well as the co-director of their Center for Cognitive Studies. He's also the author of a number of books on evolution, consciousness, memes, language, and more, including Consciousness Explained, Darwin's Dangerous Idea, and Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking.We got to ask him about a lot of great topics, including:- the role of language in spreading culture- what linguists and philosophers can learn from each other- whether the gap between linguists and the general public is closing- computers and whether they'll be able to use language in a human-like way- a question from one of our followers about whether we have a dedicated mental languageAnd more! Hope you all enjoy it.Some related videos:Our previous interview with Steven Pinker: youtu.be/piJBmPh5jFUHow do computers understand our speech?: youtu.be/FI9IJteS-5YdaHow logical is language?: youtu.be/lw4ykgRtv3QFind us on all the social media worlds:Tumblr: http://thelingspace.tumblr.comTwitter: http://twitter.com/TheLingSpaceFacebook: http://www.facebook.com/thelingspaceAnd at our website, http://www.thelingspace.com !You can also find our store at the website, http://thelingspace.storenvy.comWe also have forums to discuss this episode, and linguistics more generally.Looking forward to next week!
