101: Micro to macro - The levels of language
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Welcome to Lingthusiasm, a podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics. I'm Lauren Gawne. And I'm Gretchen McCulloch. Today, we're getting enthusiastic about all the different layers of language structure.

But first, thank you to everyone who shared so many excellent linguistics facts to celebrate our 100th episode anniversary. To celebrate Lingthusiasm now having more than 100 episodes, we've compiled a list of 101 places where you can get even more linguistics enthusiasm. If you want some suggestions for other podcasts, books, videos, blogs, other places online and offline to feed your interest in linguistics, you can check out that link from our website.

Even with 101 options, I'm sure there are still a few we've missed, so feel free to tag us at Lingthusiasm on social media about your favourites. G – Or if there are any that you're particularly excited to see on the list, we would love this to help be a bit of a hub for people to find other cool linguistics communication projects.

Our most recent bonus episode was an interview with Julie Sedevy about our relationship with language and how it changes throughout our lives, and the linguistics of what makes writing feel beautiful. G – You can also read Julie's new book called Linguophile, which is indeed very beautifully written, and it is about that relationship that we have with language throughout our lives. L – For this and over 90 other bonus episodes, go to patreon.com slash lingthusiasm. G –

Welcome to the 101st episode of Lingthusia. G – It's Ling 101! L – Oh, my gosh. That is a classic first-year subject course code. G – I feel like there's this canonical introduction to linguistics course that almost every linguistics program has in some form.

It's a classic textbook format. It's a classic course style. It goes from this very micro level of language to this macro level of language, where you're starting with the very smallest units and zooming out into the whole area of discourse. Weirdly enough, I absolutely did this subject, but we didn't have course codes like

Ling 101, but I did do an introduction to linguistics that was exactly like this. L – Ours also was not called Ling 101. It was called Ling 100. G – Oh, no. That was last episode. We missed it. L – We missed it. Now we can't do it ever. Then I was at another university where it was called 201. I don't really want to wait for another 100 episodes for us to be able to do this. I think 101 is still sort of

classically in the culture, the idea of an interlinguistic course, even if there are many course codes that are different from that. Lengthusiasm is intentionally

not in this structure. It seems like it'd be a bit of a shame if we had to start like, "Okay, our first year is only phonetics, and then we're gonna do only phonology, and then when we get all the way to pragmatics, we better stop doing the podcast or something." We made a very conscious decision early on to mix it up a bit. Especially with the level of detail we're in. Imagine if we're like, "We're 100 episodes in. We're now moving from individual phones up to phonology."

We could have been here for quite a while. G – Yeah, I think it's more fun to mix it up. It also means that if we encounter a really good example or anecdote or paper, a new paper comes out that we wanna talk about about a particular topic, there's always more stuff that we can say about sounds. It's not like, oh, we did sounds for the first three years and then we never get to do sounds again. L – But episode 101 is a great time to actually take ourselves through

101 course style. All these different layers of linguistic structure. You can see how a finite number of building blocks have this capacity to combine in so many novel ways. L – I think of it as like those – have you ever seen those videos where they start really, really zoomed in on a quark or an electron or a nucleus and they zoom out to the atom and then to the cell and then to the –

plant and then to the backyard and then to the map view and the Earth view and the solar system and the galaxy. Then you feel like, wow, we're so far out! You can zoom back in and back out. It's very trippy and fun. We can do that with language. L – One of the great things about this is that those building blocks being able to combine in really versatile ways allows us to create sentences that have never been uttered before.

and collecting these is something of a linguist hobby. L – We have a few fun sentences that we can keep returning to and talk about them at all these different layers. Let's debut our candidate sentences here. G – 1. Today, I learned that there were small walrus ancestors, and I am extremely happy to report that the researcher writing about this did indeed refer to them as smallrus. L – 2. Moons can have moons, and they are called moonmoons. G –

Three, as the current record holder for the highest score in Donkey Kong, Hank Chen is legally fourth in line to be president of Taiwan. G – I'm gonna need to check some of the accuracy of these sentences. But a sentence does not have to be true to be a linguistic example sentence. And –

If you're thinking, oh, I'm really excited about linguistics from micro to macro, we also do organise Lingthusiasm episodes on our website by topics as well. You can group them together and listen to all of the sounds ones together or all of the words ones or grammatical ones together if you wanna approach Lingthusiasm episodes in that more structural way. It's just something that we keep returning to because even after 100 episodes, we still have lots of future topics that we haven't gotten to yet. L –

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

If you want a more formalised lecture-style introduction to linguistics, another option is that we collaborated a few years ago on a crash course linguistics. There's these 16 10-minute videos that also go through linguistics at various levels if you like a style where you can see some

illustrations of examples, some really fun animations that we did not make, but some very skilled animators at Crash Course did. That's another way of doing this more structural approach to things. L – Okay. Let's start with the smallest individual units. G – These are the individual sounds or signs that themselves have

an even smaller set of structural properties between them. If you think of something like the M in moon versus the N in moon, M versus N, these are two sounds that are found in English and a lot of languages around the world, and they

contrast in one particular way, and that's where the closure in your mouth happens. If you make a m sound and a n sound, you can see that your lips are closing for the M, and your tongue is at the front part of the roof of your mouth, right behind your teeth for an N. But they both have a full closure of your mouth and your air going through your nose, compared to something like

P and T, which have your mouth making the same closures, but this time the air is exiting through your mouth instead of through your nose. Spoken languages are manipulating mouths, lips, tongues, teeth. Signed languages are manipulating hands and other parts of the body to articulate differences between different

signs. Some of those major features are the shape that your hand is in, the orientation and location of your hand, and any movement that gets made. Just like /m/ and /n/, you can have two signs that only vary in one particular little variable of those set. Right. For example, in

ASL, American Sign Language, you have a pointing index finger towards the middle of your chest, which means "me," or "I," compared to "my," which is done with an open or flat hand. Oh, it's a closed fist when I learnt it in Auslan, but I did go check to add the sign bank entry for this episode. There is a version where you can have the open palm as well. Ah, okay. Those are two signs that are virtually identical

except for the handshape, which is the thing that's modified, compared to you, where you're pointing out towards someone else. That's a difference in orientation and location because it's the same hand but at a different spot. G – Auslan and American Sign Language are from completely different sign families. They just happen to have the same forms there, but you can get handshapes in some sign languages that aren't in others. I think maybe it was the Taiwanese Donkey Kong –

in-line president that made me think of this, but Taiwanese sign has an extended ring finger as a shape that can get used in Taiwanese signs, but that's not a handshape you can use in Auslan. G. I've never seen it in ASL either. You could do an extended index finger or extended pinky finger. Obviously, the extended middle finger in Western context has a certain additional semiotic value. L. Mm-hmm.

Indeed. Which is also sometimes used in sign languages, but sort of in this relatively restricted meaning. But the extended ring finger, I've never seen it. This is how and where the hands are positioned, how and where the mouth and the throat muscles and little flappy bits are positioned. It creates a finite set of ingredients that we can make into a much larger set of words. Yeah. You can list all of the individual sounds in a language. In fact, for spoken languages –

there's the International Phonetic Alphabet, which maps out the whole possibility space of what we think human languages can do with the meat pipe of the human vocal tract. And

That's why it hasn't changed much in the recent couple of decades because we have a generally good sense of all the different things you can do with that system. L – It really is constrained by human anatomy. Then different languages will pick different subsets of that larger list. G – To be honest, there's a lot of terminology in that set

but once you get past having an exam where you have to memorise IPA, if you have that for any undergraduate subject, every linguist I know has a photocopy of the IPA on their wall. L – Yeah, in their wall or in the front of their planner or something like that that you can just refer to it to check on the ones that you need to know. We also made IPA posters a few years back that people can get that have some fun colours on them. G – We did. L – But there are a few common symbols of the International Phonetic Alphabet that

everyone's pretty familiar with the schwa, which is – we did a whole episode about only the schwa sound, like the – in sofa or a lot of unreduced forms, like if you say the linguistics –

the there. You're not saying a full the. Tomorrow, today. Tomorrow, today. Compared to tomorrow and today. I like to think of them as things like schwa and the glottal stop are like the charismatic megafauna of phonetic symbols. The charismatic megaphones.

Yes, actually, even better. It really sounds like they're, you know, out there screaming on the streets for their demands to be respected for a four-day workweek. But, you know, they're very charismatic. There's a bunch of other sounds that if you don't know a language that uses them, might be like, ah, well, yeah, like, I can look them up if I need them, but I don't need to have them in active memory.

When it comes to phonetics, we can think about the way people move their mouths, or we can think about the way people hear the sounds that they're perceiving. Or you can use things like spectrograms, which we've done in a previous episode, to look at the sound wave itself as it's moving through the air between a mouth and someone's ear, hopefully, if you're speaking to someone. Just moving through the air. They're all different ways of coming at the same thing. With the International Phonetic Alphabet, there are all these

basic symbols, but then there are all these additional language accent marks that you can use to add additional information. It all looks very sparkly by the time you add quite a few of those. I like to think of the phonetic symbols as the periodic table of the elements. There's a finite number of elements that scientists have catalogued. But using those, you can make all of these different things that are different from each other – the

You and I are pretty much made out of the same elements. We're all both humans. We have carbon and oxygen and stuff in us. But we have differences. I'm not a chemist. I'm pretty sure those are around. But we're also –

different as people at this much more macro level, which we're gonna get to in a bit. But the building blocks are this very finite set of things. L – We need to start modifying those because, basically, as soon as you're looking at how people actually use sounds rather than thinking of them as these isolated little atoms, as soon as we combine them into little molecules of sound –

they really start influencing each other in how they're produced. L – Right. The area of linguistics that talks about the rules and the patterns that explain how these sounds fit together is called phonology, which is our next micro, slightly larger area that we're looking at because not just sounds, we now have sound interactions. G – A lot of these rules are quite interesting because there's this tension between

As a speaker, I want to be as efficient as possible, but I also want to maximise the chance that people will understand what I'm saying when I speak. Yeah, because it's easier to just keep my tongue in a very similar position and not move it as much. If I'm hyper-articulating, then it takes more effort because I'm using my muscles more than when I just speak flat like this because everything is very close in the same position of my mouth and not going very far at all.

It's that efficiency, but it's also the things in relationship to each other. If we think about something like that schwa popping up in a word like today, which is a word from one of our example sentences, that is really reduced because the to part of today is generally not stressed. Schwa in English likes to

slide on in there. It's right in the middle of your mouth. It's very easy to articulate. If it's not stressed, we're not stressing. We're just throwing a schwa in there. L – There's not some other word like tea day and tie day and ta day that we can get it confused with? G – Toe day is when I get a pedicure. L –

There's also words like can from our example sentences, which when I say it in isolation, I'm saying this very distinct can. But in the context of moons can have moons and they're called moon moons, I'm saying much more like can. Moons can have moons, not moons can have moons. L. That was very articulated there. Good job. G. Thank you. L. Sometimes, in order to make it easier for the mouth, it's not removal of

sound features. Sometimes we add things in without necessarily noticing. That's what we're doing in a word like highest. Struggling to not add a y between the high and then second syllable est. High-est. High-est. You have to almost add a pause to not do it. High-est. Mm-hmm. Which isn't written, but –

it needs to be there to make the transition between the two vowels smoother. Or similarly, with a word like president, as in president of Taiwan, you have S in the writing, preside, but president is almost invariably pronounced with that S as a Z sound because it's in between two vowels, and you just wanna keep using your vocal folds the whole time. It's a little bit more challenging to say precedent

versus president. L – That's a whole different word. G – It's also a whole different word, yeah. L – It's a really good point that with phonology, the way you say things and the way you mentally think about them, especially when you're being influenced by your writing system, where that S sound – we just think of it as an S until we actually slow down and pay attention to what our voices are actually doing. G –

Another one of my favourites is that all of the different forms of the T sound in English. When you take a word like writing, which in most types of speech, unless I'm being very, very hyper-articulated, I'm pronouncing as a Canadian, writing, not writing. Australian English has this as well. L – If you had a horse, you would be – G – I'd be riding it. L – Right. The

that you're using in writing and the one you're using in writing when you say it quickly are not quite the same. They sound a little bit different. L – Writing and writing, for me, the vowels are different, but the consonants are actually the same because they're both in between vowels. It's just that at some level in my brain, I'm aware that one's a T and one's a D. I've produced –

the vowels the same way that I would in write and ride, where I do have different consonants to influence what's happening to the vowels next to them. Write and ride, for me, have different vowels. Writing and riding have different vowels for me. This is a very characteristic feature of Canadian English. L – Very efficient. I like that. G – Different applications of phonological processes are also some of the big things that produce what we think of as accents. L –

When I'm saying, okay, you sound Australian to me, it's because you're not producing this thing with writing and writing, but you are producing writing and writing with the –d-ish sound, whereas if you were British, you might be more likely to say –right-ing, the different sound in the middle there. Sometimes two sounds will be treated the same in one language and very distinct in another language. Absolute classic 101 –

example is that what we think of as le and re are treated as the same sound in Japanese. So many facts that I know about so many languages are classic first-year examples that we're given. But then sometimes there are two sounds that might be the same in your language that you have to learn to articulate as different in another language, and you don't perceive them as different. That's

a challenge as a language learner. I often think about Nepali, Parsi, pumpkin, and Parsi, the day after tomorrow. Those really just both sounded like P to me. Yeah. You have them in the same part of your brain, and I have had to learn to distinguish them in the way I hear and produce them. L:

This can change in the course of the history of a language. English speakers 1,000-plus years ago treated F and V as simply versions of the same sound, like wolf and wolves, life and lives. You can – okay, well, it changes, but it's only because you've added the plural there. –

But then after the Norman Conquest, when a whole bunch of words from French were entering English, there were a lot of French words that had V at the beginning of the word, so something like vine, which English already had a word fine. Now F and V are in the same position. They're contrasting with each other. Fine and vine have very different meanings. English speakers collectively acquired a more important distinction between

F and V at a word level, whereas previously they'd been at this subconscious, oh, yeah, this changes, but just to make it produce more efficiently. L – It's cute we've fossilised wolf-wolf leaf leaves into our writing system in this way as a nice little record of that earlier sound process. G – Right. Something that started off as this regular type of efficiency has now become something that's perceived as an irregular plural. You

You also see this efficiency happening in sign languages. For example, there's an ASL sign for student, which comes from learn, which has the hand going up to the forehead where the thinking happens. Then the sign for person, which has the two hands side by side. We'll link to videos. You can't really talk about signs on a podcast. We'll link to some videos. The very formal version of this sign really makes it evident that the information is going up into your brain, and then you're a person who's doing that. But then

Those are very big and distinct movements. Once you start doing it a lot, when people are producing student quickly, the hand doesn't go all the way up to the forehead. The hand barely goes past the chin because you can produce this slight upwards movement, which is enough to convey the meaning to someone who's familiar with the concept, and you don't actually have to do this big movement up to the forehead for learn. The same thing for person. You have this very quick movement to person, and so this gets –

lexicalised into a compound that just means "student" and isn't obviously related anymore as much to "learn" plus "person," which is the original root that it has. We'll link to some video by Bill Vickers, who's a deaf teacher who posts a lot of videos online. L – I love that "person" is clearly two hands held in parallel and pulled down in the full version of the word "person," but then when it's put together with this

reduced form. It's just one hand straight down. But that's enough to give you the sense of the same meaning. That's how it's been turned into this combined form for the word student. L – This gets us into the next level, as we keep zooming out, of the

parts of words that fit together that each contribute various aspects of their meaning that can get sort of smushed together as time goes on or made more distinct if you're trying to be really, really clear with what you're saying. L – What is a word is –

a major and endless topic in linguistics. If you think about something like "donkey Kong" in one of our example sentences, it's technically two words if we're thinking about spaces, but really we treat it as one. It's referring to one video game character. Linguists have a real challenge of defining what is a word.

Instead of trying to deal with this meaning of word, which has many meanings in a casual use, linguists have defined several different potential meanings with different words. One of those concepts is the smallest meaningful bit that can make up a word. For example, with a word like moon, moon is already its own

smallest meaning unit. You can't split moon into moo and nn, and each of those contributes part of the meaning. L – I mean, they have meaning on their own, but they don't have meaning that relates to moon. You're just breaking it into unmeaningful sound parts at this point. G – Exactly. Moo is a word, but a moon –

does not have a meaning that's a subtype of "moo" despite the cow jumping over the moon. But whereas "moon" and "moons," you can break that up into two parts of the meaning. You have the "moon" part, and you have the "suh" part, plural. Indeed, "moons" is in relation to the meaning of "moon," which is it is multiple moons. There is some sub-word-level vibes-based

with sound meaning. We've talked before about how words for nose tend to have a nasal of some kind, like in English. But that's not the same as these elements that build up to make greater meaning from these compositional parts, like this in moons. L – Right.

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

Then it creates this grammatical information that means more than one. Right. There's lots of these. You can have highest. High is a morpheme that can stand by itself.

"est," the most high, and doesn't stand by itself, even though it's much more pronounceable than the /s/ in "moons," because we don't find it by itself in context. Because we don't find it by itself in English, it's considered bound to the root high or smallest, largest, etc. Learn and learned whether /d/ on the end or learnt that /t/ can't escape phonology when it comes to morphology, 'cause these sounds are smashing up against each other as these affixes smash up against each other.

you've got something there that's adding that this thing happened in the past. Exactly. It's adding part of the meaning, and it's the smallest pairing of form, whether that's sound or sign, and a part that you can identify a meaning for. Those

morphemes, those affixes, are adding grammatical information. I also like morphology where adding affixes changes the type of word that something is entirely. It's like putting on a completely different outfit. L – You can have something like extreme or legal and then make it into extremely or legally, which lets it occupy a different role in the sentence. G – Or I am researching linguistics. I am a linguistic researcher. One of those is

A verb and one is, and just by changing and adding that –er on the end, you've turned it into a person, a type of thing, a noun. Changing word class by adding an affix there. Then you have –

sort of quasi-morphemes, which is not a technical term for them, but something like report, which is in one of our example sentences, which you compare to import, export, transport. This is not – it's sort of its own morpheme in English. English speakers often have a vague sense that something port-like is carried, which is what the Latin root comes from. But it's not something that's sort of live and acquiring new

potential affixes, new potential morphemes added to it the way that something like moon is doing in English already. This is sort of this – you're having stuff that's a bit of a dubious morpheme status as well when you have words that are borrowed from

other languages very consistently with the same languages, sometimes we start learning bits from them. Also, thanks to the phrase "world record holder" in one of our example sentences, I get to talk about one of my favourite morphological processes in English, which is where the word changes the type of word that it is depending on where the stress in the world goes. I have a world record, or I recorded

the Lingthusiasm podcast with you right now. You recorded your skills at Donkey Kong. Yeah. Record and record, the difference between them is whether the stress is on the first syllable or the second syllable. There's a whole bunch of pairs in English like this where you have a stress-based change in the word to create the meaning rather than an additional affix. Again, morphology can never completely escape phonology.

And then you have the really fun stuff, which is...

novel coinages like moon moons and smolris. This is when we start beginning to see the edge of the infinite because there were this finite number of sounds. You can sort of make a list of the morphemes that exist in a language like English. Yeah. Except insofar as they start becoming independent words and there's a lot of independent words.

But then you get people doing linguistic creativity and making novel compounds like moon moons or making the rus ending in walrus, which wasn't originally a separate thing, into something that can correspond to, okay, you have a small walrus, it's a small rus. L – And if you had a really big walrus, then you'd have a big rus? G – A tall rus? L – Oh, no, that's much better. G –

Maybe it's not particularly productive yet. Yeah, I think it's really requiring the entire Olrus overlap. But we can add new morphemes to a language. I think we'd have to put a lot of work into creating Russ as a productive affix to denote

walrusnessness. But this does happen sometimes. You have marathon, which started off as an original word. It was a place name in Greece. But then now you have telethon and skatethon or walkethon or – Wikipedia editathon, which is one of the ways that we met. Yes. To refer to a particular type of group charitable activity –

and a thon was not originally a productive morpheme. But now, because it's been extended to other types of circumstances, you could create a new type of a thon, and people would know what you meant. L – I'd say, in this game of things, English has a

what would you say? Medium, small, medium quantity of affixes. I feel like it's got the right amount to teach an undergraduate morphology unit. L – Yeah. It certainly has enough to teach an undergraduate morphology unit. There are languages that have very few, if any, affixes and do it all with independent words instead, grammatical particles. There are languages that have way more affixes than English. G – Indeed. L –

One of those languages that comes up a lot in interlinguistic classes is Turkish. Or at least it came up a lot in my interlinguistic class because my instructor was herself Turkish. Whenever she needed an example of like, here's some morphemes, go do a problem set, if she didn't have another language already prepped, she'd be like, well, let's just do Turkish. Turkish is easy.

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

Yeah. Turkish is really more like a sort of Lego of language where you have these sort of distinct morphemes that don't bleed into each other, whereas some languages are more like sort of

plasticine or Play-Doh where you can have little bits of colours. Then when you start smooshing them together, your reds and your yellows and your blues start acquiring orange and purple tinges. But one of my Turkish linguistics professor's favourite Turkish example sentences was – I don't remember the words in Turkish, but it translated as, are you one of those who we could not Europeanise? L – What a lovely –

sentence in English slash word in Turkish. L – Right. This is a single word in Turkish. It's one of the famous examples. It's the anti-disestablishmentarianism of Turkish. But this is a real word that's been used in real context because you can imagine a news article type thing, and you can start with this root of Europe becomes European, becomes Europeanized. Then English switches from doing affixes to doing individual words, not Europeanized or

could not Europeanize, we could not Europeanize, where Turkish is still adding more and more suffixes. So that's –

this type of thing where different languages have different levels of tolerance for how much of this is gonna be in prefixes and suffixes, various kinds of affixes, and how much of this is gonna be in more freestanding words. L – And you can't really talk about morphology without talking about word order and syntax because one language's morphology, as we've just seen, is another language's syntax. G –

You can go through an example of expressing the same sort of meaning and various different types of strategies that a language uses for that. Let's take questions because questions are pretty straightforward. L – Sure. Let's do that classic intro to linguistics thing where we –

make English pretend to do all the different types of structures. L – If we put English with a whole bunch of hats on to pretend to be another language, which is an easier way to see the examples than trying to work in languages that people might not all know, one way of making questions, which English has and many other languages have, is you can change your intonation. You can use question intonation

This is way back up in phonology. "Moons can have moons?" Exactly. We can also do a more morphological strategy. We can add a little suffix onto something like the verb. Latin does this. There's a –nay suffix in Latin that attaches onto the verb that makes something into a question. Okay. "Moons can nay have moons." I don't know if that's pseudo-Latin or a negative in Scots English.

That's true. But in pseudo-Latin, moons can, nay, have moons. You can also have a related but slightly different question particle. This is a more freestanding word, sometimes at the beginning or the end of a sentence that makes a statement into a question again. The Chinese has this. In Mandarin, it's ma, which makes something into a question. Moons can have moons, ma. Right. So

There's a question particle. English also kind of has question particles. Moons can have moons, huh? Moons can have moons, yeah. If you're Canadian, moons can have moons, eh? Yes. Yes.

Finally, we can go to the most syntax-y and do it entirely with word order. English has this strategy. L – Can moons have moons? G – Exactly. We've moved can from near the middle of a sentence where it is in a statement to at the beginning to make it a question. L – Once we start building words into sentences, we really start to expand the possibilities of what we can create. G – Again, with the a small amount of things can create a huge amount of results –

There aren't that many syntactic rules and patterns in each given language. It's just that when we start combining those with all of the morphemes and the words that we have, that we create this explosion of possibilities. L – And we know that these rules –

exist for speakers because when we don't use them, people get really confused and it's not something you would expect a person speaking that language to say. To use English, a sentence like, they moon moons are called, does not fit

what we expect for English sentences. Yeah, maybe that's a Yoda sort of thing, but in English I would say they are called moon moons, but I wouldn't say they moon moons are called. If you have a language where the verb goes at the end of the sentence – if you translated this literally into Nepali, that would be a completely grammatical sentence in that language. But in English, English follows its own rules for grammatical structure. In a sentence like

Today, I learned that there are smaller walrus ancestors, and I'm extremely happy to report that the researcher writing about this did indeed refer to them as the smallrus. You also need syntax to do things like reported speech and embedding sentences into each other because this is actually quite a complex idea. The researcher said that they call them a smallrus. It's not the person who's actually saying the sentence that said this. It

having grammatical patterns that let us convey, okay, one person said this, and then they said that something else happened, or someone else said this. This lets us nest things inside other things. L – Yeah, the researcher could have said something that was itself an entire sentence inside that sentence. I still absolutely remember in my first year Ling 101 class having –

a full galaxy brain moment, realising what this meant for the explosion of possible sentences that can be made with a very small number of rules. L – You can also get ambiguity out of this. This sentence, as the current record holder for the highest score in Donkey Kong, Hank Chen is legally fourth in line to be president of Taiwan –

has an implication that it's his high scores in Donkey Kong that cause him to be fourth in line for the Taiwanese presidency. When it actually is that presumably some sort of coincidence that this person just happens to be particularly good at Donkey Kong and also have this particular political role in

Presumably, these facts are unrelated to each other, but the syntax actually does not tell us this. L – Of course, this is presuming that you mean current as in right now and not current as in the electrically charged individual who's holding the record. G – That's true. L – Which I know is a very deliberately poor reading of that example sentence. G – You do sometimes see actual –

meaning-level ambiguity like this. I remember my high school French teacher once told one of the other students that, you know, I can tell that you weren't really paying attention to this homework because you've translated get out of bed using the verb obtenir. L – Mm-hmm. As in –

in French, "obtenir," I'm gonna guess, is like "obtain" type of getch, rather than just a grammatical form that means "be in the process of." Because if you get some apples and you obtain some apples, those are roughly the same thing. But if you get out of bed and you obtain "out of bed" – Doesn't work. They are two different words.

Get, in that context, is being used idiomatically, and it's being used to make something a little bit verbier. It's not being used in its obtain meaning, maybe obtain out-of-bedness status. But words can mean different things in different contexts, and that's another even further zooming out level of meaning. L.

There are so many different tools when it comes to pinning down what we mean by meaning and how we describe meaning, and even keeping a list of words. Dictionaries are trying, and they're always chasing behind. You can keep a list of most of the words with some degree of explaining their meaning, but speakers of all languages are always innovating new words. It's a lot easier to add words than it is to add

morphemes or syntactic rules or sounds to a language. L – Even within a sentence where you're using relatively well-established words, you can have different potential meanings depending on how you interpret those meanings in relation to each other. Classic 101 example sentence, everyone loves someone. What meaning do you get from this? G – Everyone loves – hang on. There is someone –

and every single person loves that one person. G – This most popular person in the world! Everyone loves someone. L – No, hang on. If you say it with that intonation, then it sounds like every person has one other individual person that they love. There are two different meanings. G – Ah.

So that's the everyone loves someone. Yeah. Versus everyone loves someone. Yeah. So you could get everyone has their own potentially different person who they love, or there's one incredibly lucky person who everybody loves and, you know, through the rest of you. I feel like –

You can basically keep students at a low level of convivial disagreement about semantics for an entire semester if you want to. L – Yeah, semantics and study of meaning is really that type of area where you can have so many different arguments. G – Yeah. L – It's a classic linguistic study where you get people to argue about the boundaries between a cup and a bowl, or what's a sandwich, perennial internet argument source. G – How many is several? L – How many is a few? How many is several? G – Mm-hmm. L –

We can zoom out even further, though. Okay. And I want to go back to our – the current records holder for the highest score in Donkey Kong. Okay. Because –

This – sentences – I actually collected this sentence six years ago, and I've now looked it up. Hank Chen no longer holds this record. It's someone named Robbie Lakeman. Congratulations, Robbie Lakeman. No word on what this means. I've looked up who's the fourth in line for the presidency of Taiwan, and it's not him. Is it Robbie Lakeman? No. Oh, okay. Okay.

But also, I don't know if it was ever Hank Chen, because he does have a Wikipedia page, and he's lived in the US for most of his life. So I just feel like he's probably not a highly involved figure in the Taiwanese political system.

I think this is one of those times where we can say a sentence can be grammatical without necessarily being true. They are two different properties that a sentence can have. L – Right. We can create implications by juxtaposing particular sentences. There may have been – all I can think is maybe there was another person named Tang Qian who was involved in the Taiwanese presidency. Maybe someone just made it up for a fun stat. But the

implications that you can get from juxtaposing two particular things or from saying that something – implying that something is true now, that zooms us out to this larger area of pragmatics and discourse. A classic example like saying, brr, it's cold in here, to hint to someone that maybe they should turn the heat up, maybe they should close the window, maybe they should turn the air conditioning down. Or, would you like some coffee? Coffee would keep me awake. L.

which could mean that you do want coffee or it could mean that you don't want coffee depending on what time of day it is because you have this implication that

from the context of why someone's saying something in a particular environment. L – With pragmatics, it all comes down to context. Context is inevitably where we're using language. We have to think about it in the wider context. Again, pragmatics is something that is interacting with all of our language use. G – This is another area where the meanings start expanding so much bigger. We can go even further to a level of discourse. It turns out that other people have also talked about the small risks. L –

Amazing. Ursula Vernon, who's a science fiction fantasy writer, wrote a short vignette story about a smallwrist in 2004, which is talking about, the smallwrist is the tiniest of the seal family, not much larger than the garden slug. Adorable. Any gardener is generally delighted to see the smallwrist appear, as the occasional nibble of a leaf is more than made up for by their ability to keep down the number of mosquito larvae and other small aquatic nuisances. It comes with a charming illustration, which we will definitely link to

It is completely different from the real smallwrist in the historical record, which is actually around the size of a sea lion and not the size of a slug, which is actually about half the size of a living walrus but gives us this very charming nickname, smallwrist. Fabulous. I like you've done a smallwrist corpus study there. Shout out to corpus linguistics. It's so wonderful that

so much writing online and so many digital corpora now allow us to make those links between things that used to be very hard to make. L – Right. We can look at newspapers. We can look at people's blogs and posts on social media from 2004 and draw connections between how people were talking about particular words or particular concepts at this much larger level.

That brings us to what is usually the end of a little structural tour across an Intro to Linguistics Ling 101 subject that takes us through phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics.

Just a special shout-out to what I always think of as Week 12, which is just that last lecture or that last seminar where, if there's time, professors love to touch on something that cuts across all of these topics. Maybe it's something they're passionate about, like historical linguistics or child language acquisition. Yeah, and

areas like historical linguistics, child language acquisition, sociolinguistics, linguistic fieldwork, they use all of these different levels, the macro levels and the micro levels. Children have to acquire all the different levels of language. Languages existed in history at all of the different levels of language. Languages exist in society at all of the different levels of

language. Language exists in the brain at all the levels. There's a distinction between the fields that look at one particular level and the fields that cut across and look at how all of those things relate to some particular aspect, whether that's acquiring them or processing them or existing in a particular place or time. Even though we've not been following this micro-to-macro structural order in

in the last hundred episodes of Lingthusiasm, we have intentionally been covering topics from across these levels and topics that cut across them in so many different ways. That has been intentional because these are all important parts of what goes into making the structure of language and how it gets used. Yeah. Much of the way that we can learn a lot about the world around us by looking at particular areas of it or by seeing connections between areas –

Zooming in macro to micro is this really interesting intellectual exercise or this sort of lens for seeing things, but it's also not the only way of seeing things. In many cases, picking a less dramatic shift can let us focus on the particular areas and the particular connections that we think are interesting in any given topic.

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