09: The bridge between words and sentences - Constituency

Lingthusiasm - A podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics

Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne

Science

4.8 • 791 Ratings

🗓️ 15 June 2017

⏱️ 39 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

How do we get from knowing words to making brand-new sentences out of them? In episode 9 of Lingthusiasm, your hosts Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne talk about how words form groups with other words: constituency. Once you start looking for it, constituency is everywhere: in ambiguous sentences like “time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana”, in remixed films like “Of Oz The Wizard”, and even internet dog memes. This month’s Patreon bonus was the backstory about the linguistics of the doggo meme and its connection to Australian slang, which grew out of this NPR article about doggo. You can get access to it and previous bonuses about swearing, teaching yourself linguistics, and explaining linguistics to employers by supporting Lingthusiasm on Patreon. For more information, and links to things mentioned in this episode, visit the show page: http://lingthusiasm.com/post/161859273886/lingthusiasm-episode-9-the-bridge-between-words

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Lingthusiasm, a podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics. I'm Lauren
0:15.3	Gorn. And I'm Gretchen McCulloch. And today we're talking about how small pieces of language
0:20.1	combine into larger pieces,
0:22.1	a.k.a. constituency. But first, Lauren, what have you been up to lately? I have been moving
0:27.7	jobs, which also involves moving countries. So it's been a pretty busy month. Which literally
0:32.7	involves moving around the world. Yes. So I have been migrating slowly westward for the last few years,
0:39.5	working in Singapore and more recently in London. And after two fabulous years of living in London,
0:45.4	we are now on the move back to Melbourne, Australia, and I will be a David Myers Research Fellow
0:51.7	at La Trobe University for the next three years, which I'm really
0:55.3	excited about. It's an opportunity to bring together all of the different languages of Nepal
1:01.2	and the kind of Tibetan work that I've been doing across phonetics and across grammar and
1:07.5	across gesture, all into one big project. That's really cool. I'm really excited about
1:12.9	that. I'm really excited to be back in Melbourne and lots of, lots of exciting research planned.
1:19.2	What about you? What are you been up to? I've been doing a lot of writing on the book. What else is new?
1:23.8	Yeah. And I'm headed to the LSA Summer Institute, aka Lingstitute, where I'm
1:29.1	going to be teaching a class on linguistics outreach, so that's exciting. Awesome. And I was
1:33.7	recently in less momentous, but still very important news. I was recently in an NPR article about
1:39.6	the linguistics of Doggo. I just love, I love when internet language memes make it into the new cycle,
1:46.6	and a whole new audience who've never experienced the meme, kind of get it translated for them.
1:52.1	Yeah, and they're like, wow, this is so cool, but also, what is this? So if you haven't
1:56.8	encountered the Doggo meme, it's based around a couple of Facebook group and a Twitter account
2:01.4	and just a general zeitgeist about a slightly different, cute way of talking to your dogs and about
	...

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