22: This, that and the other thing - Determiners

Lingthusiasm - A podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics

Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne

Science

4.8 • 791 Ratings

🗓️ 19 July 2018

⏱️ 36 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

When linguists think about complicated words, we don’t think about rare, two-dollar words like “defenestration”. Instead, we think about the kinds of words that you use all the time without even thinking about it, like “the”. You might not already know that defenestration refers to throwing something out of a window, but once you find out, it’s easy to explain. But what does “the” mean? And, for that matter, what kind of a word even is “the”? If you think back to when you learned about nouns and verbs, you might have been told that “the” was an article. But this brings us to a circular question, which is, what exactly is an article, other than “that thing that ‘the’ is”? In this episode of Lingthusiasm, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch get enthusiastic about a bigger-picture answer to the question of how “the” works, one that joins together a bunch of words that might not seem related at first glance, including the, that, each, my, and five. Welcome to one of our favourite word classes: the determiner! Determiners are probably the most underrated word class. We use them all the time, and linguists have been talking about them by this name as a unified category for nearly a full century, and yet they’re still rarely discussed outside linguistics. That’s a shame, because determiners are also a really interesting way that languages differ from each other. To see this episode's shownotes, go to https://lingthusiasm.com/post/176067102571/lingthusiasm-episode-22-this-that-and-the-other

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Lingthasm, a podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics.
0:21.9	I'm Gretchen McCulloch.
0:26.4	And I'm Lauren Gorn, and today we're talking about this, that, and the other thing.
0:28.7	The other thing, of course, being determiners.
0:33.5	But first, we met our recent Patreon goal to do a live show.
0:35.6	Yay, live show. I'm excited.
0:38.6	We will have more news for you about where and when that live show is going to be, but stay tuned. Thanks to everyone who helped us meet this goal, all of our
0:43.9	fabulous patrons who make these main episodes happen ad-free and available for everyone, and who, of
0:49.9	course, as a thank you from us, get a bonus episode every month as well. And if you're
0:55.0	patron, you'll also have seen the advance announcement that, since we've also met our art
0:59.9	goal, a while back. Yay, art goal. We now have preview art up on Patreon, which you can see
1:06.5	a sample sketch, and we're announcing here that the theme for this art is space babies.
1:13.4	Space babies! We are so excited. Space babies have been with us since episode one, where we talked
1:19.7	about what would happen on the International Space Station, given that they speak both Russian
1:24.1	and English as their daily languages, if we sent a whole bunch of babies to
1:28.2	space to grow up. Yes, if all the astronauts and cosmonaut started having babies together,
1:33.5	what would happen to the babies? So we have an international array of cute babies floating
1:38.1	into space. Very unethically, we are not sending any actual babies to space, but they're
1:42.1	very cute in their cartoons versions.
1:49.0	We just couldn't get the ethics. To be honest, we didn't try to get the ethics. We knew we couldn't do that. We've talked about space babies in a couple of other episodes, and of course,
1:53.0	we always love to chat about just how great language learners babies are. So we're very happy to
1:58.6	have some cute little mascots for the show, and we'll be
	...

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