41: This time it gets tense - The grammar of time

Lingthusiasm - A podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics

Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne

Science

4.8 • 743 Ratings

🗓️ 20 February 2020

⏱️ 35 minutes

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Summary

How do languages talk about the time when something happens? Of course, we can use words like “yesterday”, “on Tuesday”, “once upon a time”, “now”, or “in a few minutes”. But some languages also require their speakers to use an additional small piece of language to convey time-related information, and this is called tense. In this episode of Lingthusiasm, your hosts Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne talk about when some languages obligatorily encode time into their grammar. We look at how linguists go about determining whether a language has tense at all, and if so, how many tenses it has, from two tenses (like English past and non-past), to three tenses (past, present, and future), to further tenses, like remote past and on-the-same-day. --- This month’s bonus episode is about what happens when the robots take over Lingthusiasm! In this extension of our interview with Janelle Shane from Episode 40, we train a neural net to generate new Lingthusiasm episodes and perform some of the most absurd ones for you. Support Lingthusiasm on Patreon to gain access to the Robot-Lingthusiasm episode and 35 previous bonus episodes, and to chat with fellow lingthusiasts in the Lingthusiasm patron Discord patreon.com/lingthusiasm Lingthusiasm merch makes a great gift for yourself or other lingthusiasts! Check out IPA scarves, IPA socks, and more at lingthusiasm.redbubble.com For the links mentioned in this episode, check out the shownotes page at https://lingthusiasm.com/post/190937079286/lingthusiasm-episode-41-this-time-it-gets-tense

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Leithisianthus, a podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics.
0:20.0	I'm Gretchen McCulloch.
0:21.5	And I'm Lauren Gorn.
0:22.5	And today we're getting enthusiastic about tense and how different languages talk about time.
0:27.5	But first, we are very excited to announce the launch of the Lingthusiasm Lingcom grant.
0:34.6	Yes, when we started this podcast, we were fortunate to be in a position where we could
0:39.5	put some of our own money into the project to get us off the ground until our lovely patrons
0:43.5	started coming in. Now we're in a position where we want to pay it forward and we want to help
0:48.4	the next generation of awesome pop linguistics projects find their feet. We're giving out a 500 US dollar grant to a project
0:59.1	that helps communicate linguistics to a new audience. And with your help, if we reach 800 patrons
1:06.2	by May 1st, we can give out three of these grants. So we're really looking forward to seeing the
1:11.9	applications come in. Applications are due June 1st, and you can see more details about the
1:17.5	Lingom grant and how to apply on our website. We'll link to it from the show notes, and it's
1:22.0	linkcom.org to m's in com. We know that some of you may be really passionate about the idea of there being more
1:29.5	linguistics communication projects out in the world but don't have the time or the expertise.
1:36.2	And so if you really want to help support us in the Lingcom grants, we've created a new tier
1:43.0	at the Patreon called Phelingsthropist.
1:46.0	And for every person who supports us at $50 or more at that level, we'll drop the number of patrons that we need to meet the three grant goal down by 10.
1:55.6	So you will be as effective as 10 other patrons.
1:59.2	Don't feel like you need to do this, but if you're somebody who has a real job and this isn't
2:05.6	a lot of money to you, then this is an interesting thing to do with it.
2:09.7	And we'll also send you a Lingthusiest mug after three months of this tier, so you can
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