47: The happy fun big adjective episode

Lingthusiasm - A podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics

Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne

Science

4.8 • 743 Ratings

🗓️ 20 August 2020

⏱️ 38 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Adjectives: they’re big, they’re fun, they’re...maybe non-existent? In English, we have a fairly straightforward category of adjectives: they’re words that can get described with a comparative or a superlative, such as “bigger” or “most fun”. But when we start looking across lots of languages, we find that some languages lump adjectives in with verbs, some with nouns, and some do different things altogether. In this episode, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch get enthusiastic about adjectives! We talk about how linguists come up with diagnostic tests to determine whether something is an adjective, other quirks about adjectives (such as why we say “big red ball” but not “red big ball”), and the galaxy-brain question of whether grammatical categories like adjectives are even valid across all languages. -- This month’s bonus episode is about doing LingComm on a budget - plus the Lingthusiasm origin story! We got started doing linguistics communication when we were both broke grad students. We talk about the various stages we went through with launching our blogs, Superlinguo and All Things Linguistic, and of course this podcast a few years later! We give tips on how to come up with a topic, set a schedule, and promote your project, as well as the nitty-gritty details on free or low-cost ways to do things like registering a website and starting a blog, podcast, or youtube channel. Support Lingthusiasm on Patreon to get access to this and 40 other bonus episodes, and to chat with fellow lingthusiasts in the Lingthusiasm patron Discord https://www.patreon.com/lingthusiasm Announcements: By popular demand, our IPA, Tree and Esoteric Symbol designs are now available on these new non-medical reusable fabric masks from Redbubble. On our store you’ll find the white IPA characters on black, red or navy, and the esoteric symbols in white on black or green on black. If you fancy another colour, or the tree design, we’ve made masks available on all of the scarf pages. Also check out our Schwa (Never Stressed) pins, IPA scarves, IPA socks, and more at RedBubble https://www.redbubble.com/people/lingthusiasm/shop?asc=u For links to everything mentioned in this episode go to: https://lingthusiasm.com/post/627014557132603392/change-audio-link-lingthusiasm-episode-47-the

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Lincathism, a podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics. I'm Gretchen McCulloch.
0:21.8	And I'm Lauren Gorn, and today we're getting enthusiastic about adjectives. But first,
0:27.9	we now have masks to match your scarves, mugs, and notebooks in Lingthusiasm, IPA, syntax,
0:34.6	and esoteric symbol designs. So if you want a bit more Lingthusiasm as you go about your everyday life, that is a thing
0:40.8	you can do. They're available in many colors, and you can go to linkthusiasm.com slash merch.
0:45.6	I'm interested to see whether people prefer to color coordinate their face masks with their scars,
0:50.4	or if contrasting colors is the way to go.
0:53.2	Stay tuned. We will report back on the Lengtheism Fashion Statement.
0:58.7	Also, this month's Patreon bonus episode is about doing linguistics communication on a shoe string.
1:04.6	Bonus 42, which means there are 41 additional bonus episodes if you've run out of Lengthysm
1:09.4	to listen to. There's way more where that came from at patreon.com slash Linguism. And it's got a bit of bonus Lincthusiasm origin
1:16.1	story because, spoiler, we started our Lincom project on a shoestring as well.
1:20.7	Absolutely. The Lincom on a Shoestring episode came together because we've been talking to
1:26.5	our wonderful linguistics communication
1:29.8	project, Lingom grantees, and we realized that it's the kind of information that's useful,
1:35.7	whatever project you're starting, or if you want to know how we got started doing linguistics
1:40.1	communication. It can probably be cross-applied for communicating about other types of topics
1:44.7	as well, but hey, we're linguists, so we'll call it Lingcom. Talk about what we know.
2:01.3	I'm going game for you.
2:02.6	I love games.
2:07.0	I'm going to give you a word and then you say whatever word you think of quickly after that.
2:07.8	Okay.
	...

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