81: The verbs had been being helped by auxiliaries

Lingthusiasm - A podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics

Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne

Science

4.8 • 743 Ratings

🗓️ 16 June 2023

⏱️ 38 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

In the sentence “the horse has eaten an apple”, what is the word “has” doing? It’s not expressing ownership of something, like in “the horse has an apple”. (After all, the horse could have very sneakily eaten the apple.) Rather, it’s helping out the main verb, eat. Many languages use some of their verbs to help other verbs express grammatical information, and the technical name for these helping verbs is auxiliary verbs. In this episode, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch get enthusiastic about auxiliaries! We talk about what we can learn about auxiliaries across 2000+ languages using a new linguistic mapping website called GramBank, why auxiliaries get pronounced subtly differently from the words they’re derived from, and how “be” and “have” are the major players of the auxiliary world (but there are other options too, like “do”, “let”, and “go”). We also put a whole bunch of farm animals in our example sentences this episode just so we have an excuse to make a very good wordplay at the end of the episode. Read the transcript here: https://lingthusiasm.com/post/720244703378964480/transcript-episode-81-the-verbs-had-been-being Announcements: Are there linguistics things you want advice about? Both serious or somewhat silly? We’re going to doing a linguistics advice bonus episode for our 7th anniversary in November 2023, where we’ll answer your linguistics questions! Go here (https://forms.gle/s6MeeVAGWD3oaDoM6) to ask us your questions by September 1st 2023, and join us on Patreon to hear the answers! In this month’s bonus episode we get enthusiastic about the jobs that people go on to do after a linguistics degree! We talk about Lauren's new academic article in a fancy linguistics journal about a blog post series she's been running for 8 years, interviewing 80 people who studied linguistics, from a minor to a doctorate level, and their experience and advice for non-academic jobs. Join us on Patreon now to get access to this and 70+ other bonus episodes, including our upcoming linguistics advice episode where we answer your questions! You’ll also get access to the Lingthusiasm Discord server where you can chat with other language nerds. www.patreon.com/lingthusiasm For links to things mentioned in this episode: https://lingthusiasm.com/post/720244621612138496/lingthusiasm-81-the-verbs-had-been-being-helped

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Welcome to Linkthusiasm, a podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics. I'm Lauren
0:23.3	Gorn. And I'm Gretchen McCulloch. And today, we're getting enthusiastic about auxiliary verbs.
0:28.8	But first, we're doing a fun experiment. Are there linguistics things in your life that you would
0:34.6	like advice about? Whether that's serious advice or somewhat silly advice,
0:39.1	we're going to do a special linguistics advice bonus episode for our seventh anniversary coming up
0:44.6	in November 2023 with questions from patrons. Ask us your question by following the link in the
0:50.1	show notes by September 1st, 2023. And we'll have the episode as our bonus in November
0:55.6	2023. Our most recent bonus episode was a discussion about linguistics and jobs,
1:00.4	including a behind-the-scenes on a new academic paper that brings together seven years
1:04.1	of interviews with people who have done linguistics and gone on to interesting careers.
1:08.7	You can go to patreon.com slash enthusiasm to get access to these and upcoming bonus episodes.
1:15.8	And also because our patrons are what lets us make the show.
1:19.9	And we don't run advertising.
1:21.6	If you like that linkthusiasm continues to exist, we always appreciate patronage at any level.
1:26.4	Music continues to exist, we always appreciate patronage at any level.
1:41.4	Today, Gretchen, we're going on an excursion to a farm.
1:43.3	Ooh, what are we going to see at the farm?
1:47.1	We're going to see all kinds of animals that we're going to use as our example sentences.
1:51.3	The first is this horse, and the horse is eating grass.
1:53.0	Ah, look at the horse.
1:55.2	The horse has eaten an apple.
1:57.0	Oh, what a nice treat.
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.