97: OooOooh~~ our possession episode oOooOOoohh 👻

Lingthusiasm - A podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics

Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne

Science

4.8 • 743 Ratings

🗓️ 17 October 2024

⏱️ 45 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Eye of newt and toe of frog, Wool of bat and tongue of dog... In this episode, your hosts Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne get enthusiastic and ~spooky~ about possession! We talk about how the haunting type of possession and the linguistic type of possession do share an etymological origin, but how the term "possession" itself is misleading, because possessive constructions are used to express all sorts of relationships between nouns, including part-whole (eye of newt), material (a cauldron of silver), interpersonal (the wizard's apprentice), and general association (the school of magic). We also talk about the three big ways possession is expressed in English (of, 's, and have) and how languages can require some concepts to be possessed (like kinship terms and body parts) or consider others too significant or too trivial for possession (like the moon or a pen). Click here for a link to this episode in your podcast player of choice: episodes.fm/1186056137/episode/dGFnOnNvdW5kY2xvdWQsMjAxMDp0cmFja3MvMTkzNjk2NzMzOQ Read the transcript here: lingthusiasm.com/post/764631688689172480/transcript-episode-97-ooooooh-our-possession Announcements: The 2024 Lingthusiasm Listener Survey is here! bit.ly/lingthusiasmsurvey24 It's a mix of questions about who you are as our listener, as well as some fun linguistics experiments for you to participate in. If you have taken the survey in previous years, there are new questions, so you can participate again this year. There's also a spot for asking us your linguistics advice questions, since our first linguistics advice bonus episode was so popular! You can listen that one here: patreon.com/posts/92128507 In this month’s bonus episode we get enthusiastic about how linguists might go about communicating with aliens! Drawing on highlights of the academic book "Xenolinguistics: Towards a Science of Extraterrestrial Language", we talk about how we'd actually go about trying to communicate with aliens. Join us on Patreon now to get access to this and 90+ other bonus episodes, including the episodes where we discuss the results of our past two surveys: patreon.com/lingthusiasm For links to things mentioned in this episode: lingthusiasm.com/post/764631220667695104/ooooooh-our-possession-episode-oooooooohh

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to L'Enthusiasm, a podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics.
0:23.3	I'm Lauren Gorn.
0:24.4	And I'm Gretchen McEllick.
0:26.0	And today we're getting enthusiastic about possession, using things like have and of and
0:31.0	apostrophe S and how different languages do possession differently.
0:34.7	But first, next month is our eighth anniversary. We've been making
0:38.9	enthusiasm for eight years with you, and we're still excited to keep making it.
0:43.3	As part of the anniversary celebrations, we're running the final listener survey in our
0:48.0	trilogy of surveys. We have a new set of linguistics experiments for you to do, and we
0:53.2	use these surveys to shape topics and ideas for the show.
0:56.1	As one example, we had really good response to our linguistics advice bonus episode that we did last year.
1:03.0	So you can also use this year's survey to ask us your pressing linguistics advice questions for a potential future advice episode.
1:12.7	You can suggest linguistically interesting books for us to read and maybe comment on, and we have further refinements on the Buba Kiki
1:17.8	experiment, and more. You can hear about the results of the last two years of surveys in bonus episodes
1:23.3	that we'll link to in the show notes, and we'll be sharing the results of the new experiments next
1:27.4	year.
1:28.2	We have had Ethics Board approval from La Trobe University, which is Lawrence University,
1:32.5	for this survey, so we can use the results in linguistics research papers as well, but the
1:37.0	Ethics Board is only for three years, so this is your last chance to be a part of the Linkthusiasm
1:41.7	listener survey. If you did the survey in a previous year,
1:45.4	first of all, thank you. And secondly, yes, you are still allowed to take it again if you want,
1:49.9	and there are new questions. To do the survey or to read more details about it, go to bit.ly
	...

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