Oh, wow, oh, oh, whoa, oh, wow.

Oh, wow.

Oh, yeah. You're listening to The Science of Everything podcast episode 67, an overview of language

part two, and I'm your host, James Fodor.

So in the last episode, we looked at language, and I gave an overview of the different

subfields of linguistics, and I talked about the first few of those, so phonetics, phonology,

and morphology.

In this episode, I'm going to continue that discussion and look at some of the other areas that we didn't get to, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, and sociolinguistics.

So, let's jump right in.

So let's move on from syntax to semantics, which is my personal favorite subfield of linguistics.

And I'm not sure if linguists would agree with this, but I would tend to say that it's the one we know the least about.

It's the one that know the least about. It's the one that's sort of least well developed. This is how you actually get meaning out of all of

those phonemes and morphemes and all the syntax and put all that together, but how does the meaning

actually come out of it? What is it that distinguishes colorless green ideas sleep furiously from

that? What does it distinguish as that sentence from I had a good sleep last night. Both of them are grammatical, and both of them use, you know, the same collection

of morphines and phonies and things like that. They're both in the same language, but one makes

sense and the other one doesn't make sense. One has meaning, the other one doesn't have meaning.

What is it that it sort of distinguishes those two? What's going on there? How is it that we get meaning out of abstract arbitrary units of sound or

squiggles on a paper at all? I mean, when I say tree, that's just an arbitrary collection of sounds.

What does it have to do with this thing that has bark and leaves and grows? How do you get the

idea of tree in your mind when I say this string of symbols, or when I write down this string of symbols

in case of written language, or when I say this string of sounds in the case of spoken

...