Lingthusiasm Episode 101: Micro to macro - The levels of language
When we first learn about nature, we generally start with the solid mid-sized animals: cats, dogs, elephants, tigers, horses, birds, turtles, and so on. Only later on do we zoom in and out from these charismatic megafauna to the tinier levels, like cells and bacteria, or the larger levels, like ecosystems and the water cycle. With language, words are the easily graspable charismatic megafauna (charismatic megaverba?), from which there are both micro levels (like sounds, handshapes, and morphemes) and macro levels (like sentences, conversations, and narratives).
In this episode, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch take advantage of the aptly numbered 101th episode to get enthusiastic about linguistics from the micro to macro perspective often found in Linguistics 101 classes. We start with sounds and handshapes, moving onto accents and sound changes, fitting affixes into words, words into sentences, and sentences into discourse. We also talk about areas of linguistics that involve language at all these levels at once, including historical linguistics, child language acquisition, linguistic fieldwork, sociolinguistics, and psycholinguistics. Plus: why we don’t follow this order for Lingthusiasm episodes or Crash Course Linguistics and how you can give yourself a DIY intro linguistics course.
To celebrate Lingthusiasm now having more than 100 episodes, we have compiled a list of 101 places where you can get even more linguistics enthusiasm! This is your one-stop-shop if you want suggestions for other podcasts, books, videos, blogs, and other places online and offline to feed your interest in linguistics. Even with a hundred and one options, we’re sure there’s still a few that we’ve missed, so also feel free to tag us @ lingthusiasm on social media about your favourites!
In this month’s bonus episode we get enthusiastic about what psycholinguistics can tell us about creative writing, with Julie Sedivy, psycholinguist and the author of Memory Speaks and Linguaphile! We talk about moving from the style of scientific writing to literary writing by writing a lot of unpublished poetry to develop her aesthetic sense, how studying linguistics for a writer is like studying anatomy for a sculptor or colour theory for a painter, and how you could set up an eyetracking study to help writers figure out which sentences make their readers slow down.
Join us on Patreon now to get access to this and 90+ other bonus episodes. You’ll also get access to the Lingthusiasm Discord server where you can chat with other language nerds.
Lingthusiasm is created by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our senior producer is Claire Gawne, our production editor is Sarah Dopierala, our production assistant is Martha Tsutsui Billins, our editorial assistant is Jon Kruk, and our technical editor is Leah Velleman. Our music is ‘Ancient City’ by The Triangles.
This episode of Lingthusiasm is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license (CC 4.0 BY-NC-SA).
A useful list of linguistics games from Nathan Saunders, including IPA Bingo, IPA memory match games, and other linguistics games based on the gameplay of classic games like Uno and Battleship. Especially suited for playing with intro-level students in online intro linguistics or intro phonetics classes, but some might be playable with friends as well.
If you want to know what a word means, all you have to do is look it up in the dictionary, right? Actually, it’s a little more complicated than that. This episode of Crash Course Linguistics is all about semantics, or the area of linguistics concerned with meaning. We’ll learn about different types of semantic relationships, and how different languages define these relationships, as well as different approaches to semantics. And we’ll discover that the humble definition may be more complicated than we think.
There are many theories of syntax and different ways to represent grammatical structures, but one of the simplest is tree structure diagrams! In this episode of Crash Course Linguistics, we’ll use tree structure diagrams to keep track of words and groups of words within sentences, and we’ll break down what roles different types of words and phrases play within a sentence.
Grammar sometimes gets a bad reputation, but we’re actually doing grammar all the time! And we’re pretty good at it! In this episode of @thecrashcourse Crash Course Linguistics, we’ll begin our discussion of syntax by learning how we can take words and morphemes and turn them into sentences, questions, stories, and even videos like this!
What even is a word? Well… linguists don’t really know! But that’s ok! When linguists want to get super specific, we don’t even talk about words, we talk about morphemes instead. In this episode of Crash Course Linguistics, we’re diving into the topic of morphology and what makes up these things we call words.
The first full-length video for the Crash Course Linguistics series I’ve been co-writing for is now up! More to follow every Friday for the rest of 2020. Description:
Language is everywhere. Linguistics is the study of language, but what does that even mean? In this episode of Crash Course Linguistics, we’ll begin talking about some of the features and levels of structure of language, and introduce some of the other topics we’ll be covering throughout this series.
Want even more linguistics? Check out the Lingthusiasm podcast, hosted by the writers of Crash Course Linguistics.
I’m excited to announce that the teaser trailer for Crash Course Linguistics is now up, and the following 16 full-length videos will be coming out around this time on Fridays for the next few months!
Welcome to Crash Course Linguistics! Linguistics is everywhere and is super useful for pretty much everyone. Over 16 episodes, Taylor Behnke will teach you all about language, from its structure, to the relationship between language and our identity, the brain, and computers, to writing, language acquisition, and the diversity of human languages!
If you’ve been meaning to learn introductory linguistics concepts in a more systematic manner, or you want an easy way to share your interest in linguistics with other people, Crash Course Linguistics is a great way to do that!
It’s been really fun working on the scripts for Crash Course Linguistics since the beginning of 2020 with Lauren Gawne and Jessi Grieser (Lingthusiasm x Crash Course crossover), as well as seeing them come to life through our host Taylor Behnke and the teams at Crash Course and Thought Cafe.
If you want to get an email when each of the Crash Course Linguistics videos comes out, along with exercises to practice the concepts and links for further reading, you can sign up for Mutual Intelligibility email newsletters.
I am really happy to see that this textbook dives straight into the range of careers for linguists. I am, of course, also happy that these interviews are reaching new audiences.
