Lingthusiasm Episode 81: The verbs had been being helped by auxiliaries
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.
Click here for a link to this episode in your podcast player of choice or read the transcript here.
Announcements:
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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.
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Here are the links mentioned in the episode:
Etymonline entry for ‘auxiliary’
Gretchen’s twitter thread on auxiliaries
Grambank
Grambank Wiki
Martin Haspelmath’s tweet on the history of WALS
‘Tense and Aspectual be in Child African American English’ by Janice E. Jackson & Lisa Green
All Things Linguistics post on ‘habitual be’
Yale Grammatical Diversity Project English in North America entry for ‘Invariant be’
@dietweeterei tweet on the origins of ‘have’ in English and German
Wikipedia entry for ‘habeo’ in Latin
Grambank entry for ‘mood’
Grambank entry for ‘aspect’
Grambank entry for ‘tense’
Grambank entry for ‘negation’
Grambank entry for ‘passive’
‘The Syntax of Auxiliaries From a Cross-linguistic Perspective’ by Bronwyn M. Bjorkman
Wikipedia entry for ‘Nande languge’
‘Auxen’ tweet by Kirby Conrod
You can listen to this episode via Lingthusiasm.com, Soundcloud, RSS, Apple Podcasts/iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also download an mp3 via the Soundcloud page for offline listening.
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You can help keep Lingthusiasm ad-free, get access to bonus content, and more perks by supporting us on Patreon.
Lingthusiasm is on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Mastodon, and Tumblr. Email us at contact [at] lingthusiasm [dot] com
Gretchen is on Twitter as @GretchenAMcC and blogs at All Things Linguistic.
Lauren is on Twitter as @superlinguo and blogs at Superlinguo.
Lingthusiasm is created by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our senior producer is Claire Gawne, our production editor is Sarah Dopierala, and our production assistant is Martha Tsutsui Billins. 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).
Lingthusiasm Episode 47: The happy fun big adjective episode
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.
Click here for a link to this episode in your podcast player of choice or read the transcript here
Announcements:
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Also check out our Schwa (Never Stressed) pins, IPA scarves, IPA socks, and more at RedBubble.
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.
Here are the links mentioned in this episode:
Diagnostic word classes
Adjective order (Tom Scott video)
Lemon Iced Tea
The bizarre syntax of “Sexiest Man Alive” (Arika Okrent)
More than one type of adjective - the Manang language
Lumpers vs. Splitters
You can listen to this episode via Lingthusiasm.com, Soundcloud, RSS, Apple Podcasts/iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also download an mp3 via the Soundcloud page for offline listening.
To receive an email whenever a new episode drops, sign up for the Lingthusiasm mailing list.
You can help keep Lingthusiasm ad-free, get access to bonus content, and more perks by supporting us on Patreon.
Lingthusiasm is on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Tumblr. Email us at contact [at] lingthusiasm [dot] com
Gretchen is on Twitter as @GretchenAMcC and blogs at All Things Linguistic.
Lauren is on Twitter as @superlinguo and blogs at Superlinguo.
Lingthusiasm is created by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our senior producer is Claire Gawne, our production editor is Sarah Dopierala, our production manager is Liz McCullough, and 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).
Transcript Lingthusiasm Episode 22: This, that and the other thing - determiners
This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm Episode 22: This, that and the other thing - determiners. It’s been lightly edited for readability. Listen to the episode here or wherever you get your podcasts. Links to studies mentioned and further reading can be found on the Episode 22 shownotes page.
[Music]
Gretchen: Welcome to Lingthusiasm, a podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics! I'm Gretchen McCulloch.
Lauren: And I'm Lauren Gawne, and today we're talking about this, that, and the other thing! The other thing of course being determiners. But first: We met our recent Patreon goal to do a live show!
Gretchen: Yay, live show! I'm excited! We will have more news for you about where and when that live show is gonna be, but stay tuned!
Lauren: Thanks to everyone who helped us meet this goal, all of our fabulous patrons who make these main episodes happen ad-free and available for everyone, and who, of course, as a thank you from us, get a bonus episode every month as well!
Gretchen: And if you're a patron, you'll also have seen the advance announcement that since we also met our art goal a while back –
Lauren: Yay, art goal!
Gretchen: – we now have preview art up on Patreon which you can see, a sample sketch, and we're announcing here that the theme for this art is space babies!
Lauren: Space babies! We are so excited. Space babies have been with us since Episode 1, where we talked about what would happen on the International Space Station, given that they speak both Russian and English as their daily languages, if we sent a whole bunch of babies to space to grow up.
Gretchen: Yes, if all the astronauts and cosmonauts started having babies together, what would the babies speak? So we have an international array of cute babies floating in space, very unethically, we are not sending any actual babies to space, but they're very cute when they're cartoon versions!
Lauren: We just couldn't get the ethics.
Gretchen: To be honest, we didn't try to get the ethics, we knew we couldn't.
Lauren: We've talked about space babies in a couple of other episodes, and of course we always love to chat about just what great language learners babies are, so we're very happy to have some cute little mascots for the show. And we'll be launching merch for those very soon!
Gretchen: And this has been one of our most popular quotes with you, the listeners, all the way through, so you will get to wear, or have stickers of, small, cute babies very soon! And you can see this preview and listen to two new bonus episodes – one about forensic linguistics, and another about homonyms – by becoming a patron.
[Music]
Lauren: Okay, Gretchen, it's time to determine who knows the most determiners. Are you ready? This is not a competition, but, you know, I love framing things as a competition.
Gretchen: It's a competition! It's on! Okay. I'm gonna start with "the."
Lauren: Oh, damn, you chose the easy one! I'm gonna go with "a."
Gretchen: My.
Lauren: This.
Gretchen: Your?
Lauren: That?
Gretchen: Her.
Lauren: Its.
Gretchen: His.
Lauren: Many?
Gretchen: Their... I did all the possessives, I'm sorry, it's really easy.
Lauren: That's very possessive of you, Gretchen.
Gretchen: Our!
Lauren: Some?
Gretchen: A.
Lauren: Three.
Gretchen: And also "an," because "an" is just kind of the same one.
Lauren: Okay, you get half a point for "an" because I had "a."
Gretchen: Uh, those.
Lauren: Four.
Gretchen: These.
Lauren: Five.
Gretchen: Some.
Lauren: Six.
Gretchen: Okay, if you're gonna do numbers we can be here... all day.
Lauren: Seven.
Gretchen: Like, until eternity.
Lauren: Eight, nine... okay, we have literally an infinite number of determiners ahead of us. It's probably not gonna make for a good episode if it's just me counting to infinity.
Gretchen: I think we need to declare it a tie, because we can't count who knows the most infinity numbers.
Lauren: Yup. And it's a good conclusion. Thanks for playing our game, Determiners Determinered.
Gretchen: Determiner Determiner Game. But determiners are really cool! And there are a lot of them, and I know when I learned about them, it kind of blew my mind that all of these different things that I thought of as different kinds of parts of speech actually had this hidden thing in common.
Lauren: Yeah, so even though that sounded like a grab bag of words that you think of as coming from different categories – like numbers, and possessive pronouns, and articles, and things that you've talked about as different parts of speech – if you've ever done any grammar, are actually part of the same group of things called determiners. And it's like discovering that all of these people that you thought were really cool all have something in common that makes them even cooler?
Gretchen: Like they all have a mutual friend with you, or – in my case, it's like discovering that all your friends are all also left-handed, because this happens to me periodically. It's like, "You're left-handed, too! Great!"
Lauren: Or it's like when I discover that a bunch of my friends are vegetarian and I'm like, "Yes! Dinner parties at my house!"
Gretchen: I will still come to your dinner parties even though I'm not vegetarian.
Lauren: Okay, thank you, tolerant carnivore.
Gretchen: Omnivore!
Lauren: But that's like, you know, there are some omnivores who will turn up to the party, and they might be doing different things at other parties sometimes, but they're very happy to be vegetarians at my parties. And that is kind of like determiners, these parts of speech that might have other jobs, but they have this job as well.
Gretchen: Yeah, and what I really like about determiner is that they're these tiny little words, and they can really drastically change the course of a story you're talking about, just by influencing the perspective or the relationship that you have with the main noun in the sentence. So if you start with a story like, "I was walking home last night and I saw a cat." So far...
Lauren: Great story.
Gretchen: Oh, it's a good story, any story with a cat is a good story. But so far it's a pretty straightforward story. Nothing surprising here.
Lauren: But it's clearly a cat you don't know.
Gretchen: Yeah.
Lauren: Or we think you don't know, at this point in the story.
Gretchen: But if I say, "I was walking home last night and I saw the cat..."
Lauren: Oh my god, your cat got out and then you saw it!
Gretchen: So maybe that's my cat, but maybe that's just, like, The Cat of Doom.
Lauren: Mmm!
Gretchen: Or, like, "I was walking last night and I saw that cat."
Lauren: Aw, has it been scratching up all of your plants again?
Gretchen: That darn cat! Or if I say, "I was walking home last night and I saw your cat..."
Lauren: Oh! I mean, that's surprising given that you live in a different city and I don't have a cat, but, you know...
Gretchen: We live in different continents, like, your cat is a good swimmer! "I was walking home last night and I saw many cats..."
Lauren: Oh, lucky you!
Gretchen: Well, depends on how many. "I was walking home last night and I saw a million cats!"
Lauren: "I was walking home last night and I saw at least ten cats."
Gretchen: Like, I'm scared now. You know that thing about “would you rather fight a horse-sized duck or a thousand duck-sized horses?”?
Lauren: Yes.
Gretchen: Like, a million cats, I don't want to fight them!
Lauren: No.
Gretchen: And I don't even think I want them all to sit in my lap, because I think I'd be crushed.
Lauren: Yes, that is a lot of fluff.
Gretchen: Yeah. So what's interesting about determiners is they can – you know, all of these were the same story, except for the determiner. And it's really having a huge influence in terms of what happened and the relationship between the noun "cat" and the rest of the sentence, the rest of the story. It determines which cat I'm talking about, or – "which" being another determiner – or what kind of relationship that cat has to the sentence as a whole.
Lauren: I always think of determiners as a really important reality check in terms of semantics. We often think about whether it was a cat or a dog, like that part of the meaning is really important. It's like, well, that part is, but the determiner is the part that makes it clear just how real it is, if it's a hypothetical cat, if it's a real dog, if it's my cat or my dog.
Gretchen: And especially it tells us things like whether it's been previously mentioned in conversation. Like if I say, "I saw a cat" or "I saw the cat" – if I say, "I saw the cat," that implies that it's been mentioned somehow before, it's an aforementioned cat, or it's a cat that's been previously relevant. Or if I say, "I saw this cat" versus "I saw that cat," those cats are different distances from me. Or, you know, "Do you want this book or that book?" The "this book" is closer and the "that book" is further away.
Lauren: I like to think about this proximity distinction a lot, because English has squandered the opportunity to have yet another proximity distinction. Because we used to have "yon" or "yonder" as part of the regular vocabulary, which was, like, further away than "that." And so I could say, "Tell me about yon cat," and that would be like, "Tell me about the cat that's all the way over there" in the story that you're telling.
Gretchen: That would be great. I think we should bring back "yon."
Lauren: We should bring back the far distal demonstrative.
Gretchen: I'm into it. I was walking home last night and I saw yon cat!
Lauren: Well, I mean, it was the size of a horse, so it was pretty easy to see.
Gretchen: That's why I could see it from so far away.
Lauren: Yep. And there are some languages that still have these distinctions, I think Portuguese is a language that has it.
Gretchen: Yeah, I know Spanish does. You can have, like, "ese gato" and "aquel gato," I think.
Lauren: Yep. And you can have a distinction between "essa," which is like me/you in Portuguese, but you can have "aquela," which is like over there, away from both of us. Which, in terms of like asking people to fetch cake for you, which is a context I think about a lot, distinguishing between the cake that's near you and the cake that is further away on the table and not near either of us, like, English doesn't do that very elegantly.
Gretchen: I think it's really important, you know, if you're going to a bakery or something and you're looking behind the glass and you're saying, "Yeah, I want three of these, and three of those, and three of yon."
Lauren: Yeah.
Gretchen: The cakes over yonder!
Lauren: So English, even though it has a lot of distinctions, we're still missing out on some good semantics.
Gretchen: Yeah! And some languages don't have this distinction between "a" and "the" at all, really! Like, some languages do just fine without it, and it's clear based on the discourse which one is there. One of the other cool things that I really like about determiners is that they can let us do – like a lot of these little little, tiny parts of speech, these little words that are kind of the glue between the big, important content words that have all this very vivid, drawable or picture-able or pointable meaning – you know, you can draw a picture of a cat, you can't draw a picture of a "the" or of a "this." I mean, maybe you want to try! I'd like to see someone try, but I don't know what's in that picture! And so when you're thinking about the type of things that can be pictured, one of the things that lets us bring in and integrate new words, or nonsense words, or fake words, or be really creative with language, is these little building blocks that tell us, when we're bringing in a new fake word, what we're actually trying to do with that word. So it's not just an entire string of gibberish, it's gibberish that sounds like it could be kind of English-y, which is a really interesting halfway point.
Lauren: And it does this by leveraging things like determiners.
Gretchen: Yeah! And determiners are a huge part of this. So if you have a poem like Jabberwocky, which is a great poem...
Lauren: Good old Jabberwocky! I give this to my students and I say, "Well, how do you know what part of speech 'wabe' is?" Because "wabe" is not a real word.
Gretchen: So this is a poem by Lewis Carroll which begins, "'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves/ Did gyre and gimble in the wabe." So it's English-y! It's got some English in there, there's an "and," and there's a "the," and there's a "did," and there's an "in," but there's also all these words that aren’t English: brillig, and slithy, and toves, and gyre, and gimble, and wabe. And yet we know that if you say, "'Twas brillig," that the "brillig" there is gonna be an adjective, and the "slithy toves" – "slithy" is also gonna be an adjective, but "tove" has got to be a noun.
Lauren: Yep.
Gretchen: And the reason we know that is because of the "the" there.
Lauren: And similar with "the wabe." There's only one wabe in the Jabberwocky, there's not a million wabes.
Gretchen: Yeah! And you know that because of the "the."
Lauren: Yep.
Gretchen: And it creates – if you said, "'Twas brillig and some some slithy toves did gyre and gimble in a wabe..."
Lauren: You'd be like, "Oh, just one of those common wabes, yeah, we've all got one."
Gretchen: Exactly! So it really kind of creates a different attitude of perspectives and speakers, like, okay, this thing is common knowledge. We don't know what a wabe is, but we know it's a thing that is previously mentioned in the discourse, or that there's only one of, the way you might say "the sea" or "the ocean" rather than "a puddle."
Lauren: Of course Jabberwocky's all well and good, but I like to use snek memes as my diagnostic tool.
Gretchen: So this is the meme with the snakes in it.
Lauren: And snakes, of course, like all animals in picture memes on the internet, talk really funny!
Gretchen: Yes. And they're particularly good at making things nouns that aren't supposed to be nouns?
Lauren: Yeah.
Gretchen: Or that weren't originally nouns. So the classic snek sentence that I always think of when I think of the snek meme is, "Heck off, you're doing me a frighten!"
Lauren: And there are a few others that we have from Snekville here: "I do a flat." "I am much venom." "Snek ned a boopings." "I'm doing a protec."
Gretchen: And so all of these – you have "a frighten." "Frighten" normally in English is a verb, but here the "a" is what's making it into a noun. And you parse it as a noun, that's what makes it work, but the determiner is really what's telling you. It's kind of the traffic signal for the streets that your noun and verb cars run down, that tell them where to go.
Lauren: Yep.
Gretchen: And the same thing with "much venom," the "much" there, another determiner, is telling you, okay, "venom" here, which would be a noun, is now actually I guess kind of...
Lauren: It's a different kind of noun, yeah. It's changing the flavor of the noun.
Gretchen: Yeah. Or "snek need a boopings," you know, you don't normally put "a" with a plural noun. "Boopings."
Lauren: Because "a" is one specific thing.
Gretchen: Yeah, there's a lot of things there that – like, the thing that makes snek an interesting and creative meme is that it has the determiners telling you here's why these nouns and these adjectives and stuff sound weird.
Lauren: I like that you pointed out, when we were assembling our mini snek corpus for the episode, that snek is really obsessed with the use of "a" rather than "the."
Gretchen: Mm, yeah. So snek doesn't say, "You're doing me the frighten," or "I do the flat," like I do the twist, or "snek need the boopings," "I'm doing the protec." Those don't sound very snek-like to me!
Lauren: No, there's something about the indeterminate. Everything is possible for snek, everything is multitudes.
Gretchen: Yeah, whereas when I think of earlier memes, especially the kind of lolcat memes that often respelled "the" as "teh” –
Lauren: Yeah. Well, I think it's just 'cause the "the" as "teh" was so much more salient, because it was graphically irregular, that it kind of seems much more prominently "cat."
Gretchen: Yeah, I think of "teh" as cats and "a" as snek. So each each animal meme gets its own characteristic determiner. Well, and we can even think of, like, the doge meme, which has like, "wow such meme!"
Lauren: Doge was very obsessed with "such" and "much" and these, like, quantifying...
Gretchen: And "many."
Lauren: Yeah.
Gretchen: Yeah, all these quantifier determiners. So, yeah! They tend to draw on a characteristic set of determiners, which I think is kind of interesting.
Lauren: Yeah. "Do me such frighten" would be more doge-y.
Gretchen: Yeah, and like, "Do me teh frighten" might be more lolcat-y.
Lauren: Yeah. Gosh, imagine if Lewis Carroll was alive in the time of animal memes!
Gretchen: I feel like Jabberwocky is already almost a meme. If you put that on some images, it would kind of look meme-like. And I think you can even see – so we did an episode a little while back about the wug test. So the wug test is, you show people a picture of this cute, little, nonsense animal, and you say, "This is a wug. Now there are two of them. There are two..." And you leave open that space for them to fill in "two wugs," which is how you know people can generalise the plural to words they've never heard before, even little kids.
Lauren: Yep.
Gretchen: But the thing that makes that test possible is that we have certain expectations and certain relationships with determiners. "This is a wug." So here's a new piece of information to you, you haven't necessarily seen one of these before. And then saying, "Now there are two of them. There are two..." You know, numbers are also determiners, so "there are two..." fills in, okay, you want to say this again, you want to say this noun again.
Lauren: I wonder if you could mess up kids doing the test by saying, "This is the wug."
Gretchen: Hmm!
Lauren: Because if you say, "This is the wug", and imply that there's, like, one, saying there are two could potentially confuse them.
Gretchen: Yeah, that's interesting! Because there are some things that... Can you do this? Because I'm thinking of, like, there are some proper names that you can say, like, "The Flash," for a superhero, but I don't think you can say, like, "Now there are two of them, there are two... The Flashes?
Lauren: The Flashes.
Gretchen: Like, what if The Flash was in some sort of, like, clone/evil twin weird movie where there was a second The Flash, are they now called The Flashes? How does that work?
Lauren: The Flashes. It sounds like a really bad band or a spate of petty criminals.
Gretchen: This is my band, The Flashes.
Lauren: Yeah, so the wug test also relies on determiners in a really low-key way, but it's still really important for it.
Gretchen: And this kind of brings us into determiners and how they interact with names of people or names of places and other types of proper nouns that are unique and singular.
Lauren: Yeah. So we've said so far that determiners, you just whack 'em on a noun and it's all good, but there are a bunch of nouns that they don't work too good with! And proper nouns are definitely those, so people names and place names.
Gretchen: Yeah, like I am not "the Gretchen," I don't think anyone can say that. Welcome to Lingthusiasm, I'm the Gretchen McCulloch!
Lauren: But you are the Gretchen of Lingthusiasm. Someone could ask if you're the Gretchen from All Things Linguistic.
Gretchen: That's true, yeah! Like, "Are you the Gretchen that's on Lingthusiasm or are you some other Gretchen?" I think maybe it's easier with your name, Lauren, because "Lauren" is a far more common name.
Lauren: Well, yeah, I am definitely a Lauren. Like I talk about being a linguist Lauren on Twitter, and how much I love all the other linguist Laurens.
Gretchen: I know many linguist Laurens.
Lauren: And saying, you know, in the 2000s that someone was a real Britney...
Gretchen: Mmm!
Lauren: It takes on a kind of adjectival title property of that name being very trendy at that time and having certain connotations and extra meanings.
Gretchen: Yeah, like, a Britney is definitely different from a Karen.
Lauren: Yes.
Gretchen: You have different associations between those. So, I read this really weird short story called "And Then There Were (N-One)" by Sarah Pinkser.
Lauren: Hang on. "And Then There Were N Minus One"?
Gretchen: Yeah, it's a pun on the Agatha Christie story, "And Then There Were None."
Lauren: Okay.
Gretchen: And the premise of the story – I guess this is a spoiler. It's a great story, though, you should read it. I won't spoil the ending.
Lauren: Okay.
Gretchen: I'll just spoil the premise partway through. So the author is Sarah Pinsker, and she kind of involves herself as a character in this story. She gets a mysterious letter that says, "We have discovered the theory of multiple universes such that every decision that anybody has ever made has created a proliferation of universes. And we're inviting you to a convention with all of the other Sarah Pinskers.”
Lauren: Ah, so she's just a Sarah Pinsker.
Gretchen: Right! And so you're gonna meet the Sarah Pinsker that didn't move to Seattle, or you're gonna meet the Sarah Pinsker that didn't end up dating your girlfriend. Like, you're gonna meet all of these different, other Sarah Pinskers.
Lauren: Yeah.
Gretchen: And some of the Sarah Pinskers have changed their last name, but they're still a Sarah. And so the story has a lot of her trying to identify the different Sarahs once she meets them. So she's like, "Okay, so this is the Sarah that was wearing the band t-shirt," or, "This is the Sarah that was wearing the cute dress,” or, "This is the Sarah that had her hair in a long braid."
Lauren: Yep.
Gretchen: Or she'll go into a room and she'll be like, "Well, there were seven Sarahs in the room." Or like, "One Sarah said, and then another Sarah said..." And so you're doing all of these determiner things to this proper name, because suddenly "Sarah" has become a type rather than just a unique referent.
Lauren: "Sarah" just sounds like any other noun right now.
Gretchen: Yeah! Right? Like, you're totally semantically satiated on "Sarah" because it just doesn't even feel like it's a person's name anymore. And by the time I got to the end of this short story, which was very interesting in terms of what it means – you know, interesting questions of identity – it was like, what do all of these Sarahs mean and what does this mean about your ability to make these types of decisions? But grammatically I also thought it was very interesting because you don't often get to have proper names being pluralised and "the Sarah" and "a Sarah" and "one Sarah," "another Sarah," and these kinds of things.
Lauren: Certainly not sustainedly.
Gretchen: Yeah! So you have this whole short story where it does that. We'll link to it, it's a great short story.
Lauren: I find it interesting – we were talking about this briefly the other day when we were talking about this topic – how superhero names do this, and I couldn't find anything, because this is definitely not my genre of popular entertainment, but if you have any links about the use of "the" or not in front of superhero names. It's kind of interesting, because we have, you know, The Flash and The Phantom, but it would be really weird to have The Superman.
Gretchen: The Batman!
Lauren: The Wonder Woman.
Gretchen: Well, I was actually also thinking of this in terms of other mythical creatures! 'Cause you have, like, Santa Claus, not the Santa Claus. But then you have –
Lauren: But you have the Easter Bunny!
Gretchen: The Easter Bunny! And the Tooth Fairy!
Lauren: Hmm! Santa, special status.
Gretchen: Right? And all the reindeer, too. Like, you have Rudolph, not the Rudolph.
Lauren: The Mrs. Claus.
Gretchen: The Mrs. Claus! I guess you have "the elves," because they don't have unique identities, but that's a little bit less distinctive.
Lauren: Yeah. Poor elves.
Gretchen: Well, and the same thing goes for other types of generic items. So you have, like, the internet, but something people kind of make fun of sometimes is often older people who talk about, like, "the Google" or "the Facebook."
Lauren: Well, the Facebook was The Facebook and they made –
Gretchen: Yeah, it was originally called The Facebook!
Lauren: The mysterious forces of branding and naming were like, "It's not cool, just make it Facebook."
Gretchen: I was trying to think of any other major companies that had "the" in them. I'm sure I'll think of one as soon as I stop trying to go for it. Like, you don't have like "The Amazon," or "The Microsoft," or "The Coca-Cola." You know, like... The Coca- Cola?? The Pepsi??
Lauren: It doesn't really work.
Gretchen: The McDonald's? I don't know if there are any that really do that.
Lauren: English isn't that big on putting determiners in front of proper nouns, unless it's in sci-fi.
Gretchen: And you do have, sometimes, "the" in front of other words that are just kind of generic, like you say, "The power went out."
Lauren: Yep.
Gretchen: It's the power, it's not a power. Like, the electricity is out. It's a specific thing, but it's also kind of not.
Lauren: Yeah. And this is what makes languages always fun to learn, because what you do by default in one language and use determiners all over the place in one context, you might not in another language.
Gretchen: Yeah, absolutely. Like in countries. Most countries in English you don't say, you know, "the Canada" or "the Australia."
Lauren: Welcome to the Australia! It does not sound natural or native to my English speaker intuition.
Gretchen: No. But a few of them – like, you say "the United States" or "the United Kingdom," partly because those are compound phrases.
Lauren: Yep.
Gretchen: You don't say "the Great Britain."
Lauren: No.
Gretchen: Or "the England." And then you also have some like Ukraine, which used to be known as the Ukraine, and now they're like, "No, please call us just Ukraine, because we want to be like all the other countries." But there are still a few countries like the Vatican or the Hague that go by "the"s.
Lauren: Uhh, The Hague is a city.
Gretchen: Is it a city? Okay. Well, so there we go.
Lauren: So there are a few places like the Vatican and the Hague that are still using determiners in English, but it's definitely not a standard convention.
Gretchen: Yeah, exactly. But in French, for example, you do put determiners in front of all your countries. So you have "le Canada," and "la France," and "l'Australie," and these kinds of things. So these are these, like, weird, little subtle variations that even when a language seems like they have direct equivalents, they get used slightly differently in different contexts. My favourite ridiculously complicated word having to do with determiners...
Lauren: Yep. I've already used the word "proximal" in this episode so you're gonna beat me.
Gretchen: This is a word that you only ever use because you can have it, and I've only ever seen linguists use it to be like, "What a great word!" And I've never actually seen it in a context where someone wasn't sign-posting how great a word it was? So definitely don't think you have to know this word to be a linguist, but also a lot of linguistics really like this word. And this word is "anarthrous." I think I'm pronouncing it right.
Lauren: Anarthrous?
Gretchen: Anarthrous. And this means "not having a 'the.'"
Lauren: Mmm! That's a really obscure word for saying "this word doesn't have a 'the.'"
Gretchen: It's such a complicated word for such a simple concept. And so "arthrous," without the "an-", would be "having a 'the,'" and "anarthrous" would be "not having a 'the.'"
Lauren: Anarthrous also just sounds like a really great roller derby name for a linguist nerd.
Gretchen: Hi, my name is Ann! Ann Arthrous.
Lauren: Yep, done.
Gretchen: So a context where you might use this, and a context where I recently saw this word, was in Lynne Murphy's book, which we talked about in a recent episode, where she talks about how Americans will say, "I'm in the hospital," and Brits will say, "I'm in hospital." And so for Brits, "hospital" is anarthrous. And for Americans, "hospital" is arthrous, as in, you put a "the" there. And you can do it with similar things, like, you go to school, you don't go to the school.
Lauren: Yep.
Gretchen: But you go to, like, the grocery store, which is the generic grocery store, even if you mean a specific one.
Lauren: That's a good word. Try to use it in a sentence today.
Gretchen: Use it today! No one will understand you. And then you too will get to explain what it means! This is the thing that's always stopped me from getting any active use of the word, 'cause I know no one else would get it either.
Lauren: We'll post a link to that in the show notes, so you also know how to spell it.
Gretchen: Lynne's got this great point in her book where she talks about the "in hospital" thing, and then she's like, "It's anarthrous!" And then she puts in brackets, "A word which I only use because it's so great, and here's what it means." And I'm like, yeah, I see what you did there.
Lauren: Pretty much.
Gretchen: I would have done the same thing.
Lauren: So we mentioned briefly that even English can't agree on when you use articles and determiners and when you don't use them, and that varies even more cross-linguistically. We saw it with English and French, but I also like that different languages have different resources to draw on. And we talked about how determiners are this diverse group of words that can kind of be invited to the same party and hang out together and do a similar thing. And I think it's really interesting, if you've learnt a couple of languages, you might notice that some of the languages you speak have a distinct word that meets the function of "a" or "an," but some languages just co-opt their word for "one" in doing that.
Gretchen: Oh yeah, that's true!
Lauren: Yeah. So, Syuba is a language like that, the Tibeto-Burman language of Nepal that I work with. So if you want to refer to an indeterminate, just any particular one of a thing, you would say "gùri tɕí," "one cat," and that does the same job as "a" without having to invent a whole other word.
Gretchen: I think there are a bunch of European languages that do that too, because I know French and Spanish do, and German does, you have "un chat," or "un gato," or "eine Katze." And those are all the same as the word for "one" in those languages.
Lauren: And there's a there's a really great WALS map – we've talked about the World Atlas of Linguistic Structures before – that shows where there are languages that have a distinct type determiner and languages that use the numeral one for that function.
Gretchen: Oh, that's very cool. So we can click on this link and see a map of different coloured dots where the word for "a" is the same as the word for "one" and where it's different.
Lauren: Yep!
Gretchen: That's really neat!
Lauren: And the definite equivalent, so the "the" equivalent, is "dì," and that's the same as the word for "this."
Gretchen: Oh, okay!
Lauren: So they don't have a separate "the" and "this," they just have this one form, "dì." They have a distal, and they have a "somewhere between far and near" as well, super cool. And what's really cool is that for the "the" equivalent, you say "dì gùri," or "the cat," and in this case the determiner is before the noun, and with the number, it was after, it was "gùri tɕí" so that's "cat one" as a kind of literal translation. And it's really, again, a nice reminder that determiners can have such different functions and they can occur in different parts of the sentence in relation to the noun, but they still all have this same function.
Gretchen: And there's a map of that, too, of which languages have their word for "this" and their word for "the" as the same.
Lauren: Yep. Thanks, WALS!
Gretchen: What I find is kind of the most interesting thing about determiners as a category is the way that they kind of unify a bunch of things that we think of as similar. Latin actually has this thing that's very similar to what's in Syuba, which is their word for "this," which was "ille, illa, illud" in Latin, became the Romance "le, la, les" or "el, los, las."
Lauren: Ahh! I was gonna say, they sound familiar.
Gretchen: Yeah! And so the Latin word for "this" became the word for "the" in the Romance languages.
Lauren: Mmm!
Gretchen: So this is a thing that happens from language to language, even when they have no contact with each other, and they've never heard of each other, and they're nowhere near each other geographically. This is just a trend that languages seem to have. And the same thing for – have you ever wondered why we have two forms, "a" and "an"?
Lauren: Yes? But it's because – I mean, I know the environments that they occur in, that "an" occurs before something vowel-y or something H-y, but that's a complicated historical complication.
Gretchen: Yeah. But "an" is actually older than "a," right?
Lauren: Ahh! Yeah.
Gretchen: And the "an" that's an "an" is because it has the same root as the word "one" in English.
Lauren: Mmmm! I have the Etymonline links, as I always love to do, for "a" and "the" that I'll put in the show notes.
Gretchen: So if you go to Etymonline and you look up the word "one," you can see that it's the same root as "only," or "alone," or "atone," which is like, "at one," "all one."
Lauren: Mmm!
Gretchen: And in the dialect form "good'un" or "young'un," that "un" is a "one" as well. But the "one" pronunciation came up later, and "an" was also a version of that.
Lauren: Yep.
Gretchen: And so if you have "own" and "an," you can hear how those are very similar to each other, and they're from the same root. So English actually has that connection. But the thing that makes me the most excited about thinking about determiners as a group is that it helps explain a few things about how we use determiners. So if you have a word like "the," you don't just go around saying "the" by itself in a sentence. Like, you can't say, "I saw a cat, and then the kept going on," or something like that. Because that does not work.
Lauren: You missed a word, Gretchen!
Gretchen: It needs a noun there, for support. But other determiners like "this" and "that," they can act by themselves without support. So you can say, "I saw this cat, and then this kept going on." Maybe that's not particularly good sentence, but you can say, like, "Give me this book and then I'll move this here," or something like that.
Lauren: Yep.
Gretchen: And so you can, you know, like the title of this episode, "this, that, and the other thing," the "this" and the "that" in that sentence can each refer to specific things without there being a noun there for support. And what's interesting is that the pronoun "they" in English comes into English from Old Norse, and it has the same origins as "this" and "that" and "the." They're all related to each other in terms of, like, "that one" or "those ones" or "these ones." All of those "the" forms are related to each other. So some theories of determiners group all pronouns together with determiners, because a determiner by itself – at least the ones that can appear by themselves, like "this" and "that" and "many" – act a lot like pronouns as well. And other languages also seem to have this set of relationships between what some of the pronouns can be and what some of what we think of as articles or something can be. And so if we group them into this category of determiners, it actually explains why these seem to have these weird similarities with each other.
Lauren: It explains why everyone's at the same party!
Gretchen: Yeah! It's like seeing into the underpinnings, or the behind-the-scenes view of language and saying, actually, these things, if we think about them from a certain perspective, they do have a lot of weird similarities.
Lauren: So like with Syuba, we have "dì" being both "the," which has to be part of a noun phrase for it to make sense as a "the" equivalent, but it also has its own full life as "this" and can occur independently. And so the thing I like about thinking about all of these things as determiners, rather than thinking about pronouns and articles and all of this, is that it makes a lot of sense as something that would otherwise be really confusing and you'd be trying to give it a kind of double identity that's unnecessary.
Gretchen: Yeah, and it's weird to me that "determiner" as a name for this particular category is actually around 100 years old. It's pretty well-established. And it's weird for me that all through school, I never learned about determiners, I just learned about articles, and demonstratives, and pronouns, and possessive nouns, or possessive adjectives, or whatever they called all of these individual things. And I didn't learn that there was a name for the super category? And you can talk about articles separately if you want to, but it wasn't until I started doing linguistics that I learned there was actually a name for this whole category, even though this is something that's not controversial among linguists, and it's something that's generally accepted and, you know, you walk into Ling 101 and they might start talking about determiners. And it's weird to me that this hasn't necessarily trickled all the way down to high school grammar education, or elementary grammar education.
Lauren: It does make me sad you have to wait until you're in a linguistics undergrad class to know that there's even a party going on and the determiners are all there!
Gretchen: Yeah! And, like, I'd studied a bunch of language and I'd learned what I thought were my parts of speech, and then I walk in and I'm like, "What is this determiner thing? And how is it everywhere? And why is it so cool?" So I think people should know about determiners! I also have some determiner haikus to leave us with.
Lauren: Excellent.
Gretchen: Do you want to hear my determiner haikus?
Lauren: Sure, go for it, now that we know all about them.
Gretchen: Okay. So this is a multi-authored set of determiner haikus from Tumblr a couple years ago, and the first one is:
The best thing about
the definite article
is that it is the
A good thing about
indefinite articles
is that they are a
The best thing about
using the demonstratives
is when you go, 'This!'
Lauren: That was beautiful.
Gretchen:
All that my best thing
re: some those determiners
is all the above
Lauren: Thank you for those. I'll link to them on the show notes if you want to reread them and process them.
Gretchen: You should definitely do that in case people want to write their own grammar haiku. If you write a grammar haiku, tag us in it, and we will retweet it.
[Music]
Lauren: For more Lingthusiasm and links to all the things mentioned in this episode, go to lingthusiasm.com. You can listen to us on Apple Podcasts, iTunes, Google Podcasts, Google Play Music, SoundCloud, or wherever else you get your podcasts. And you can follow @Lingthusiasm on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Tumblr. You can get IPA scarves and other Lingthusiasm merch at lingthusiasm.com/merch. I tweet and blog as Superlinguo.
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Lauren: Lingthusiasm is created and produced by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our audio producer is Claire, our editorial producer is Emily, and our production assistants are Fabianne and Celine. Our music is by The Triangles.
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[Music]
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I'm reading an interesting paper by Martin Haspelmath on the problems with asking questions like "do all languages make a distinction between nouns, verbs, and adjectives?" Here's an interesting passage from page 14:
I proposed that languages should be compared on the basis of the following semantically based notions:
(9) a. thing-root: a root that denotes a physical object (animate or inanimate)
b. action-root: a root that denotes a volitional action
c. property-root: a root that denotes a property such as age, dimension or value
These comparative concepts appear to have nothing to do with the formal categories of language that linguists pride themselves on being able to discover. However, there are many different kinds of formal categories. Why should some of them be privileged over others? Why should some classes be called parts of speech, even though speech has many diverse parts, or word-classes, even though words can be grouped into classes on the basis of many different criteria? Why should thing-roots, action-roots and property-roots have a special status? There are two answers to this. (The second answer will be given in the next section.)
The first answer has to do with the habits of linguists. Even though we rarely admit it, the concepts in (9a-c) are at the basis of what we normally do. If we found strong evidence for grammatical classes of words that have nothing to do with things, actions and properties, we would not call them word-classes. For example, suppose a language has a class of prefixing words such as ‘father’, ‘mouth’, ‘kill’, and ‘eat’, and a class of non-prefixing words such as ‘tree’, ‘knife’, ‘swim’ and ‘sit’, we would not say that these are word-classes, even if the prefixing vs. non-prefixing distinction is important for a number of different regularities in the language. Thus, while saying that “nouns refer to things, verbs to actions and adjectives to properties” may sound naive, from a cross- linguistic perspective, this really is the meaning of these terms.
The whole paper is quite accessible, and available free online here, and it's a great question to get you into typology/comparative linguistics, if you want a step up from the cool maps at WALS.
