101: Micro to macro - The levels of language

[♪ Music playing Welcome to Linguistic.com, a podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics. I'm Lauren Gorn. And I'm Gretchen McCulloch. And today, we're getting enthusiastic about all the different layers of language structure. But first, thank you to everyone who shared so many excellent linguistics

facts to celebrate our 100th episode anniversary! GeryL! 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. GeryL! So if you want some suggestions for other podcasts, books, videos, blogs,

other places online and offline to feed your interest in linguistics, you can check out that link from our website. Even with 101 options, I'm sure there are still a few. We've missed, so feel free to tag us at Lingthusiasm on social media about your favorites.

Or if there are any that you're particularly excited to see on the list, we would love this to help be a bit of a hub for people to find other cool linguistics communication projects. Our most recent bonus episode was an interview with Julie Sedevi about our relationship with language and how it changes throughout our lives and the linguistics of what makes

writing feel beautiful. You can also read Julie's new book called Lingua Fael, which is indeed very beautifully written and it is about that relationship that we have with language throughout our lives. For this and over 90 other bonus episodes, go to patreon.com. Lingthusiasm.

Welcome to the 101st episode of Lingthusiasm. It's Ling101! Oh my gosh, that is a classic first-year subject course code. I feel like there's this canonical introduction to linguistics course that almost every linguistics

program has in some form. It's a classic textbook format. It's a classic course style. And it goes from this very micro level of language to this macro level of language where

you're starting with the very smallest units and zooming out into the whole area of discourse. GZM – Weirdly enough, I absolutely did this subject, but we didn't have course codes like Ling101. But I did do an introduction to linguistics that was exactly like this.

LH – Ours also was not called Ling101. It was called Ling100. GZM – No, no. That was last episode. We missed it.

We missed it. Now we can't do it ever. And then I was at another university where it was called 201. And I don't really want to wait for another 100 episodes for us to be able to do this. So I think 101 is still sort of classically in the culture,

the idea of an inter-linguistic course, even if there are many course codes that are different from that. Lengthusiasm is intentionally not in this structure? It seems like it'd be a bit of a shame if we had to start like,

Okay, our first year is like only phonetics and then we're going to do only phonology. And then when we get all the way to pragmatic, so we've got to stop through the podcast or something. So we made a very conscious decision early on to mix it up a bit.

I mean, especially with the level of detail we're in, imagine if we're like, we're 100 episodes in, we're now moving from individual phones up to phonology. We could have been here for quite a while. Yeah, I think it's more fun to mix it up.

And it also means that if we encounter a really good example or anecdote or paper, new paper comes out that we want to talk about a particular topic, there's always more stuff that we can say about sounds. It's not like, oh, we did sounds for the first three years and then we never get to

do sounds again. But episode 101 is a great time to actually take ourselves through 101 course style. All these different layers of linguistic structure so you can see how a finite number of building blocks have this capacity to combine in so many novel ways.

I think of it as like those, have you ever seen those videos where they start like really, really zoomed in on like a cork or an electron or a nucleus and they zoom out to the atom and then to the cell and then to the, you know, plant and then to the backyard and then to the sort of map view and the, you know, earth view and the solar system and the galaxy. And then you

you feel like, wow, we're so far out, you can zoom back in and back out. It's very trippy and fun. We can do that with language. Loretta And one of the great things about this is that those building blocks being able to combine in really versatile ways allows us to create

sentences that have never been uttered before and collecting these as something of a linguist hobby. Gail So we have a few fun sentences that we can keep returning to and talk about them at all of these different layers. Well,

let's debut our candidate sentences here. One. Today I learned that there were smaller walrus ancestors, and I am extremely happy to report that the researcher writing about this did indeed refer to them as smallrus. Number two, moons can have moons. And they are called moon moons.

Three. As the current record holder for the highest score in Donkey Kong, Hank Chen is legally fought in line to be president of Taiwan. I don't need to check some of the accuracy of these sentences, but a sentence does not have to be true to be a linguistic example sentence. And if you're thinking, oh, I'm really excited about

linguistics from micro to macro, we also do organize Lingthusias of Episodes on our website by topics as well. So you can group them together and listen to all of the sounds ones together or all of the words ones or grammatical ones together if you want to approach Lingthusiasm episodes in that more structural way. It's just something that we

keep returning to because even after 100 episodes, we still have lots of future topics that we haven't gotten to yet. So many. Also, as we're going from micro to macro, that is a whole lot of different layers of language. That's a whole lot of different structure. One of the joys of

Lingthusiasm rather than an actual Ling101 is there's no example at the end of this episode. So there's no requirement to memorize all the terminology as we sail through