66: Word order, we love

Let’s say we have the set of words “Lauren”, “Gretchen”, and “visits”  and we want to make them into a sentence. The way that we combine these  words is going to have a big effect on who’s packing their bags and  who’s sitting at home with the kettle on. In English, our two sentences  look like “Gretchen visits Lauren” and “Lauren visits Gretchen” -- but  that’s not the only word order that’s possible. In theory, we could also  use other orders, like “Lauren Gretchen visits” or “Visits Gretchen  Lauren”, and in fact, many languages do. The only thing that really  matters is that for any given language, we all agree on which order  means what.

In this episode, your hosts Gretchen McCulloch and  Lauren Gawne get  enthusiastic about how languages put words in a particular order. There  are many possibilities, but a few of them show up a lot more than  others: “I <3 linguistics” (as in English and Indonesian) and “I  linguistics <3″ (as in Turkish and Japanese) are the most common word  orders for conveying who did what to who. Another common strategy is  using some other way of marking the actor and the acted-upon, which  frees up word order for other functions, like indicating the topic of  the sentence first (and what you want to comment about it afterwards) --  in English, this might be akin to “Linguistics, I <3 it”. We also  look at how Yoda maintains his unique approach to word order across a  variety of languages, including Hungarian, Japanese, Romanian, and  Czech.

Announcements:
We’re doing another online Lingthusiasm liveshow on April 9th (Canada) slash 10th (Australia)! (What time is that for me?) It will be a live Q&A for patrons about a fan fave topic: swearing!  We’ll be hosting this session on the Lingthusiasm patron Discord  server. Become a patron before the event to live-react in the text chat,  and it will also be available as an edited-for-legibility recording in  your usual Patreon live feed if you prefer to listen at a later date. In  the meantime: tell us about your favourite examples of swearing in  various languages and we might include them in the show!

LingComm Grants are back in 2022! These are small grants to help kickstart new  projects to communicate linguistics to broader audiences. There will be a  $500 Project Grant, and ten Startup Grants of $100 each. Apply here by March 31, 2022 or forward this page to anyone you think might be interested, and if you’d like to help us offer more grants, you can support Lingthusiasm on Patreon or contribute directly.  We started these grants because a small amount of seed money would have  made a huge difference to us when we were starting out, and we want to  help there be more interesting linguistics communication in the world.

If  you want to help keep our ongoing lingthusiastic activities going, from  the LingComm Grants to regular episodes to fun things like liveshows  and Q&As, join us on Patreon!  As a reward, you will get over 50 bonus episodes to listen to and  access to our Discord server to chat with other linguistics nerds. In  this month’s bonus episode we get enthusiastic about how linguistic research topics come together! We talk about where our own research came from, figuring out spaces for  new questions in the existing literature, and bridging gaps between  multiple subject areas and communities. Listen here!

Here are the links mentioned in this episode