37: Generativism 1: How It Started (with David Adger and John Goldsmith)
We’re doing a deep dive into generativism, the linguistic school of thought championed by Noam Chomsky. It’s had an enormous impact on the direction of linguistics, and even those who disagree with the generative programme will be at least somewhat conversant with its claims and the debate around it. Here, we’ll try to answer questions such as: What is generativism, and what are its claims? What does generativism help you to do in linguistics? What is the relationship to nativism, the idea that some aspects language are inborn? How does generativism relate to functionalism? What should the next generation of generative linguists keep in mind?
30 Sep 20211h 50min
36: Journal Club: Clickety Clack (with Stephen Mann)
The Because Language team are talking through some of the most interesting research around, and you get to listen! Valuable medical information gets lost when Indigenous languages are wiped out When it comes to learning languages, multilinguals have the edge over bilinguals A generativist argues that languages don't adapt to their environment. What's behind this? And it's iconicity turned up to 11: some experiments that explore how language began.
13 Sep 202153min
35: Something's Got to Change (with Lesley Woods and Alice Gaby)
Linguistics as a discipline throws up challenges to Indigenous linguists. At the same time, they're the ones called upon to fix it. It can't stay like this. How do we make linguistics a safe place to work? Daniel, Hedvig, and very special co-host Ayesha Marshall are having a yarn with Lesley Woods and Dr Alice Gaby about their work in changing linguistics for the better.
27 Aug 20211h 21min
34: OzCLO 2021: 2 Cool 4 School (with Elisabeth Mayer, Henry Wu, Victoria Papaioannou, and the students of Melbourne Girls Grammar School)
OzCLO is the Australian Computational and Linguistic Olympiad. It gets students together to compete and solve linguistic problems. It’s also a gateway to further linguistic study. We’ve brought some of the winning students to compete in a linguistic quiz with Ben and Hedvig. Will it go well for them?
5 Aug 20211h 46min
33: You're Wrong About Everett, Roberts, Blasi 2015
All it took was a tweet. Last week, linguists refocused their attention on a paper about humidity and tone. Was it bad linguistics? Environmental determinism? The reaction said a lot about linguistics and the nature of linguistic communication in the digital age.
25 Juli 20211h 25min
32: Fallen Leaves: The Chinese Languages (with Wu Mei-Shin, Ye Jingting, and Israel Lai)
What we call sometimes Chinese is really a gigantic family of languages. They’re somewhat divided in mutual intelligibility, and somewhat united in their writing system. How are they different, and how are they maintaining themselves? Two Chinese researchers, Wu Mei-Shin and Ye Jingting, join us. And what’s going on in the Cantonese lingopod world? We’re joined by Israel Lai of Rhapsody in Lingo.
18 Juli 20211h 38min
31: All the Words (with Grant Barrett)
Words of the Week are coming out of the woodwork, and who better to work through them with us than Grant Barrett of A Way with Words? Wowee.
30 Juni 202158min
30: Mailbag of Raspberries (with Helen Zaltzman)
Our Mailbag is once again full of questions, and podcasting luminary Helen Zaltzman is here to help us answer them! Why is the raspberry sound (PBTPBBBBT) not a speech sound in any language? Or is it? How can sounds in a language change so much over time? Am I BURNED OUT? Or BURNT OUT? Why are they called metaphysicians and not metaphysicists? What can we call something besides LAME? Why is AMPHI- so infrequently used in English?
14 Juni 20211h 7min
