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?
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Become a Patron!Show notes
Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities | GoodReads
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/312944-a-wonderful-fact-to-reflect-upon-that-every-human-creature
A Tahoe Ski Resort Ditches Its Name, Saying It’s Racist And Sexist
https://www.npr.org/2021/09/14/1036914217/palisades-tahoe-ski-resort-changes-name-racist-sexist
A racial slur remains in hundreds of place names throughout North America
https://www.pri.org/stories/2020-09-18/racial-slur-remains-hundreds-place-names-throughout-north-america
Negative Words Mutate Faster than Positive Words in Lexical Evolution
https://psyarxiv.com/r5cxs/
Contact-tracing in cultural evolution: a Bayesian mixture model to detect geographic areas of language contact
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsif.2020.1031
Language Unlimited: The Science Behind Our Most Creative Power | David Adger | Oxford University Press
https://global.oup.com/academic/product/language-unlimited-9780198828099?cc=au&lang=en&
Battle in the Mind Fields | John A. Goldsmith and Bernard Laks | University of Chicago Press
https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/B/bo28509221.html
Booster Bandits Are Walking a Fine Line
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2021/09/booster-bandits-ethics/620048/
The ‘Pureblood’ Trend Reveals Anti-Vaxxers’ Mystical Racism
https://melmagazine.com/en-us/story/pureblood-antivaxx-rhetoric
Moderna Creates Twice as Many Antibodies as Pfizer, Study Shows
https://www.reddit.com/r/Coronavirus/comments/pf4633/moderna_creates_twice_as_many_antibodies_as/hb2q45s
Transcript
HEDVIG: We bought three Žižek books the first day.
BEN: Was that agreed upon beforehand? Like: “Right, we are in Slovenia.”
HEDVIG: No. It was just… we walked by a bookstore and I was like: well, obviously I’d like to go in and see if they have any Žižek in English. And they did! We got one book which was only his jokes.
BEN: Oh!
DANIEL: [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: Like, a compilation of jokes.
DANIEL: That is so niche.
HEDVIG: I can go… Do you want one for the recording? I’ll go get one.
BEN: Okay. That’s good.
DANIEL: I want a Žižek joke.
BEN: I want to be clear though, I’m afraid. Like, anytime someone says the following phrase: “A notable philosopher has written a book of jokes,” there is a deep fear in me.
[BECAUSE LANGUAGE THEME]
DANIEL: Hello, and welcome to this episode of Because Language. A show about linguistics, the science of language. My name is Daniel Midgley. Let’s meet the team. You know him. You love him. Well, maybe you don’t love him, love is a strong word. Let’s just say you like him, but you don’t “like him” like him. It’s Ben Ainslie.
HEDVIG: [LAUGHS] Aw.
BEN: I would accept and be happy with “unconditional positive regard””.
DANIEL: A lack of antipathy.
BEN: Yeah, exactly!
DANIEL: Hmm, okay.
HEDVIG: I’ll go so far to say that I like-like Ben.
BEN: Oh! [CHUCKLES] Hello. 😏
HEDVIG: [LAUGHS] I think.
BEN: Don’t leave that in, I will almost certainly get in trouble. Let’s edit that out.
HEDVIG: Oh, wait. Love is actually better than like-like, because like-like is…
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: Yeah, exactly. Like, what are you…
HEDVIG: …flirtier. I was thinking like-like was between like and love, but you’re right. Okay. No, I love Ben. That’s better.
DANIEL: I do love Ben.
BEN: Platonically! Really platonically!
HEDVIG: Yeah. We should maybe reiterate for the listeners. Ben and I have never met in the Fleshworld.
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: I am secure enough in my masculinity to say this is a man that I care for dearly. We’ve been doing this for so long, that it’s a feeling not entirely unlike love.
BEN: I am not at all comfortable enough in my own emotions to accept any of this praise. So, let’s move on!
[LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: Fair enough.
DANIEL: You know her. Well, how well do you know her? I mean, how well can we really know any other person? Charles Dickens once wrote that “every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other.: If that’s so, then perhaps we can seek solace in the fact that our minds are truly a private space, and while it’s easy to lament our eagerness to blast open that private space on social media and say that it’s merely for attention or for the approval of strangers, maybe instead, it’s part of a very human, but ultimately, tragically futile desire to be known, to be understood by any other human. A human like Hedvig Skirgård.
HEDVIG: Y… I… That was amazing. I love that.
DANIEL: It was a journey.
HEDVIG: I feel that… yeah, that is the type of existential little rabbit hole that I fall in whenever I try and talk about intelligibility.
DANIEL: Yes!
BEN: It also sounded a lot like a Žižek joke.
DANIEL: Long and not very funny?
HEDVIG: [LAUGHS] No.
DANIEL: Thank you both for coming here. It’s great to see you again after a small break.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
BEN: It has been… ah… cleansing.
DANIEL: On today’s show: the first of a two-parter, a deep dive into the linguistic school of thought called Generativism.
BEN: I hope our listeners — like, I hope their pencils are sharpened. I hope they have bought the appropriate textbook because we… I’m confident in saying this is our most scholastic episode ever.
DANIEL: I don’t want to overthink this.
HEDVIG: And I think that’s… I don’t know. Maybe our listeners can correct me, but…
BEN: I’m not saying it’s bad. I like managing expectations. That is a thing that I think people in the world should do a lot more. And so, I’m saying to my listeners: buckle up, because we’ve got some linguistics coming your way! Like, Linguistics with a capital L.
HEDVIG: But we’ve tried to make it accessible and I think people come to us for some of the deep dives into research. I think this is something people would appreciate.
BEN: I think a good chunk of our listenership, I have just whetted their whistles quite thoroughly.
HEDVIG: Yes.
DANIEL: [WHISTLES] Remember, our latest bonus episode was Journal Club with Hedvig and me… and Ste!
HEDVIG: Yeah!
BEN: Ooo!
DANIEL: Yes, that’s right. Stephen Mann joined us. You know him as the Bee Guy, but you’re going to know him as the Journal Club Guy because we all had a lot of fun.
HEDVIG: Yeah, that was really nice.
BEN: And soon, you may know him as his alter ego, Ester Forte. But you just have to stick around for that little juicy tidbit. It’s coming soon.
DANIEL: Is that a tease?
BEN: It was a tease for a show coming up. I’m not very good at this. I’m very blunt, generally.
DANIEL: So, if you want to make sure that you can listen to all of our bonus episodes, make sure you’re a patron at the Listener level. And there are different levels with different rewards. You can hang out with us on our Discord channel, there’s merch, and of course all patrons get our yearly mailout. We’re going to work out our bonus package. It’s going to be definitely a postcard and stickers, but maybe some other stuff too. So, be a patron. That’s patreon.com/becauselangpod.
BEN: Okay, what’s going on in the news? We better get there eventually.
HEDVIG: Mm-hmm.
DANIEL: Let’s see, people seem to come to us for slurs, when slurs are removed from product and place names, and I gladly take this up, Cheyenne and Chris on Facebook mentioned that a resort in Lake Tahoe that had a slur name, and they’ve changed it. Let’s see. Lake Tahoe is in Nevada and in California in the USA. So big it takes two states. And this story is about a resort on the California side of the lake. It used to have a derogatory name, which they’re dumping. I’ll just say the word once, it was known as Squaw Valley Alpine Meadows. And the first of those words is unacceptable, and I recommend dropping it from your lexicon.
HEDVIG: I never had it in my lexicon.
BEN: Yeah, exactly. I was going to say: for people who are either under the age of, I’m going to say, about 55, which is I think how old you need to be to remember westerns actually being popular instead of being, like, old people shows that are on late at night. So, that’s one group of people who probably had that word in their lexicon and then, the other group of people is just like, I guess, probably people from like;
HEDVIG: Non-Americans.
BEN: …people from the Northern Midwest, and that’s probably it. But do you know what it reminded me of? It reminded me of AKIMBO, one of those funny little words that it just gets used in a really small set of circumstances, do you know what I mean?
HEDVIG: You’re just saying that is a low-frequency word that a certain group use, and you think that this word is similarly only use by a small amount of people? I would agree…
BEN: Yeah, like a funny little fossil that just kept on going when a lot of its contemporaneous words had well and truly fallen away. Like, I’m sure when this word was being regularly used 100 and something years ago, there was heaps and heaps of awful, awful words, and most of them are gone, but this nasty little one is like…
HEDVIG: Stuck it out.
BEN: …hung around like a virus.
DANIEL: It’s been used for hundreds of years by white people as a sexual slur to demean and dehumanise Native American women. They are changing the name. Oh, sorry, Hedvig?
HEDVIG: No. I was just… I didn’t know that this word meant and I just learned what it meant, and I just went, “Oh, I see.”
BEN: It is a derogatory word for Native American woman. That is the simplest I can… And I’ve personally found in many of the places that I’ve traveled that there is a version of this for all sorts of different Indigenous peoples who have been horrifically colonised. We have one in Australia, which I’m not going to say. And, yeah, I’ve come across several in many different places.
DANIEL: The new name of the resort is Palisades Tahoe, which is very nice. And Cheyenne says this has the double feature of a racist name being changed as well as — this is the fun part — an explanation of Lake Tahoe being a tautological place name.
BEN: Oh, is this like the Tar Tar Pits?
DANIEL: The La Brea Tar Pits?
BEN: Yeah, the La Brea Tar Pits, which is really just like the the Tar Pits.
HEDVIG: Salsa sauce?
BEN: [CHUCKLES] Yeah.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] Yeah, salsa sauce.
HEDVIG: Latte milk. Yeah.
DANIEL: Yeah. The name Tahoe comes from the Washoe word for lake: Da ow. So, basically, when you say Lake Tahoe, you’re saying Lake Lake.
BEN: Ooh, can I share my favorite tautological name with people? I saw it on TikTok.
DANIEL: Okay.
HEDVIG: Yes, I’d look forward to it.
BEN: Basically, there’s a place somewhere in Wales, that was like: Hillberg Torpen. And each one of those different things all mean HILL and it was just successive peoples, just basically like, “What do you call that?” And they’re like, “TOR.” And they’re like, “All right! Well, our word for HILL is PEN, so we’re going to call it Torpen.” And then the next people were like BERG, and they’re like, “Ah, cool. We’ll call it Torpenberg,” and it just means hill, hill, hill.
[CHUCKLES]
HEDVIG: I like that.
DANIEL: You’re thinking of Torpenhow Hill.
BEN: Yes! Yes, that’s right. Torpenhow Hill.
DANIEL: Hill, hill, hill, hill.
HEDVIG: That’s funny.
DANIEL: The best I could do is Bredon Hill, which BRE was a hill, DON is a hill, and just successive waves of people forget what it meant and so, they just append their own things onto it. I love it.
BEN: But it’s great news that this place in Tahoe has changed its name. I think that’s really positive, and I’m glad that this momentum is keeping up.
DANIEL: Thanks to Cheyenne and Chris for that one. Who gave us this one?
HEDVIG: Oh, I think I found it on Twitter! I love Twitter sometimes. I would highly recommend Linguistics Twitter, if you…
BEN: [LAUGHS] Actually, I thought you were about to be like, “I would highly recommend anyone who hasn’t heard of it, check Twitter out!”
[LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: No, but a lot of people I know, say that their Twitter feeds make them feel anxious or depressed in various ways, and I found that Linguistics Twitter overall doesn’t make me feel anxious or depressed. And I’ve been keeping an eye out for some news for our news segment, and I found this interesting study by Joshua Connor Jackson and colleagues, they’re all from wildly different universities. So, they’re from Northern… Northwestern University in the United States. They’re from University of North Carolina, University of Auckland, my institution here in Leipzig, and also University of Otago. So they’ve somehow met, all of these lovely people, and they’ve done a study on how negative words mutate faster than positive words.
They’ve done one study on a big amount of cognates, so they’ve tried to recalculate how fast different words mutate across time in the Indo-European language family, and they also did an online study. And lo and behold — I don’t think anyone’s surprised — there’s a higher replacement rate for words with a negative connotation than with a positive.
DANIEL: Okay, so why would this be? Is that what I’m thinking of as the… I don’t want to call it the “euphemism treadmill” because that’s a Steven Pinker thing. We’ve got to find a different name for euphemism treadmill…
HEDVIG: Okay… I don’t…
DANIEL: …because Steven Pinker won’t be fully cancelled until we eradicate his terminology.
HEDVIG: Oh, are we cancelling all of his…? Hmm. Okay. [CHUCKLES] This is… I don’t know what to say, but like…
BEN: The sweary-to-good transitory property.
DANIEL: Yeah. Okay. Sounds good. Dang, why can’t I find my tweet on this? I’m going to have to… dang it. I’ll have to find it later.
HEDVIG: [LAUGHS] Ben is googling your…
BEN: So, it looks like we’re sticking with sweary-to-good transitory process!
DANIEL: Okay. So is that what’s happening here? You have a word like GROSS or FILTHY, and eventually we get sick of it and then we find something else?
HEDVIG: Yeah. So we’ve got words like DIRTY, STAB, and GUTS.
BEN: Just quickly, because I think I’ve come up with a better one than the one I came up with before, which wouldn’t be hard because it was terrible. Is there a negative version of a superlative? Do we have a word for that? Or can superlatives be positive and negative?
HEDVIG: Superlative. Superlative just means the extreme version of when you say good, better, best.
BEN: The most thing. Right?
HEDVIG: So, bad, worse, worst is also superlative. The worst is also superlative. It just means the most extreme.
BEN: Okay, so in that case, I would call for this property, superlative entropy.
HEDVIG: Oh my god, that is pretty impenetrable, Ben. What does that mean? [LAUGHS]
BEN: What do you mean? I feel like that’s super self-explanatory.
HEDVIG: No! You used the word ENTROPY.
BEN: Yeah, exactly.
DANIEL: I need help.
BEN: Okay, so entropy, right, is this notion that everything eventually stops.
DANIEL: Everything winds down, nothing winds up.
BEN: Everything winds down, everything slows down, everything gets cooler, everything just eventually on a long enough timeline is going to stop. So, superlative entropy is this idea that no matter how intensely something something is… Eventually MORON, which was like a really intense word, just becomes nothing.
HEDVIG: Yeah…
DANIEL: So why is this happening…
BEN: [LAUGHS] Moving on!
DANIEL: Is it that the positive words are normal, and then the negative words are a takeoff on that so they can deviate lots? What’s the mechanism here?
BEN: I just feel as a layperson, my explanation, my nonlinguistic explanation is that when you’re pissed off, you wanna just like… It’s a little bit like a linguistic version of, like, chucking a tantrum. You don’t want to just sit there and calmly explain in simple language, “I feel that a thing has happened that is bad.” Right? You want to chuck your toys out of the cot. You want to just linguistically stomp around and throw some things and so you need a whole bunch of words to do it. You’re like: “Son of a… motherfucking, god, bitch.”
HEDVIG: That is… oh my god.
BEN: You know what I mean?
DANIEL: Mm-hmm.
HEDVIG: It’s so funny, Ben, it’s such an Australian response, I think, because I’m reading here in the paper that… because they did this study where individuals got to replace words and they were more likely to replace the words of negative concepts. Many of them themselves said that they found the words unpleasant, and wanted to replace them because they felt they were unpleasant. So, that’s sort of not… [LAUGHS]
BEN: That is not at all in line with my experience!
DANIEL: Yeah, but taboo replacement is totally a thing. We know that that’s a motivator for words getting turfed out of the language. Even unrelated words, like when FUCK came into vogue, other words that sounded like FUCK — like FUG and FECK and FACKS, not FAX that we know, but other words — people stopped using them and we no longer see them. So, this could be a case of taboo avoidance motivating the lexicon.
HEDVIG: It could. They do also mention… it’s funny, here in the paper they also say that they found that there’s been studies that show that people transmit positive words with higher fidelity than negative words. I think “transmit” here means “to the next generation”. But then, they also say that there’s another study showing that people transmit negative information with higher fidelity than positive information. So, it’s a little bit unclear. But all this paper can say for now at least, is that they found through two different methods, the tracing cognates back in time and individuals doing this online game kind of thing, that people do replace negative words at a larger frequency. Why seems to be maybe a bit harder to explain. If you have a good idea, why don’t you tell us because at least one of these people is a colleague of mine.
BEN: Cause we’re dry!
HEDVIG: [LAUGHS] And I could tell them your clever thoughts. It’s also a paper that is open access, it’s up as a preprint. So, anyone can read it, we can put it in the show notes.
BEN: Woo-hoo!
DANIEL: Wow. All right.
HEDVIG: Woo-hoo! Love open access.
BEN: Free academia, everyone’s favourite.
HEDVIG: Yeahhhhhh.
DANIEL: All right, what’s next, Hedvig, you’ve got one.
HEDVIG: Next up is a paper from some researchers from Zurich and colleagues. This is Ranacher et al. Or I’ve been corrected, it’s an Austrian named Ranacher, I think, is the correct pronunciation. So do you know what linguistic areas are?
BEN: The areas where languages happen to be, like the actual geographic map of languages?
HEDVIG: Ooo. That’s a very good point, because that’s a language area, and a linguistic area is a different thing. Oh, no!
DANIEL: Oh, no.
BEN: No, this is important. This is good. The dummy nonlinguist has stumbled into the briar patch.
HEDVIG: No, this is great.
BEN: And now you two need to take my hand and extract me.
DANIEL: No, I can’t, because what is this? Is it how some languages are…
BEN: Okay, Hedvig needs to take both of our hands and extract both of us!
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: Okay, so I know that languages sometimes resemble each other in ways because of inheritance — they’re related genetically — sometimes, it’s because there are things that are more or less intuitive, like onomatopoeia. But then, there are also areal features where languages have been in contact and they’ll resemble each other because they’re just near each other, even if they’re not related. Is that a linguistic area?
HEDVIG: Yes, that’s where we’re getting. Good job. Pew pew pew!
DANIEL: Thank you!
HEDVIG: A language area is the area where language is spoken. For example, I’m in Germany, the language area of Germany covers Germany and some parts of some neighbouring countries a little bit. And you can see maps of this. The most famous ones are made by Ethnologue. And you can see these beautiful maps with what’s known as polygons. So, they’re sort of blobs that sometimes follow nation boundaries, but very often don’t at all.
BEN: So that’s a language map, but that’s not what we’re talking about. We’re talking about a linguistic map.
HEDVIG: Yes. So particularly in the field of linguistic typology, people have been looking for linguistic areas. And these are areas where people say: hmm, just like how there are families for shared inheritance, maybe there are areas for particularly large amounts of shared horizontal transmission. So, when you borrow from your neighbor, that’s a linguistic area. One of the definitions of it is: say you have an area, and you have different languages in there, and they come from different language families. So far, so good?
DANIEL: Yeah, I’ve got a bunch of languages. They’re not related, but they’re near each other.
HEDVIG: They’re near each other. And they have relatives that are related to them that are further away, that are not inside the area. Right?
BEN: Mm-hmm.
DANIEL: Good so far.
HEDVIG: Good so far? And then within this area, they share certain features. Maybe their pronouns look a bit similar, or they share a bunch of vocabulary items, or they all have this super quirky phoneme that no one else has.
DANIEL: Because they’ve started to talk like each other, or sign like each other.
HEDVIG: Yes. And we can tell that they’re starting to talk like each other because this isn’t a trait that their relatives, their cousins outside of the area have.
DANIEL: Oh, they left the other people in the other areas behind.
HEDVIG: Yes.
BEN: I think I’ve understood this. Can I give you an example, Hedvig, and you tell me if I’ve got the right example, and I think this might help listeners who are still a bit confused?
HEDVIG: Yes.
BEN: So, my very limited understanding of, like, linguistic family trees and linguistic genealogy is that Basque, the Basque language, it’s unrelated to stuff around it from a linguistic point of view. So, it has nothing to do linguistically with French and has nothing to do linguistically with Spanish, the two languages that are directly around it. However, in that particular part of Spain, the Basque region, and France, you would possibly find that the Spanish and French speakers would have a few quirky little bits and pieces that are also features of Basque, but that aren’t features of French or Spanish.
HEDVIG: Yes. I should say: I don’t know if that’s true. That’s a good example. I don’t know if that’s true but that would be an example.
BEN: Yeah. That might not be, but if that was true that would be a linguistic area.
HEDVIG: That woud be perfect. Yes, that exactly.
DANIEL: I’m just upset that you’re neglecting the Basque-Korean connection here which, clearly, those two were… I’m kidding.
BEN: Oh, is this like an old hokey, like, Basque is actually secretly related to Korean but everyone’s like, “No, it’s not. Shut up.”
DANIEL: Don’t even start me on Klingon.
BEN: [LAUGHS] I won’t. I won’t start you on Klingon!
HEDVIG: I think there’s a funny thing about Basque. I think there’s a Basque/Icelandic pigeon, but never mind.
DANIEL: Oh wow.
BEN: Okay, yeah! Listen, now I’m going to be the person who grabs both of YOUR hands and drags YOU out of the linguistic tricky briar patch.
DANIEL: Save me.
HEDVIG: This paper by Ranacher et al have devised a new method of finding these linguistic areas. So, traditionally, these areas have been found by qualitatively manually saying, “I found a feature. I think this is an area.” And sometimes, people have said one trait is enough to establish an area, sometimes people have said, “No, there needs to be more.” People disagree on this, and that and blah, blah, blah. And they found a new cool way of taking a bunch of data, in this case, mainly grammatical data about languages and other structural data, and run this cool clustering algorithm that tries to find significant clusters that aren’t explained by shared inheritance or universal preference. So, precisely what Daniel said at the beginning.
So to do this, they used some data on languages in the Balkans and in the South America, and they found some areas that correspond to known areas of more contact. So, their method is picking out areas that seem to make sense. It’s really cool. And I should say, for full disclosure, that it’s so cool that I’m actually involved in a research project with these people on applying this method on another data set! So, I’m…
DANIEL: Nifty!
HEDVIG: Nifty! It is nifty and I’m very excited about it. I think this is a new example of this wave that’s been happening in linguistics over the past 10 years, where people are saying, “Oh, these concepts that people were working on qualitatively, manually crafting together, maybe we can automise and do this in a more large scale, and more honestly, objective way.” Computers don’t know anything more than what we tell them. So, they’re not likely to have biases.
BEN: So, they have all of our biases is what you’re saying.
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: Well, true.
HEDVIG: That was funny because we just ended on exactly the different notes! They don’t have the unknown biases at least.
BEN: I know what you mean! Yeah yeah yeah. True.
HEDVIG: This is yet another example of how to automise and objectify [???] traditional linguistic methodology. So, linguistic areas is a traditional thing that people have been making, but this is a new way of doing it. That’s really cool.
DANIEL: So I’ve got two questions. What will this help you to do?
HEDVIG: It will help you find linguistic areas.
DANIEL: Okay. And that’s good, because we don’t want to think that something is inheritance or universal tendency. We want to be able to tease those apart and say, “Ah, these resemble each other, but not because of inheritance. It’s contact.”
HEDVIG: Yes, that’s one of the reasons. And also, just for knowing things about migration and history, maybe if we apply this to an area where we don’t know as much about the history. So in the South American case and in the Balkan case, people know about some of the history between these communities. But if we apply it to a new place, we could learn new things about the history of those communities that we didn’t know before. So, we could find clusters that were unknown, and then we could look into those, sort of explorative and then you can look in and try and find out: “Ah, okay, these are clustering together.” And when you look, you might find something interesting about their history.
DANIEL: The other thing I wanted to know is they used grammatical features. Is there a good reason to do that? I thought you could use words, but is that a bad idea?
HEDVIG: No, you can use words. We’re actually going to be using some lexical items. It’s just that most sets of lists of words are basic vocabulary, so they’re super-duper inherited.
DANIEL: So, that kind of mucks it up. Okay.
HEDVIG: Yes.
DANIEL: Okay. Hey, well, congratulations on working with the team! That’s going to be really cool, and we’ll be interested to see what comes out of it.
HEDVIG: Yeah, I’m excited.
DANIEL: Sponcon alert. Give us 37 seconds. BOOP! Are you a language nerd? Maybe you love a good anagram or crossword puzzle? Well, have we got the podcast for you. Slate’s Spectacular Vernacular is a new podcast that explores language and plays with it.
HEDVIG: It’s hosted by Nicole Holliday, a linguistics professor at the University of Pennsylvania and a frequent guest on the show. And Ben Zimmer, a language columnist for The Wall Street Journal.
BEN: It’s out every other week and it brings you the latest news from the language world and offers you the chance to flllex your own linguistic skills with some wordplay, and maybe even win a prize.
DANIEL: Check out Spectacular Vernacular. New episodes every other Tuesday wherever you get your podcasts.
[TRANSITIONAL MUSIC]
DANIEL: This episode is about generativism, a school of linguistic thought that has been championed by Noam Chomsky and many other great linguists.
HEDVIG: Mhm.
DANIEL: Let me just start by saying that when I first got into linguistics, it was like walking into a room where there had been a huge fight. Everybody wants to tell you what the fight was about, and who did what, and you try to follow along, but there are a few things that are problematic. One is that everyone’s super, super angry about the fight. Number two, the fight is about stuff that’s really hard to understand. So, you kind of go along, and you try to understand and try to join into this discussion. I don’t want to say it’s a fight, but there have been battles.
HEDVIG: I think it’s a fight.
DANIEL: Okay. I’m glad to hear you say that. Am I getting this right, Hedvig?
HEDVIG: I think definitely, I felt very much the same way and I also found that there’s a lot of linguistics out there that has nothing to do with this fight, actually.
DANIEL: Hm.
HEDVIG: It depends a bit on where you do your undergraduate degree, how you were introduced to this fight. I think if you do it in Australia, or United States, or somewhere in Europe, you’re going to get quite different impressions.
DANIEL: My professor, John Robertson, was definitely an anti-Chomsky. There were Chomskyan linguists in the department. You know.
BEN: What was your one, Hedvig? Like, what side of the… What were the West Side Story… the Jets and the Sharks?
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] Yeah, exactly!
HEDVIG: I definitely grew up in a very functionalist department.
BEN: Which is non-Chomsky.
HEDVIG: Yes. But I’m contrarian, so when I was told…
BEN: Don’t do this thing.
HEDVIG: …don’t do this thing, I was like, “Uh-huh, uh-huh.”
BEN: You got your little Chomsky book and you put on a cardigan and you were like, “Wwwwwatch me!”
HEDVIG: I definitely was more intrigued than maybe some other. I still have not a generative, I should say, definitely not. But the thing that was people were trying to inject into me, which I felt was quite like, quite despite, this anger, I was quite, what’s it called, reticent?
DANIEL: Reticent.
BEN: Reticent.
HEDVIG: There we go, that word. Yeah. Which is one of the reasons I was so happy when you guys agreed to do these two shows. So, we have two shows, how it started and how it’s going, and today we are at the how it started show.
DANIEL: We had a bit of a chat recently with two linguists in the generative tradition, towering giants in the field. One is Professor David Adger at Queen Mary University of London. He’s the author of “Language Unlimited: The Science Behind Our Most Creative Power””. We also had a chat with John Goldsmith, a professor of linguistics at the University of Chicago. He’s a fellow at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the author of “Battle in the Mind Fields” with Bernard Laks.
There are going to be a few concepts that are going to come up here like a grammar and making a grammar that generates things. Also, nativism, the idea that at least some language knowledge is innate. We’re also going to be talking about the relationship between generativism and functionalism which… Hedvig, could you give me a fairly good definition of what a functionalist thinks?
HEDVIG: Oh. I actually think that it’s hard to describe generativism as a monolith, and it’s even harder to describe functionalist, but roughly you could say that one of the core areas of conflict is that functionalists believe that the main function of language is to communicate and that thing stem… part of what language looks like comes from the social interaction, the pragmatic sort of interaction between people and information transfer. Whereas generativists aren’t as enthused by that function of language. I would say that’s one of the reasons why it’s called functionalism.
DANIEL: Yeah, okay. At least you’re concerned with the functions of language, how it’s used. Versus a generativist who might be more concerned with language in the mind.
HEDVIG: Yes.
DANIEL: I feel like if you’ve got a grip on those concepts, then you’re ready to absorb this discussion that we had with David Adger and with John Goldsmith.
BEN: I did warn them! I did warn them at the start of the show: I hope your pencils are sharpened, this one’s not for slouches! Come on! Let’s do it!
DANIEL: John, I’d like to ask you about what’s become known as the Chomskyan revolution. What were you doing at the time?
JOHN GOLDSMITH: I was a student at MIT in what you might call the second generation of students. I was there from ’72 to ’76. I worked closely with Morris Halle and to some degree with Noam Chomsky and Paul Kiparsky and Haj Ross. And it was really wonderful time to be in grad school and I enjoyed it very much. In retrospect, there’s a lot of things I would have done differently if I had been in charge, but the fact is, for me, it was a great education and a wonderful experience.
DANIEL: Wow.
HEDVIG: Wow.
DANIEL: Heady days.
JOHN: Yeah.
DANIEL: What was so different about generativism? What were the goals of this new movement?
JOHN: It didn’t feel new at that point. It felt… Since I started there in ’72, that means I applied to grad school a year later, and I was in college at that point. And it already seemed like Chomsky was the dominant force on the scene as if there really wasn’t much else. I now know that that’s really wrong. It reminds me often of how in the Bible, it talks about Cain and Abel going out to marry somebody in a neighboring community. And, of course, there couldn’t have been any other people there in the scene. [LAUGHTER] That’s how it was in linguistics. It seemed like there was Chomsky at MIT and generative grammarians, and there wasn’t anything else, although the journals, they had been publishing for 40, 50 years.
Anyway, by the time I got to MIT, Chomsky was working primarily on syntax at that point. In the ’50s when he got started, he worked on lots of areas; he worked on phonology, he worked on mathematical linguistics, and he said later that he decided he had to give up phonology and mathematical linguistics, because he wanted to do politics as well. And so that’s an important part of the answer, I think, to your question, that Chomsky was doing politics. I think all of us saw that side of him as an important part, as a defining part of who he was. I certainly felt that way, even though I probably didn’t articulate it very much. But I first became aware of Noam Chomsky as a person, as an intellectual in 1969, I saw him give a talk at Cornell University on the responsibility of intellectuals. It was very impressive and he articulated a lot of thoughts that I had, that I’d never been able to put into words. And so coming to MIT was coming to work both with somebody who seemed like the center of everything on linguistics, but also an important public intellectual.
I’ll tell you an anecdote. I remember the very first class that I went to at MIT, so this was the fall of ’72 — this was Chomsky’s class, I should say. It was a reasonable size room, maybe 45–50 seats there, but there were many more people than that. People were standing by the windows and sitting down. I had gotten there early as I usually do, like I did this morning, and sat down one of the chairs in the front seat. I didn’t know anybody around me. And then, at some point, right on time, Chomsky walked into the room, and he comes up to the person who is sitting next to me. And Noam says, “Hi.” And I later found it was Wayne O’Neil, Wayne says, “Hi, Noam. Do you understand what’s going on in Vietnam now?” And Noam says, “Yeah, I think I do.” And Wayne says, “Well, you’ve got to tell me about it.” And then, Chomsky walked up to the front of the room and started talking. So, it seemed like a very fitting way for the class to begin. That’s a bit of what MIT felt like at the time.
DANIEL: David, what’s your view? How was generativism different from what came before?
DAVID ADGER: My understanding is that basically, Chomsky arrived on the scene where fundamentally, the approach to language was deeply surfacey, it was very behavioristic. So, you looked at just the language you recorded in field work sessions. And then, you took that as the primary data and what you did is you applied various processes to it to determine what the phonemes were. Once you had the phonemes, you looked at sequences of phonemes and built up morphemes, which are like things like DOG, or -S to give you DOGS. And then on top of that, then you built up grammatical categories, things like nouns and verbs by looking at how the morphemes are distributed in the sentences you’ve recorded, and so on.
The whole focus was on external behaviour and systems or processes, which you could apply to that external behaviour and which would give you an analysis of the language. So the idea was you should have some kind of mechanism whereby you just apply it to the data and, poof! what you get is a grammar of the language, and that gives you an understanding of that language.
And basically, Chomsky came along with a very different point of view. He made a bunch of arguments that that approach was just never going to work. The argument really was… the core argument, I think, was more or less: look, in no science, do you have something where you just look at the data, and then apply a procedure to whatever data you’ve collected, and get a theory. That just doesn’t happen in the sciences. What he said is, “That shouldn’t really happen in linguistics either. What we need to do is we need to build a good theory that explains the data.” So, what you’re trying to do is not just take the data initially, and then extract something from that. What you’re really, in a sense, doing is saying: there’s something else going on which gives rise to that data, something which produces the data, something which, if you like, generates that data.
Of course, since that data is never ending — that is, there’s no in principle, longest sentence in a language — whatever generates or produces that data, whatever system gives you that, that has to be a system that is essentially going to give you an unbounded number of sentences. So, that’s what Chomsky did. He came in and he said, “You guys are doing all this wrong. We need to be a bit more like the real sciences and actually build a theory. And that theory will generate the data from us, rather than looking at the data and applying some processes to derive a theory.” So, I think that was the big idea.
DANIEL: So this reminds me of physics. If I want to know how long it’s going to take a ball of a certain size to fall from a certain building height, I can drop the ball a bunch of times, and I’ll get observations that are kind of accurate, kind of not accurate because my stopwatch isn’t very good, or it’s only so good. And what a mathematician would say is, “No, no, no, I’ve got an equation that will tell you exactly how long it’ll take under ideal conditions. Your observations are just deviations from my equation.” So, what Chomsky is doing is he’s saying, “Let’s work on the equation.”
DAVID: That’s kind of spot on, I think. It’s a very particular kind of equation, because, as I said earlier on, for human language, and specifically for syntax, for the grammar of human languages, there’s an unbounded number of sentences that we can have, right? We just use those sentences as we feel like. We just kind of generate them on the fly, right? What you’ve got to somehow do is not just write the equation, but that equation has to be a certain kind of equation. It has to be an equation which gives you an infinite set of outcomes, right? And that’s interesting, because, we human beings are not infinite in any sense, right? We’re finite creatures.
And so the big thing then is, how do you get that unbounded output from a finite creature? And Chomsky appealed to a particular kind of mathematics whose job is specifically to do that. That was the theory of computability, what was at the time called Recursive Function Theory. Sounds terrifying but basically, it’s kind of the basis of how most computing systems work, right? It just basically says, you’ve got a set of primitives — of things you can’t break down any further — and a set of ways of putting those primitives together. And you can use your maths to have a finite set of primitives, finite number of ways of combining them to give an infinite or unbounded set of outputs. And Chomsky was arguing that’s the way to think about this, particularly the syntax of human languages. So, you don’t just look at the data and extract from it the patterns. What you do is, you say, “No, there’s an underlying system that, even though we’re finite, will generate an infinite number of patterns.”
JOHN: Chomsky had a couple of things to offer the field that were really quite new. And the first basically was to say that we can think about a grammar as a mathematical — or the term I’d like to use is an algebraic — object. If I use the word ‘algebraic,’ it isn’t going to mean a whole lot to most people, and I think probably a more simpler and probably a better way to put it is writing a computer program. So what Chomsky did was he said, “First of all, our task is no longer going to be — as everybody had assumed at to this point — our task is no longer to be able to analyze any sentence that comes from a given language. Our task is going to be to write a computer program that generates all the grammatical sentences and none of the ungrammatical sentences.” So those are two big ideas. They don’t sound big the way I put them just now, but they really were. So what were the two?
The first was saying that what a linguist is trying to do is to write a computer program. Up to that point, really, nobody knew programming. There barely was such a thing as computer programming. So, linguists had taken their task to be, “Well, I want to analyze English or Swahili, and that means if you give me a sentence of it, I can break it down into the pieces and tell you how the pieces fit together.” And Chomsky turned that around. He saw there were a lot of difficulties that linguists were facing when they posed the question that way. And he said, “No, let’s think about it a different way. Let’s generate the sentences,” which essentially is where the word generative comes from. But then, he said a second thing, which in the last 50 years has just sounded like something completely normal. And that is: the goal of the linguist is to separate the grammatical from the ungrammatical sentences — the good, from the bad, you might say. And if that sounds perfectly natural to you, it’s only because Chomsky has said so.
DANIEL: David, I want to ask you about Universal Grammar and how it relates to this question of what a language can be. How do you think of Universal Grammar, and how might this be different from what functionalists think?
DAVID: The way that I think about this at least is that Universal Grammar, which is the notion that generativists generally believe in — “believe” is just a rubbish word, but “hypothesise” — is intended essentially as an envelope that says what language will not be like. And then within that, there can be all sorts of functionalist, communicative stuff that actually makes languages change in the way they do. I’ve done quite a bit of work on sociolinguistics and how it interacts with generative grammar. And I think at certain periods during an individual’s lifespan, the grammars are — I mean, maybe their whole lifespan — the grammars can be really pretty variable. And then, that variability can be taken advantage of by the group, in a sense. You might think, “Ooh, that’s a cool way of saying this.” I mean you don’t think that, but that’s how your cognitive systems might end up, and then everyone starts drifting towards that.
Grammars themselves have to have a space in them for variability. But the crucial point, I think, is that from a generative perspective anyway, what happens, grammars, they create an envelope within which all of that variability takes place. And there may be even further restrictions on that. There might be formal restrictions than that. So, the whole idea behind the Principles and Parameters approach was that actually, not only are some things ruled out, but when a language does one thing, it’s going to do a bunch of other things as well.
DANIEL: Syntax is really cool, but there’s a lot of other stuff in linguistics, like phonology, morphologies, sociolinguistics…
HEDVIG: Neuro…
DANIEL: …semantics, child language acquisition. Do you get a sense of why Chomsky thought that syntax was really the place that was most properly the concern of linguists?
JOHN: Yeah, actually, I’d like to give two responses to that; they’re quite different. The first is that you’ve pointed to some areas like sociolinguistics which were, in a sense, wiped off the map by some of the decisions that Chomsky made. I gave you a partial answer a second ago when I talked about some of the new things that Chomsky said. But in the ’60s, he took a step forward which he hadn’t before, and that was to come up with or to propose and to defend a theory of mind that he thought would be appropriate for language using people like us as humans. He thought of it as cartesian, he thought of it as rationalist. But most importantly, he didn’t think of it as social. He didn’t think of there being anything like social knowledge or culture or anything of the sort. In a certain sense, he really was — and is — a cartesian in the sense that all that matters is a single individual mind. That, again, was very new for linguistics, because linguistics in the United States was really rooted in, well, three approaches.
The first was good old historical linguistics, people who studied Greek and Latin and Sanskrit and all those languages which served as an important part of linguistics, especially in the 19th century. But there was also sociology and anthropology, and they were studying language, and they are studying language, as a social phenomenon. Chomsky was not interested in that in any way, and left no room for it in his model of what’s going on. For Chomsky, there’s only individuals and species. If you want to study the species, you study Universal Grammar. If you want to study individuals, you can try to figure out their grammar, but there’s no room there for people, and so there’s no room for sociolinguistics. And that really means that over the last 50 years, there’s been an undeclared war — maybe that’s too strong a word — between people doing Chomskyan linguistics and people doing, let’s say, Labovian linguistics, for lack of a better word, sociolinguistics, and Labov has been a major mover in that way.
HEDVIG: Is it right to think about that there were a movement of scholars and linguistics, Chomsky being one of them, that thought that the point of language was to do with sorting and thinking and doing things inside your head, your internal monologue, and your cognitive processes, and that the social communication between individuals was sort of like a secondary point. Is that to characterise it correctly, or is that…?
JOHN: Yeah, I think that’s fair to say. I think if Chomsky were forced to respond to that, he would say, “Yeah, that’s what I think.” But they didn’t even really leave a secondary role for communication. When I say “they”, again, I’m speaking of the core Chomskyan project. It’s mind, and not in a social context, not in a context in which one person is interacting with another.
DANIEL: And I remember how he even said that: I wouldn’t say that language is for communication, you can certainly do that with language, but you can do it with a haircut.
JOHN: [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: Oh, wow.
JOHN: Yeah. That’s the Saussure that was picked up by the French, that anything can be a symbolic system, including how you cut your hair and the car that you buy. You asked another question, or you asked a question, I only gave half an answer to it. So let me…
DANIEL: Go ahead.
HEDVIG: Yes, please.
JOHN: Let me answer the other half. And that was, why did Chomsky choose syntax to keep working on and not phonology and not mathematical linguistics? I think the answer probably is that he, like everybody else, realised that his contribution in syntax was really unique and important. In the 1950s, linguists around him, people like Zellig Harris his teacher, or Kenneth Pike, or Charles Hockett, they were trying to develop ideas that their teachers like Edward Sapir and Leonard Bloomfield had developed. And everybody recognized that syntax was the next frontier, so to speak. And people had ideas how to move forward with it, but they knew that they were only scratching the surface. When Chomsky came along in 1957 with Syntactic Structures and other things that he published just after that, people stood up and they looked and they said, “Wow, this is fantastic! This is really what we’ve been waiting for.” And I think that’s the answer, that he really had new ideas that not only did he think that they were interesting and revolutionary, other people did too.
DANIEL: We’ve talked about language and children. Because children have human brains, they acquire a language eventually. And so one term that comes up in connection with generativism is nativism, the idea that some aspects of language are inborn, or that language is part of our genetic human inheritance, or even in some cases that there are specific structures that humans are born with. How much of that am I getting right? And what’s the relationship between generativism and nativism in your view?
DAVID: So I try to generally avoid the word ‘innate’ when I’m talking about these things, or “nativism” or those kinds of words.
DANIEL: Oh!
DAVID: Partly because everyone thinks there’s a ton of innate stuff in the mind, right? There is no one these days who thinks we are born with a blank slate. So the question is not so much what is innate, it’s what is specific to language, okay? Then, there’s a more specific question to that, which is what we mean by language. There’s a ton of stuff that’s innate in people’s minds, like capacities to extract patterns and follow frequencies and all that kind of stuff. Everyone agrees that. And then, there’s the question of what is specific to language, where we understand language as “grammar” in this particular case. That is, what’s specific to grammar, and then that’s a question. There could be nothing specific to grammar, in which case, you would essentially be within the more functionalist lines, and you’d say, “All the generalisations the typologists and linguists make about grammar, they are all an effect of other kinds of properties of the brain that have nothing to do with language.” They may have to do with processing, or pattern extraction, or frequency or whatever. And they all have something to do with language from that perspective, but there’s nothing that is specific to language and unique to language.
The generative perspective, the argument is there is something specific and unique to language, okay? That’s what we call UG. And then what is that? The arguments for that are generally these poverty-of-stimulus-type arguments. So, that would be whatever the primitives of that knowledge are, that’s what specific to language.
DANIEL: I’ve heard it expressed the children are good at doing certain language things, even though they never hear input like that.
DAVID: Yeah, that’s poverty of stimulus, basically. Yeah.
DANIEL: Do you think that’s true?
DAVID: I do. Yeah. I mean, we wouldn’t even need to go to children, we can go to adults. There are very complex things, very complex pieces of knowledge about grammar that you can test experimentally, that humans in general seem to have, that is not in their input.
DANIEL: The example that I always hear is: The man is singing. The man is tall. Is the man who is singing tall? I always say that. And I never say: Is the man who singing is tall? I could say that, but I never do. And adults and children never say that either. They always do it the way that sounds good.
DAVID: Yeah. That’s a classic example and there have been many, many attempts to try and make that work through non-language-specific means. I didn’t really know how to evaluate them at this point. I mean, maybe some work, maybe some don’t. I have another example, which I quite like, which might appeal to people who do typology as well. So, that’s an example I stuck in one of the chapters of this Language Unlimited book of mine, which is about possessors in languages like English or German or whatever. You say: David’s cat. You could also say: David’s cat’s tail. You can say: Anson’s partners cat’s tail. You can say: Anson’s neighbor’s partner’s friend’s cat’s tail, and so on, right? Actually, what you end up with is you end up with being able… you kind of lose track of who’s doing what to him… who’s owning whom I guess. But you can repeat this at will, right? There’s a pattern there. And you can get that pattern of meaning, it clearly has a meaning, although your semantic systems might get bored after a while.
Now, it’s really interesting: if you look at languages of the world, there are some languages which have this kind of syntax in them, like English and Scottish Gaelic, and Mandarin, and so on. And there are some languages, which have been reported to only allow one possessor. So, you can say: David’s cat, but you can’t say: David’s friend’s cat. Okay? Those are languages, like standard German has been argued to be like that. And, Dan Everett’s work on Pirahã argued that Pirahã is like that as well. Not so many languages like that, but people have argued the same thing.
HEDVIG: It’s good for me to know about standard German. It’s what I’m trying to learn at the moment!
DAVID: Excellent! Dutch has been claimed to be like this as well. I did some work in Dutch, it doesn’t quite look like that. And so there’s a really interesting question there, right? We know that babies are able to discern things automatically, which are in very small numbers. Groups of two, or groups of three, compared to larger groups, like five, they can’t look at that and go, “Oo, that’s five.” What they do is they cut it into two groups, of three and a two. So, this is a general non-language specific capacity called subitisation. Actually, crows can do it. All sorts of animals can do this. You can determine the number of things in a very small group, and you can also determine the relative sizes of large groups. So, that’s another kind of skill that seems to be innate, but not language specific. Now, here’s an interesting question. We don’t know of any languages that restrict the number of possessives to two. This would be a language where you could say: David’s cat, David’s friend’s cat, but not David’s friend’s cat’s tail. Okay?
HEDVIG: Okay, you either cut at one or…
DAVID: We don’t know of any languages…
HEDVIG: …infinite.
DAVID: …or infinite.
HEDVIG: …or very large at least.
DAVID: Yeah, very large. I mean probably not infinite because you’ll die, but yes. So then, there’s a really interesting question about why that typological generalisation holds. And further, if you look at languages like English, which do allow multiple possessors and you look at the input to children from their caregivers — so Avery Andrews has done this by looking at the CHILDES database in English, which is you guys maybe know about —
DANIEL: Love it.
DAVID: …and what he found is basically, in that you get a lot of single possessors, a small number of two possessors, and a tiny number… actually, no, that’s it.
HEDVIG: [GIGGLES]
DAVID: I think there might be some cases of John’s baby’s mother’s name. I think there might be a bunch, there might be some with three. But they all involve just basically the word NAME as the noun. I think there’s 82 examples, or something like that.
Okay, so here’s the question for both the typologists and the language acquisition people, which is: why, given that the input to the kids is only two, very rarely three, why do kids learn to do it with four or five? How do kids go from finite data — in fact, highly restricted finite data — to an infinite set of possibilities? And equally, why do languages never end up with just two? Since that’s what kids hear.
HEDVIG: Okay. Yeah, why?
DAVID: Yeah. Why?
HEDVIG: Oh. I thought you were going to tell us! [LAUGHS]
DAVID: Well, I can tell you why from a generative perspective, but I think that this is a really interesting poverty-of-stimulus-type case, because we know what the stimulus is. We know it’s poor. We should expect, therefore, to find languages… some language somewhere where you can say: David’s friend’s cat and not David’s friend’s cat’s tail. Right? We know that there is extralinguistic capacity, innate subitisation skills, where you can determine two things. We know that kids can learn sequences. Right? They learn one, two, three quite happily. There’s all the old work of psychologists that show that sequence learning, they can sequence different-sized blocks very early on and so on. So there’s an interesting question about what we’d rule that out. I’ve given you… it was Daniel who picked up the one about singing and talking to you or whatever.
DANIEL: The man who is singing is tall.
DAVID: Yeah. That’s an example that Chomsky came up with in the ’60s, it’s in Language and Mind, I believe. But there — I was going to say an infinite amount, there probably is an infinite amount — but there is an enormous amount of similar kinds of cases all around us, if we just look. And then, what functionalists end up having to do is appeal to something else that will then explain why the syntax of possessive recursion is as restricted as it is. I asked Adele Goldberg about this, and she said, “Yeah, it’s the semantics. The semantics restrict it in some fashion.” And actually, Stefan Müller, who is an HPSG person, has also suggested the same. But without a theory of what the semantics is of this, I don’t know even know what that means. There’s absolutely no sense in which I can’t have a flat semantics for this. There is something, and David owns that something, and that something is a cat, and so on. The cat, and there is something else, and something else is a tail, and the cat has the tail and so on. These are very flat semantics. In fact, that would be the normal predicate logic semantics for something like this and it’s flat. I don’t know why you should expect to get a recursive structure in the syntax, a structure with a noun-phrase embedded inside another one. So, you can maybe try and say that it’s because of other stuff, but I think those are the kinds of interesting challenge for functional accounts that need to be dealt with.
DANIEL: John, I’d like to ask you, what aspects of language do you think might be innate?
JOHN: I think it’s too early in the development of our scientific knowledge about language to have anything other than an opinion. And everybody has an opinion — or maybe several opinions — and those opinions influence what we do. But I don’t think we’re at a point where we have any particular, any real scientific knowledge as to what’s innate. Let me put it a slightly different way. Chomsky and people following Chomsky used to like to point to the empiricists in the 17th and 18th century. Philosophers like David Hume and before him, John Locke. And they used to like to point at them and say those are the empiricists. And they famously said there’s nothing in the mind that doesn’t get there through the senses. Everything in your mind originally came in, if i’s language, through your ears. And they liked to say that even in the 20th century, that was a fitting way to describe what the predecessors to generative grammar were doing. I don’t think that’s right. I don’t think anybody could be an empiricist anymore in the way that people back in the halcyon days of empiricism in the 17th and 18th century. Nobody’s an empiricist that way. And certainly, if you’ve thought a bit about learning, anybody who’s thought about learning realizes that learning is done based on the architecture or the hardware, however you want to put it, of the device that’s learning.
So, actually, now, let me break into what I do for the last, I don’t know, 20 years, I’ve been working on developing a computer program that breaks words down into pieces. And if you have a word like TRANSFORMATIONS, you can break that down into a word TRANSFORMATION that’s got an S on the end, and you’ve got inside that TRANSFORM, and a suffix -ATION, and so forth. We know of those things, as speakers of English, that’s how we learn it. And I’ve been working on a program that does that, not for English, but for any language, that’s the goal. You put in a text in any language and out come those pieces of the word. It’s great fun, I have to say, it’s really great fun to put in a language that I’ve never worked on and see what comes out and see what it gets right, what it gets wrong.
But to do that, I have to make assumptions about what capabilities I want to give to the program. And the only thing that makes what I’m doing different from what anybody else is doing, is that I’m doing with a computer program rather than, so to speak, thinking it through in my head without a computer. So everybody makes assumptions as to what’s built in. Some people think that if psychology, for example, or neurobiology points to something as being present in the human brain, that the smart money should go with that for language also. I actually don’t feel that way. I don’t think Chomsky feels that way, either. I don’t look to psychology or neurobiology for inspiration as to what might be or… well, let’s just say what might be native. But I certainly have respect for people that do, and I’m sure I’m in a small minority in that way.
DANIEL: Well, it sounds like we’re really talking about two different things when we talk about generativism versus nativism. They touch, and they have a long history of traveling together, but they’re not really the same thing.
JOHN: Yeah, absolutely. You can be a generativist without being a nativist. And in some ways, I think Chomsky has come around to that, and I’ll say why in a second. And you can certainly be a nativist without being a generativist. A nativist ultimately is somebody who says, “Here’s what we have to begin the learning process with. I have to assume that the hardware is the following.” But if they say I’m not interested in separating the grammatical from the ungrammatical, as let’s say computational linguist, anybody working from Microsoft doing computational linguist is not interested in separating the two. And then really, by definition, they’re not generative grammarians. So, you absolutely can be a nativist without being a generativist.
And I would say the early Chomsky was a generativist without being a nativist. So why am I saying that he’s come around to that now? Over the last 10 years, he has said some things to support the idea that possibly the only thing you need to know, only thing you need to have access to, is some very abstract notion of simplicity, some computational notion of simplicity. And that’s an idea I’ve been very comfortable with for the last maybe 20 years. If you can define a notion of simplicity that really is mathematical and doesn’t depend on anything in this finite world that we live in, then you’re not a nativist. You’re really only appealing to platonic notions of what makes one analysis better than another. So, there’s no question in my mind. I think the right answer to your question is, yeah, nativism and generativism are logically independent.
DANIEL: We’ve talked about functionalism and generativism, but I feel like I really want to focus on what they are. We’ve talked about what generativism is, but what is functionalism? And how do the goals of functionalism differ?
JOHN: I don’t really think that the term ‘functionalism’ describes a single thing, a coherent object. I tend to think that anybody who focuses on grammar but distances themselves from generativism is viewed as a functionalist, but I think there are many different ways to do that. Or to maybe put it slightly differently: if a person’s work doesn’t naturally fall into some well-known category, let’s say, like sociolinguistics or Chomskyan linguistics, that functionalism is sort of a category of last resort.
HEDVIG: Like a trash bin category!
JOHN: Well, you know, I wasn’t going to use a metaphor like that but [CHUCKLES] you could…
HEDVIG: [LAUGHS]
JOHN: …say that. You could also just a default category or whatever.
HEDVIG: Okay, default. Default is better, you’re right.
JOHN: [CHUCKLES] We all need categories, I suppose, to try to put the people that we know, or the people we read into, we need these categories and maybe we shouldn’t rely on them, but we tend to. So I would tend to think that the term ‘functionalism’ is something that we could probably get rid of. We could stop using and we wouldn’t miss it if we’d stop using it.
HEDVIG: I think the reason why we wanted to do this episode is, as I think Daniel talked about in the beginning, before we started recording maybe, there’s this perception that there’s a war going on. But you get called into the troops without having a basis of like, what the conflict is, or if the conflict is about something that concerns you, which it isn’t always, honestly.
DAVID: I mean, there’s obviously sociological reasons for this, I think. Like, you know. It’s quite interesting, if you talk to older linguists who maybe were students of Chomsky and then ended up disagreeing with him, those people are often quite openminded about the generativist-functionalist divide. But actually, sometimes I find, when you talk to younger people, some of the older people’s anti-generativism has solidified in some younger people, and it’s totally gone away in other ones. Then, you get these, like, sociological groupings of people. Some people who are like, “Yeah, I don’t really care about this stuff,” or, “I think that we’re more or less saying the same thing, just about different stuff.” And other people are like saying, “No, functionalists have no idea what they’re doing,” or, “No, generativists have no idea what they’re doing.” And then those are the loud people, right? Usually.
I think that we should do as much as we can to encourage there to be conversation, not conflict. I think that’s obviously the way that you want to go with these things. I always think it’s really important to read across different research ideas, right? People always have really good ideas in all sorts of different frameworks, where you can just go, “Oh, and these guys said this and that’s really interesting. I’m going to take that and incorporate it into my work, and let’s see how that will go.” And I think that that’s way better than saying, “I will have nothing to do with these people.” I noticed this very much when I started to work on sociolinguistics and syntax and their connection. I gave this talk on dialectal variation in Buckie, which is a tiny little fishing village up in the north of Scotland, with my friend Jen Smith, who is from there, and she’s a big figure in sociolinguistics, and works in that stuff. And I remember we gave this talk a long time ago, back in 2003 or something like that, at a variationist conference. And someone turned to one of Jen’s students in the audience and said, “This is dangerous stuff!”
[LAUGHTER]
DAVID: And of course, the student then told Jen, right? And that was because he was pooling together sociolinguistics and formal minimalist syntax in an attempt to see how they could talk to each other, and they didn’t like that. It’s always good to do dangerous stuff, I think, right?
HEDVIG: We have one final question to you. You’ve been partaking in the first part of two episodes about generativism. The second part we’re going to talk to — I hope I don’t offend you by saying — more younger, more newly graduated students who are also thinking about these issues, but from the next generation, so to speak. I was wondering if, to our listeners or to them, there’s anything you wanted to say about the legacy of generative theories or these discussions that you think is really important for the next generation, so to speak?
JOHN: I’d actually like to generalise that question a little bit, because you sent me some questions ahead of time, and you put the question in terms in a more slightly more general context about the flow of information from one generation to another. The question you asked me just now has to do with — or the way I’m interpreting it is — what’s something important that the next generation should be certain not to miss out on, or to forget, or not to capture? And I could try to give you an answer to that, but I’m actually more interested in the larger question, which is: how does it happen that knowledge and wisdom fails to be passed from generation to generation? And I think that this is an enormous phenomenon in disciplines, especially in the social sciences, and especially outside the natural sciences, but perhaps even including them to a lesser degree. I think, in linguistics, it’s a tremendous problem.
I’ve been rereading actually some work from the 1950s on phonology, because I’m writing about it now. And I’m struck once again by how generative grammarians, generative phonologists in particular, had to rediscover — to some extent, on their own — things that were published by famous people in important venues during the 1940s and ’50s. Just publishing something isn’t good enough. We need better ways of making it easy for the next generation, so to speak, to not to forget what preceding generations have learned. And to some degree, this book that I published that you mentioned at the beginning of the hour, “Battle in the Mind Fields””, is an attempt to encourage younger linguists to do exactly that. We don’t set down a curriculum of what it is that you’re supposed to learn, but we make the case that this is something that’s important for the discipline, that we need to stop forgetting what it is that we’ve already learned. So, what is important? What’s the most important thing for generativism, to make sure the next generation hasn’t forgotten?
That’s a difficult question. Feynman, Richard Feynman said that if there was one thing that he wanted the next civilisation not to forget, that would be that all matter is made out of these little things we call atoms. I would say that the most important thing is to recognize that a formal account, a mathematical account of language has to be borne in mind, a computational model is important. That may not be the whole truth, but it’s an important part of the truth. But just trying to boil it down to a single sentence, that can’t be enough. We need to make it easy. We need to make it possible and easy for all generations to have access to what we think of as the most important conclusions of our generation, because there are strong social and psychological reasons for people to reject the work of their teacher’s generation, and sometimes their grand-teachers — so to speak, going back two generations — but this is one of the themes of “Battle in the Mind Fields”. The fact that there are perfectly valid reasons for challenging what earlier linguists have said is perfectly reasonable thing to do, but one of the consequences of that is pooh-poohing and not paying attention to the important points that that they were making.
I’ll give one example, you can edit this out. [LAUGHTER] When Paul Kiparsky created Lexical Phonology — along with some other people, but I’d give most of the credit to him in the early 1980s — what he was doing was taking Harris’s theory of phonology and morphophonology and reconstructing it in a generative context. I asked him about that at one point, he said, “Oh, I never thought of it that way.” But it’s exactly what he was doing, and it was the right thing to do. I would have been happier if he had said, “Oh, yeah, of course, that’s what I was doing. I’m glad you noticed.” But generative grammar, or rather generative phonology, threw out that difference, rejected it, the difference between phonology and morphophonology. But it had to be brought back in and it was brought back in, but not in a conscious and intellectually rich, articulated way. So, that’s the best answer I can give you.
BEN: I feel like now you guys are unfortunately in a little bit of the same boat that physicists are still in with gravity. Right? They’re not there yet with figuring out truly, properly, what it is that forms that force. And similarly, you can’t bust open a cell and be like, “Yay, generativism. We found it.”
DAVID: I mean, you’re absolutely right, Ben. You said unfortunately, I think of that a:s fortunately!
[LAUGHTER]
DAVID: There’s a lot of work still to do.
HEDVIG: Still in the “fuck around” phase of “fuck around and find out””?
[LAUGHTER]
DAVID: Yeah, more or less! I definitely feel that a great deal of the work in generative syntax, let’s say, which is what I know most about, over the last decades has been a bit like chemists in the 18th century, or whatever, like, kind of just trying to figure out what the stuff is, what the big molecules are, in a sense. So what are the things that are around there? And there’s not been so much work — I mean Chomsky does this and a number of other people do this — there’s not been so much work in trying to get down to those primitive. A lot of people just take the theory off the shelf, and go, “Okay, this one will do.” And then, you kind of like say, “How does this explain the generalisations we’ve got?” So, we’re absolutely nowhere near yet. And there’s a big, big problem, which is that we don’t really understand how knowledge maps to cellular structure in the brain, right? In any domain, never mind just linguistics. We really have very little understanding of… how does the fact that I’m having a complex thought about linguistic theory, what the hell is that in my neural structure? We don’t know anything like that! I don’t know if we ever will.
BEN: Yeah, we’re basically at the stage of being able to go, “Ooh, look, some pretty lights!”
DAVID: That’s exactly where we’re at. There is some interesting stuff in the pretty lights, so you know. But I don’t know how much… There are a lot of people that know a lot more about neurology, the physiology of neurons, and how they map to memory and knowledge structure than I do. But you know, there’s certain things… I don’t know, we don’t know how to explain why we do any of the things we do, why we say what we want to say. We don’t know why… like, I saw a caterpillar on my walk yesterday, and it was kind of like walking in the direction it was walking, and then it went around a leaf. And I’m like: we don’t have the neurological understanding to know why that happens, even something as simple as that. Maybe we could if we could MRI a caterpillar, I don’t know. So I think that there is a gap, there’s absolutely a gap. I don’t think it will never be bridged. I don’t know if it will be bridged soon, but one can hope.
DANIEL: We’ve been talking to Professor David Adger of Queen Mary University and Professor John Goldsmith of the University of Chicago. =Okay, that was a lot of terrain to cover.
[CHUCKLES]
BEN: Whee-hee-hee-hee! We’ve done a lot.
HEDVIG: Yeah. I’m glad our listeners were with us for that ride. I thought that was really revealing and we learned a lot of interesting things.
BEN: I told you to sharpen your pencils! Don’t say you weren’t warned, you were warned. I warned you.
DANIEL: Do you get the impression that generativism is fading a bit, or is it as strong as ever?
HEDVIG: I think maybe it is diversifying and becoming a bit blurred at the edges. I think that there are many different types of generativists, and that they’re not a monolith. I think this happens with any good academic field or research question, is it’s very sharply defined at its onset. And then, it becomes more blurry and blurry as it starts interacting with neighbouring disciplines. It’s usually a good thing. It usually generates better research.
DANIEL: Yeah, cross-pollination is great. You don’t want to have a discipline that’s completely insular.
HEDVIG: Yeah, exactly.
BEN: The vibe I get is that it’s just kind of quite old as a concept. It’s been around for a really long time now, and a lot of different people have taken some stuff from it, but then not other stuff from it. It certainly isn’t irrelevant, but it’s like a grandfatherly-type school of thought that has influenced a lot of things and has generated a lot of discussion, and it’s not irrelevant and it’s still important to know about and to think about. But at the same time, like, sort of the vibe that I personally get is that some people are just kind of like, “Mm, yeah, it’s a thing but like, I want to talk about this other stuff now.” Do you know what I mean?
HEDVIG: Yeah, exactly. Including some generativists, maybe even.
BEN: Yeah yeah yeah, exactly! I’ll guess sometimes, we’re kind of like, “Yeah, I mean, I guess, but also, look at this other cool stuff!”
DANIEL: My impression is that it might have faded already, except that Chomsky has been such an incredibly capable and omnipresent force keeping it moving along.
BEN: I mean, look, the dude is, without question, a towering intellect. And I think that some of his non-linguistic stuff — in fact, a lot of his nonlinguistic stuff — has probably fed back into… Like, how do you come at a Chomsky? Honestly, he is just such an enormously smart and influential dude, that his weight, his gravity, I think has probably kept things going sort of due to its own power a little bit.
DANIEL: Well, there’s something that I would teach my linguistic students. I would bring up the concept of the analytical knife, and this comes from Robert Pirsig’s book, “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance”, which maybe nobody reads anymore, maybe it’s no good. Maybe I was impressed way too much by it when I was younger.
HEDVIG: It was clearly a book that impressed a lot of people a lot. I think that’s true.
BEN: Yes.
DANIEL: Yeah, I guess. But that could be because I’m just a basic bitch. But anyway!
[LAUGHTER]
BEN: You don’t have to hate it!
HEDVIG: But you should own that, you should stand in your truth.
BEN: It’s fine. I really like the first, like, five seasons of Modern Family. It’s hilarious. It’s genuinely a really funny show. And yes, is it incredibly popular and mainstream? Is it still funny? Absolutely.
DANIEL: Okay.
HEDVIG: That is when I out that Ste watches a lot of How I Met Your Mother.
DANIEL: Okay.
BEN: I would not be comfortable being outed that way, personally.
HEDVIG: Okay okay okay. Scratch, scratch, scratch, scratch.
DANIEL: Aaaaanyway, what I would tell my students is about a concept called The Analytical Knife. The example that I like to use is if you take an apple and you cut it up to down, perpendicular to the table, that’ll show you something about the structure of the apple. But if you take that apple and slice it parallel to the table, like across, you’ll see a lovely star pattern in the seeds.
BEN: Right. In one, you see the core or the structure of the core, and the other, you see the structure of the star.
DANIEL: Yeah, the way that we use the analytical knife influences the kind of things that we see. I told them in my units, which were more generative, I would say, “This is a generative approach. It will show us some things and it will obscure other things.”
HEDVIG: Yes.
BEN: Now the question is though, if I may be so bold, if I may be even a little bit cheeky: is that you being sort of wishy washy, like academically fence sitting?
DANIEL: I don’t think so. I think that the choices that we make have consequences. So one of the choices that generativists make is: syntax is where we are going to do our thing. That is the point that they find very interesting. And if you think that language is internal and syntax is the place to look, then it tells you some things about language, but it also obscures some others. Like it becomes very difficult to say why language varies and changes. In fact, in our Journal Club, we saw an article by a generativist who said, “You know, language doesn’t adapt to its environment, language doesn’t change very much in very interesting ways, because the environment is the mind, and we all have human brains. And language doesn’t change very much, at least not in ways that I find very interesting as a generativist.”
HEDVIG: Yep.
DANIEL: But if you start with language as communication, then language change and language variation become easy to understand. We all have a repertoire, we communicate, we don’t communicate entirely faithfully, things change over time, we change our language according to who we want to be blah, blah, blah. All the functionalist stuff.
So what I want to ask here is: if we take a generative approach, are we gaining more than we lose? Is it costing us more than it’s worth? You’ve got to look at what we gain from this, and it’s not clear to me that the insights that we gain are worth what we lose. But maybe that’s because I’m more interested in variation and change and I’m less interested in syntax. And if you made different choices, then you’d be like, “Hell, yeah, this is what I’m into.” What do you think?
HEDVIG: I think that when you only do one thing in academia, you only have one perspective, you always lose a little bit. I’ve taken some classes by generative teachers in syntax and been genuinely in awe of some of the elegant cool things you can show with that theory.
BEN: I just have a mental image of you dressed like an emo while you do it, because you’re being like a hell rebel to all the people who are like, “No, don’t do it.”
[CHUCKLES]
HEDVIG: But I didn’t continue down that path because I was interested in questions that I didn’t think that enterprise could answer or were interested in about why languages diversify. I don’t think they were interested really in that question in that way. So I think it’s good to be multifaceted as a scholar, and I think there are more and more generativist scholars who are seeing that need. I don’t know if I already flagged that I might bring this up. For example, there was a conference in 2015 called Generative Syntax in the Twenty-First Century: The Road Ahead. They had a roundtable discussion where everyone beforehand submitted little statements about where they thought the field was going.
DANIEL: Cool.
HEDVIG: I noticed that there were several of the people there who said that generativism should become more multidisciplinary and look into other fields more. So, yeah, maybe it’s blurring out, but in a good way. And that’s what we’re going to be talking more about in the next episode.
BEN: You mean the show, the episode, How It’s Going, which will be up soon.
DANIEL: That’s right. Remember, there’s a lot more to these discussions. So, if you are a patron at the Listener level, you can hear the full interviews with David Adger and with John Goldsmith. Check us out on patreon.com/becauselangpod.
[TRANSITIONAL MUSIC]
DANIEL: Now, we are to our Words of the Week.
BEN: Boo.
DANIEL: [CHUCKLES]
BEN: Sorry, old habits die hard.
DANIEL: I’m afraid this one might not be very fun, because there’s a lot of covid vocabulary. Like I said, I used to avoid Trump vocabulary and now I’m avoiding covid vocabulary.
BEN: But certain things can’t be avoided.
DANIEL: Yep. So I’m going to start with one, you tell me what you think this is: BOOSTER BANDIT.
BEN: Oh. I’m going to I’m going to open with a guess. Is it to do with the reports — I don’t know if this is unique to just Australia, — but people taking home doses of vaccine at the end, like nurses and stuff at the end of their shifts that have not been injected and then, like, giving them to friends and family, is it to do with that?
DANIEL: It is not.
BEN: Okay.
DANIEL: Hedvig?
HEDVIG: Is it somehow stealing a third dose?
DANIEL: Yes.
HEDVIG: Okay.
BEN: Stealing a third… Oh, I see, you take it upon yourself as a not medical professional to be like, “I need three!”
HEDVIG: Or you fake that you say… that you didn’t have the second one?
BEN: Yeah, something like that, in a way to secure your third dose.
DANIEL: That’s right. I’m reading this from an article in The Atlantic by Rachel Gutman: Booster Bandits Are Walking a Fine Line. It’s true that for some people, a third booster is recommended maybe because they are immunocompromised, like some cancer patients with a weakened immune system, people over 65, but it seems that the CDC in the USA has counted nearly 1.8 million people who have gotten an additional shot, maybe because they said that they were immunocompromised so that they could get it.
BEN: Oh, yucky.
DANIEL: Mhm.
HEDVIG: Oh. How do you fake being immunocompromised?
DANIEL: You could just say that you are. And then…
HEDVIG: Oh!
DANIEL: Yeah.
BEN: [LAUGHS] I love that Hedvig, as a good nice person, doesn’t understand how lying works.
[LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: I just thought that you’d show a thing from a doctor saying, like, “Look at my low blah-blah count.” No. Okay, interesting.
DANIEL: Gutman also says — this is a quote — “There’s also virtually no way to know how many reported first doses are actually illegitimate third shots.” Yeah, it’s a bit ethically sketchy to get a third one when you don’t need it, especially when people in developing nations have a hard time getting any at all.
BEN: Oh yeah.
HEDVIG: Oh ya.
DANIEL: At this stage, it’s recommended for some people, but not for all, so don’t be a booster…. I think the word BANDIT is a really interesting choice here.
BEN: Well, I mean, clearly, they’ve gone for alliteration here. Like they were, like, “What thief word starts with B?”
DANIEL: [LAUGHS]
BEN: Sounds super boomery, I’ve got to be honest. It sounds this sort of thing that, like, over 55s say.
DANIEL: Oh, okay.
HEDVIG: [CHUCKLES] Maybe, yeah, I don’t know.
BEN: Am I the only person who’s getting that vibe? Really? Really?? That doesn’t sound like…
HEDVIG: No, a little bit. Yeah.
BEN: Okay.
DANIEL: “Now, Thomas, don’t be a booster bandit.”
BEN: Yeah, [CHUCKLES] exactly! Thank you. Thank you.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] I think I get it. I get it. Okay, next one. We all know that antivaxxers are dangerous and gross.
BEN: Fact.
DANIEL: But now they’ve taken it to a whole new level. And I noticed this in a tweet from Jack Lynch @JackLynch000. Who says: So, the antivaxxers are rebranding and apparently asked themselves, ‘How can we convey all the paranoia of traditional antivax conspiracy theorists, but throw in a hint of white supremacy too?”’
BEN: Oh, no.
HEDVIG: Oh, no.
BEN: That’s not what that movement needs!
DANIEL: Here it is.
HEDVIG: I know what this is. This is worse.
DANIEL: Go on.
HEDVIG: It’s PUREBLOODED.
DANIEL: Yes, thank you.
BEN: What??
HEDVIG: Yes.
DANIEL: Pureblooded.
HEDVIG: I saw it on Twitter as well.
BEN: Wait, does this mean that you are a good white person or a good unvaccinated person?
HEDVIG: Both.
BEN: Or does it mean both?
HEDVIG: Potentially. And it means that you believe that you are strong enough to defeat this virus without having any vaccines.
BEN: Oh, 🤮 🤮 🤮 this is… this is… 🤮 🤮 🤮 oh, this is gross.
HEDVIG: Yeah, this is pretty gross.
DANIEL: You haven’t been tainted with the vaccine. Did these people just not get vaccines at all? I imagine some of them don’t.
HEDVIG: I mean it is… like, I can understand them.
BEN: Wait, are you asking if antivaxxers don’t get vaccines? I think that’s right there in the title, Daniel.
DANIEL: But have they never??? Are they imagining that there’s this group of people who have never gotten any vaccines at all?
BEN: Oh! Sorry.
DANIEL: So, let me just read some of the tweets. “I’m #pureblooded and I feel AMAZING. My immune system is strong. I’m a real #humanbeing.” Another person rather worryingly tweets — and these tweets are still up as of this morning — “It is time for the #pureblooded, the antivax, to start their own economies, come together to build their own schools, banks, factories, and etc.”
BEN: Oh, my.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
BEN: Wow. That is… um…
HEDVIG: I’m a big fan of, as I’ve talked before on this show, the QAnon Anonymous Podcast, and they cover a lot of this kind of stuff. And there’s a weird overlap between antivaxxers, QAnon people, and hippie-dippie crystal-healing people, and lo and behold, crypto people!
DANIEL: Oh, gross.
HEDVIG: Because they believe that they need to build a new currency for their new world.
BEN: Do you know what I find particularly noxious about this part of this story, is that this notion of, like, we need to build our own economies, and we need to have our own schools and facilities and stuff. That is just ruthlessly appropriated from many people in disenfranchised communities. Right? So like, this is a talking point that you’ll hear a lot of black activists talk about. We need to keep, to tease their language, the Black dollar in our communities for much longer, we need to like… all this kind of stuff. And it is a super valid argument. It’s a really, really good and important thing that disenfranchised people, Indigenous people, Black people, people of colour absolutely should be looking at and doing. And then as with all things, the whities come along and they’re just like, “Oh, I really like this language you’re using! It seems to work quite well for you. Imma a steal it.”
DANIEL: It doesn’t even necessarily have to be expropriated from the Black community. I mean, the language of the white ethnostate is exactly this kind of thing. “We need to have our own sort of area with everybody else shipped out of it.”” It ties in pretty well to the white supremacy narrative. Pretty gross!
BEN: Super gross!
DANIEL: So that’s out there, but now here’s a nice one, and this one comes to us from Matthew via email, who says, “Apologies if you’ve already had this word on the podcast. I can’t catch every minute of every episode, but I do try ever since I started listening a few months ago. The question is what do you call somebody who’s had a mix and match of vaccines?” Maybe you got one Pfizer and one Moderna, one of one and one of somebody else.
BEN: Ooh, that’s fun.
DANIEL: Yeah, what do you call it?
BEN: Um… What would you call it? Would you call it a shake and bake? No. Would you call it a…
DANIEL: Mix and match?
BEN: Yeah. Or pick ‘n’ mix!
DANIEL: Pick ‘n’ mix.
HEDVIG: Oh, pick ‘n’ mix is good. Pick ‘n’ vax.
BEN: Pick ‘n’ vax! Vax ‘n’ mix!
[LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: That sounds like chickenpox, pick ‘n’ max. Poxy max.
DANIEL: The term that Michael alerted us to: bivaxxual.
BEN: Oh. [CHUCKLES] I don’t know if I like that.
HEDVIG: Yeah, that’s cute.
DANIEL: What do you reckon?
HEDVIG: I don’t like that ‘ual’. I always struggle… bivaxxed. I would do that instead.
BEN: Bivaxxed. I like that. That’s fun.
DANIEL: And you would have two x’s which according to convention is the way that goes.
HEDVIG: Yeah. Bivaxxed, but Bivaxxual is also fun.
BEN: Dig it.
DANIEL: Hedvig, you have another one?
HEDVIG: Yeah, I have sort of two. And one of them none of you are going to get, but you can do your best guesses, and the first one, I think, you’re going to get. BallGate and BaliGate.
BEN: Can you spell the second one for me, just so I know I’m understanding?
HEDVIG: B-A-L-I gate.
BEN: Okay, so the place, Bali.
HEDVIG: No.
[LAUGHTER]
BEN: Oh, okay.
DANIEL: Golly. 😩
HEDVIG: You’re never going to get this one, but you can… I can just say it’s a person name in Sweden, so it’s not…
BEN: The first one, I think, is the safe bet. It’s something to do with the Met Gala because every year when the Met Gala happens, people who don’t have enough words in their bloody news stories just use it. They’re just, like: Oh, the Met Gala! I can write stories about that.
HEDVIG: No. It’s not to do with the Met Gala, though I considered having PEG and some other terms from there on here, but no. BallGate is to do… Daniel, do you know?
DANIEL: The only thing I can think of is Deflategate, which was when a certain sports ball match had slightly deflated balls, which gave one team an advantage. The -GATE clearly suggests some kind of scandal.
BEN: Yeah, -GATE is a suffix we know. Thanks to good ol’ Richie Nix, everything that is bad ends in -GATE.
DANIEL: All right, but I’m out.
HEDVIG: You’re out. BallGate is to do with Nicki Minaj. She tweeted… what did she tweet…
DANIEL: Hang on, hang out, I remember this. It was something obnoxious about… God, why have I forgotten this? Maybe because I don’t think about Nicki Minaj.
HEDVIG: She said, I’m going to paraphrase, I’m going to get this maybe slightly wrong, but she said that her cousin’s friend or her friend’s cousin — either way, someone a few distance removed from her — had gotten the vaccine and that his testicles had gotten very swollen, and she was sort of suggesting that the vaccine had caused this. Since then, the White House in the United States of America has reached out to Ms Minaj and discussed with her…
BEN: …options for not saying that!
HEDVIG: Offered her to talk to a doctor about how vaccines work. And it was just fun to me that this word…
DANIEL: Why should get a private tutorial? Oh my god!
HEDVIG: Apparently, this is the thing they do. On the press conference, the White House spokesperson said that they do this with other influencers as well. And BaliGate is just… in Sweden there is a politician called Hanif Bali who regularly gets into hot water on a number of different issues. Actually, when I googled BaliGate, I found out that he just often says obnoxious horrible things, so he frequently… the BaliGate refers to about like three different events, but the most recent…
BEN: All right. So, he’s Sweden’s Trump or whatever like, he’s just a person who just is making a brand out of saying just obnoxiously controversial
DANIEL: He’s their Clive Palmer.
HEDVIG: Ah.
DANIEL: By the way, Ben, did you get a random text from Clive Palmer’s party saying…
BEN: I did not.
DANIEL: Oh, god. I got two saying, “Free people, and make sure the vaccine isn’t given to anyone.”
BEN: Oh, was that today?
DANIEL: It was like last week.
BEN: Okay, because there was a big march, there was like a freedom rally, stupid idiots doing a thing in the city today while I was in the city, so I thought that might had something to do with it. Anyway, not relevant!
DANIEL: Sorry, Hedvig, what is it?
HEDVIG: Ah, no he’s just under investigation for pressuring young girls to pose for him sexually.
BEN: Oh, good.
DANIEL: Ugh.
DANIEL: It’s one of the latest things. I should say it’s in an investigation, so he’s not found guilty yet but that is what currently BaliGate is referring to, but as other Swedish people who listened to this podcast will know, BaliGate refers to a number of different things. But I just thought it was quite funny that both these words were in my newsfeed at the same time. So, BallGate and BaliGate.
BEN: I like that your two words are only being shared because there is a sema… not semantic, like a geographical similarity.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: Just so that I don’t misunderstand: the BallGate thing, people are worried that the vaccine will swell their testicles?
HEDVIG: Yeah.
BEN: Based on Nicki Minaj’s mate’s cousin’s friend, whatever.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: So it’s kind of like a reverse koro, where people thought that their penises were shrinking into their bodies by witchcraft. Am I right?
HEDVIG: Yeah, but I don’t think this is… like, you don’t increase your potency by having swollen balls, I believe.
DANIEL: No, of course not, because you just have these enormous useless testicles swinging around.
HEDVIG: Yeah. [LAUGHS] Yeah.
BEN: Melons. Pant melons.
HEDVIG: Oh god. We should say: vaccines don’t cause your testicles to swell. I think our listeners know better than that.
DANIEL: Thank you, Hedvig.
BEN: 100% not a thing. I am double vaccinated. My testicles didn’t swell. Daniel?
DANIEL: Mine are just the same size as they always have been. But that’s an N of 2, so you know.
HEDVIG: Oh, god.
DANIEL: Thank you for that. Those two are great. So, booster bandits, pureblooded, Bivax or Bivaxxual, BallGate and BaliGate: our Words of the Week.
BEN: You see why I hate the segment, you see? Do you see?
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: It’s all a put on, he loves Words of the Week.
HEDVIG: You hate this segment because it is the most newsy segment and we live in late-stage capitalism and everything’s horrible. That’s why you hate it, Ben.
BEN: Yeah, okay. Fair enough. That is actually a really… That’s quite insightful.
DANIEL: Loves it. Loves it.
HEDVIG: It’s like: you don’t hate Mondays, you hate capitalism. It’s that.
BEN: [LAUGHS] I haven’t seen that meme. But that’s good, I like that.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: Ben, you don’t hate Word of the Week, you hate capitalism!!
HEDVIG: Yeah.
BEN: That is true. I do.
HEDVIG: I think that is true.
[ENDING MUSIC]
HEDVIG: Anyway, if you don’t hate capitalism or hate it, you can get in touch with us. But we should say we are not political scientists. We are a language and linguists show, so if you want to question or comment, or just say hi to us, you can get in touch with us in all the places where we are. We are @becauselangpod on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Mastodon, Patreon, TikTok, Clubhouse, and Substack. If you are not on any of those social media platforms, probably good for you.
DANIEL: Congratulations.
HEDVIG: Congratulations. [LAUGHTER] You have other things to do with your life, but maybe you have an email. You can send us an email at hello@becauselanguage.com. And if you like our show, if you like our bantering, and our generativism and all the things that are us, we would be really, really grateful if you told a friend about us. Maybe your aunt who always gives you those, like, etymology books or clippings, because you said one time you were interested in language.
BEN: [LAUGHS] Is that a real… do you have an aunt who does that?
HEDVIG: Yeah, of course, I do.
DANIEL: Unfortunately. Yeah. It’s like that thing where, like, when you’re eight years old, you say you really like frogs, and then it’s, like, nothing but frog presents from that one grandma.
BEN: Ohhhh, I see. I get you. I get you. I get you.
DANIEL: I think words are neat!
HEDVIG: And it’s like anything to do with language. It’s very lovely. No, I like it. I’m very grateful for my aunts, and it does show that they care. So, I’m just saying that if you have an aunt like that, and she’s showing that kind of interest in you, tell her about our show, maybe she’ll like it. You can also do like Dustin of Sandman Stories and recommend us anytime anyone asks podcast recommendations on Twitter. I’m continued to being amazed by the bravery of people who do this, because people on Twitter love podcasts. And another great way you can help the show is by leaving us a review in all the places where you can leave a review. I would highly recommend that, even if you don’t really use iTunes, log on to it, just once, just for us! Log on to it once and leave a review. It is unfortunately one of the main places where podcast reviews matter. Doing all of those things will help people find us.
BEN: I know! It’s really unfortunate and annoying, I have to say. I’m very resentful of iTunes’ bizarrely influential thing on podcasts because it’s not the primary place that people listen to podcasts! Not by any stretch of the imagination. It’s a significant player, no question. I’m not saying it’s not, but yeah, it’s… their reviews being the reviews that people care about, is weird.
HEDVIG: Yeah, they also are…
BEN: But it is a thing, so please go and do it for us!
HEDVIG: Please do it, and we did have someone do it for us. MoenRadio via Apple Podcast from the location of Japan, unless it was a VPN, gave us a five-star review and said, “Best place to satisfy my linguistics brain.” So, thank you so much for that MoenRadio.
BEN: Thank you. That’s so lovely. Hey, friends, compatriots, but not patrons. Patrons, you can just tune out for a minute because you know what’s coming. But everyone who isn’t a patron but who is a friend and compatriot, perhaps you would like to consider becoming a patron, because by becoming a patron, you allow us, through giving us money, to do heaps of really cool stuff that isn’t really about us. We don’t — contain your surprise — we don’t personally individually make a lot of money from this show. But we do, with your money, do lots of cool things. Such as: making these episodes without annoying ads, making transcripts, thanks to the work of Maya Klein of Voicing Words. Hey, Maya, I hope you have once again had a ‘as not terrible time as possible’ trying to transmogrify my awful voice into words. Because of Maya’s wonderful work of Voicing Words, our shows are accessible to people who can’t listen or just don’t want to and it also has the sideline benefit of being searchable.
Now, the patrons, who helped make this possible are [DEEP BREATH]: Dustin, Termy, Chris B, Chris L, Matt, Whitney, Damien, Helen, Bob, Udo, Jack, Kitty, Lord Mortis, Elías, Michael, Larry, Kristofer, Andy, Maj, James, Nigel, Kate, Jen, Nasrin, River, Nikoli, Ayesha, Moe, Steele, Andrew, Manú, James, Rodger, Rhian, Jonathan, Colleen, glyph, Ignacio, Kevin, Jeff, Dave H, Andy from Logophilius, and most recently Samantha, Zo, Kathy, Rach, and the Legendary Kate B. [GASPS] Made it. Thanks to all our patrons for your support.
DANIEL: Nice going. Our theme music has been written and performed by Drew Krapljanov, who is a member of Ryan Beno and of Didion’s Bible. Thanks for listening. We’ll catch you next time, Because Language.
[PAUSE]
BEN: Aw. Good show everyone.
HEDVIG: Beep.
DANIEL: Pat on back.
[DANIEL AND HEDVIG SINGING “DANCING IN THE MOOONLIGHT”]
DANIEL: Hey, what are we doing for the mailout? We were talking about the condoms, the Ben Ainslie double thumbs up condoms.
HEDVIG: Oh my god. Are we… Were we… Is that a… gonna happen?
BEN: Oh, I can’t even remember making that joke, but I regret it immensely!
DANIEL: Okay, we’re not doing that.
HEDVIG: Yeah, I regret it and I haven’t made it.
DANIEL: Okay. Of course, stickers are a thing, but there’s also… we could go large. We could go pencils.
HEDVIG: “We can go large. We can go pencils.”” [LAUGHS] I love that.
DANIEL: That’s about as large I can go actually because…
BEN: Oh, like shipping constraints. I like it. But yeah, for a second, I was just like, “Oh, wow, that’s some real Mormon baggage coming through.” ~We could go really extravagant, guys, and get pencils.~
DANIEL: Lash out on pens, yeah.
HEDVIG: I should say, recently I went to Sweden to dig out a bunch of my old stuff that I left there years and years and years ago. And I did find, that I totally forgotten about that I was the President of the Student Council in my high school.
BEN: Hang on. You were the head girl, is that what you’re saying?
HEDVIG: I don’t know what head girl means. Or valedictorian.
BEN: Like, you were the student president.
HEDVIG: Yeah, for my secondary school!
BEN: That absolutely tracks. I don’t know about you, Daniel, but now I’m just like, “Oh my god, of course you were.”
HEDVIG: Yeah, that doesn’t surprise anyone.
DANIEL: This gives me an idea. For the postcard this year, should we do old school photos?
BEN: Oh, can we please get Hedvig in her full ceremonial regalia from of her school? That would be so good.
HEDVIG: We don’t do ceremonial… Like, oo one has robes, there’s nothing like that. We don’t do graduation… Well, we do graduation. But anyway, what I was going to say was, I was the chairman of the student council in my secondary school and we had a campaign for some reason about safe sex, and we did print out customised condoms, that we did a little rain off. I was on stage and then we threw a lot of condoms at students. That was pretty fun.
BEN: Please tell me there is a photo of you throwing condoms off the stage as a teenager.
DANIEL: At high schoolers.
HEDVIG: Ah, no.
BEN: Please.
HEDVIG: But I have a condom. What I found among things was an unopened little one with the little customised text on it, and I was kind of pleased.
BEN: Wow. That’s cool.
HEDVIG: Yeah, I’m pleased about myself.
DANIEL: Don’t use it.
HEDVIG: No, I’m going to save it for forever.
BEN: I thought you were about to like, “I’m going to save it for…
DANIEL and BEN: “A special occasion.”
[LAUGHTER]
BEN: Like a time I really, really specially don’t want to get pregnant. What?
DANIEL: No, a time when you really don’t care about the safety of it or not because that thing’s friggin’ old. Yeah.
HEDVIG: Oh, no. It’s very old. Yeah.
BEN: Oh, yeah. it’s horrendously expired. Yeah, true.
HEDVIG: Yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s probably expired. For sure.
[BOOP]
HEDVIG: I scratched my screen the other week and I went to a phone repairman and said, “Oh, I need to replace the screen on my phone.” And he was like, “Are you sure it’s not the screen protector?” And I was like, “I’m not.” And he pulled off the screen protector and turned out, it was and I felt very silly, but glad to not have to replace it. And he was like, “I’ll put on a new one for you.” But the new one he put on is a bit better, so it’s a bit thicker, so I have to press a bit harder to get anything done.
DAVID: Hah!
DANIEL: Oh, I hate that.
BEN: Oh, that’s fascinating. I’ve never encountered that with a screen protector. Having said that…
HEDVIG: … and I hate it.
BEN: …I’ve never used a phone without a screen protector, so I wonder if I just peel this bad boy off, if I would just be like, a person trying to shave with an axe, you know what I mean? Like, I was just this fat-fingered pleb who’s just been bashing away for his entire life.
DANIEL: Well, Hedvig, why don’t you just scratch it again and then peel it off?
DAVID: [LAUGHS] So, I threw my phone in the ground during a walk the other… I mean about two months ago. Totally smashed the front of it. Got a new replacement screen for, like, too much money and now it’s overly sensitive. I have to turn it backwards inside my pocket or else it’ll just go… it randomly turns off like Bluetooth or turns me into flight mode.
HEDVIG: Oh, no.
DAVID: It’s infuriating.
BEN: It’s like a raw nerve exposed and ready.
DAVID: It’s exactly like a raw nerve exposed, yeah.
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: Well, I’ve always been a nude phoner. And I dropped it, but I cracked the back, so…
HEDVIG: Nude phoner.
BEN: I don’t… I genuinely cannot fathom your tribe. People who have phones unprotected in any way, honestly…
HEDVIG: I used to do that for the longest time.
BEN: I just can’t… To me, you were just people who are members of swingers’ communities just having unprotected sex constantly.
[LAUGHTER]
BEN: I cannot possibly imagine that.
HEDVIG: To each their own, I should say.
DANIEL: It is a bit like that, but I figure: I’m out for kicks, I’m here for a good time, not for a long time, and I’m up to no good.
BEN: Oh, my god. Either that or you guys are just — and this, I think, is actually the far more likely explanation — far more careful people than I am. Phones die.
HEDVIG: No. I was biking home last night from a social gathering! I was at a social gathering in a park.
DANIEL: Wow.
BEN: [GASPS] Look at you! Being outside!
HEDVIG: Being outside, talking to people. I made a new friend! She’s called Alexis, she’s very nice.
DAVID: I lloveike the way your voice is almost cracking there when you say the words: I made a new friend!
BEN: Mom! Dad! You won’t believe it!
[LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: It was amazing. And then, when I biked home, I had these, like, bad pockets. I was listening to a podcast and suddenly the podcast stopped and I heard a slam, and it was because my phone just went down into the street with a great force.
BEN: As a fellow cyclist — and I promise we’ll start doing a show soon, I swear —
DANIEL: Yeah, jeez, we’ve got enough B roll.
BEN: I have lost many phones to the exact scenario that you’ve just described over the years. But what I’ve noticed though, and this might happen for you as well, the name and the episode of the podcast I was listening to, for all of those instances, is indelibly burned into my brain now.
DANIEL: That’s interesting.
DAVID: Yeah. some kind of trauma on your neural system, right?
BEN: Yeah, absolutely. It’s like a bad Pavlolv bell ringing type thing.
HEDVIG: So, my phone was totally fine.
BEN: Oh, that’s pretty great.
DANIEL: Lucky.
HEDVIG: Yeah, the screen protector wasn’t even scratched. I don’t know why. I don’t know why, by what sort of grace of whatever deity I managed to pull that off, but it was totally fine. Yeah.
BEN: Yeah, maybe the Big Guy was just checking you out, being like what, “It’s her first party since all this. I’m not gonna. It’s just not right. I’ll give you a pass.”
HEDVIG: [LAUGHS] Yeah. It’s very nice.
DANIEL: [SIGHS]
BEN: The DM of your life basically just took pity on you.
[LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: Yeah, probably.
BEN: Or, you just had a great saving throw.