An interesting question found its way into our inbox recently, asking about relative clauses in Swedish, and wondering whether their unique characteristics might pose a problem for some of the linguistic theories we’ve talked about on our channel. So if you want a discussion of syntax, Swedish, and subjacency (with some eye-tracking thrown in), this is for you! So yes, there is a hypothesis that Swedish relative clauses break one of the basic principles by which language is thought to work. In particular, it’s been claimed that one of the governing principles of language is Subjacency, which b ..read more

What’s in our minds when we throw an if/then sentence out there? How do we work out what worlds we may be talking about? In this week’s episode, we talk about the semantics of conditionals: what an “if” looks like logically, why a simple logical arrow isn’t enough to capture the complexities of conditionals, and how we change what possibilities we allow ourselves to think of based on what our “if” clause holds. We’re happy to be back again, and we’re looking forward to hearing what people have to say ..read more

Here’s our collaboration with Origin of Everything and 12tone on the history of God Save the Queen and My Country Tis of Thee, what makes music sound anthemic, and what happens when you translate a song. Give it a look and check out their channels, too! ^_ ..read more

We’ve got a big week this week for the Ling Space! Today, we’ve got a collaboration episode we did with the fantastic history channel The Origin of Everything and the fascinating music theory channel 12tone. It’s on the history of God Save the Queen and My Country ‘Tis of Thee and anthems; we talk about song translations and how they work. We’re really excited to share it! Then tomorrow, we’ll be posting our new video on the semantics of conditionals. If you’ve been wanting to understand how we deal with what-ifs, then this is the video for you! Tomorrow afternoon - we’re looking forward to i ..read more

thelingspace: What can silence tell us about the syntax of a sentence? How do we know what meaning to fill in when words are missing? In this week’s episode, we talk about ellipsis: what rules are at work to tell us how to use it, how sentence structure plays into what words we can leave out, and whether words are even missing at all, or just hiding. We’re really glad to be back and sharing stuff with you all again! Looking forward to hearing what you have to say. Reblog for the day crew! ^_ ..read more

What can silence tell us about the syntax of a sentence? How do we know what meaning to fill in when words are missing? In this week’s episode, we talk about ellipsis: what rules are at work to tell us how to use it, how sentence structure plays into what words we can leave out, and whether words are even missing at all, or just hiding. We’re really glad to be back and sharing stuff with you all again! Looking forward to hearing what you have to say ..read more

We’ve got a new episode coming up tomorrow to brighten up your December! We’re going to be talking about the syntax of ellipsis: what we understand when we leave words out of sentences, and the rules underneath it. Very much looking forward to sharing it! ^_ ..read more

Our staff writer Stephan Hurtubise is going to be discussing linguistics with Jon Perry from Stated Clearly this Sunday at 1 PM Eastern Time! If you want to check out the discussion, it’s going to be over here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SkgFyL6eDJ8 ..read more

We’re looking forward to taking part in LangFest in Montreal this weekend! Moti is giving a talk at 2:45 on Friday on what exactly it is linguists do, with some fun demonstrations. Plus there are intro language workshops, and a lot of other exciting speakers, as well, including Jessica Coon, who we interviewed about her work on the film Arrival, Steve Kaufmann, and many more. You can still get tickets at a big discount here, if you’re around and want to come give it a try! Hope to see you there. ^_ ..read more

I’ve been catching up on Lingthusiasm lately, the excellent linguistics podcast by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne, and ran into their episode about untranslatability. You can go listen to the whole thing - it’s unsurprisingly pretty fun! But it made me also think of this article by Zach Davisson on translating sound effects from Japanese to English: The greatest challenge you will face as a manga translator is the sound of silence. I mean that literally. When it comes to silence, Japanese has a specific sound effect for it. English doesn’t. When a Japanese character walks into a room ..read more