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lingthusiasm · 7 years

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Transcript Lingthusiasm Episode 9: The bridge between words and sentences - Constituency

This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm Episode 9: The bridge between words and sentences - Constituency. It’s been lightly edited for readability. Listen to the episode here or wherever you get your podcasts. Links to studies mentioned and further reading can be found on the Episode 9 shownotes page.

[Music]

Lauren: Welcome to Lingthusiasm, a podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics. I'm Lauren Gawne.

Gretchen: and I'm Gretchen McCulloch and today we're talking about how small pieces of language combine into larger pieces, AKA constituency. But first Lauren, what have you been up to lately?

Lauren: I have been moving jobs which also involves moving countries, so it's been a pretty busy month!

Gretchen: It literally involves moving around the world.

Lauren: Yes, so I have been migrating slowly westward for the last few years, working in Singapore and more recently in London and after two fabulous years of living in London we are now on the move back to Melbourne, Australia. I will be a David Myers Research Fellow at Latrobe University for the next three years, which I'm really excited about. It’s an opportunity to bring together all of the different languages of Nepal and the Tibetan work that I've been doing across phonetics and across grammar and across gesture, all into one big project.

Gretchen: That's really cool!

Lauren: I’m really excited about that, really excited to be back in Melbourne and lots of exciting research planned. What about you, what have you been up to?

Gretchen: I've been doing a lot of writing on the book (what else is new?) and I'm headed to the LSA Summer Institute, AKA “Lingstitute”, where I'm going to be teaching a class on linguistics outreach, so that's exciting, and, in less momentous but still very important news, I was recently in an NPR article about the linguistics of ‘doggo’.

Lauren: I just love it when internet language memes make it into the new cycle and a whole new audience who've never experienced the meme get it translated for them.

Gretchen: Yeah, and they're like ‘wow this is so cool but also what is this?’ If you haven't encountered the doggo meme it's based around a couple of Facebook groups and a Twitter account and it's just a general zeitgeist about a slightly different cute way of talking to and about your dogs. And I had a lot of fun with the reporter, we actually talked for like an hour and a half, so we'll link to the article in the show notes. But there's even more of that story that didn't make it in and so we've actually made a Patreon bonus this month which is a further deep-dive into the linguistics of doggo, even more historical origins, even more context, Lauren is contributing Australia.

Lauren: Even more Australian intuitions about where doggo might come from, so that's on our Patreon.

Gretchen: It is thanks to Lauren that I was able to identify the word “doggo” as probably coming from Australia, so thanks Lauren.

Lauren: Everyone should have an Australian on their consultant list.

Gretchen: I think so.

Lauren: We also have previous Patreon bonus episodes which include how to teach yourself even more linguistics, which also includes our top recommendations for books videos and further resources for self-study, and also how to sell your awesome linguistic skills to employers so if you are thinking of doing a linguistics degree, you're currently doing one and thinking about your next job or you're looking for a career change, that has got you covered.

Gretchen: All sides of the linguistic spectrum! and if you have ideas of things you'd like to hear from us on the podcast or on the bonus episodes you can also do that at Patreon. And speaking of this we reached our sustainability goal on Patreon last month, which means that we officially have the funds to keep paying our producer and our transcriber, who are often the same person, and our audio hosting fees, which is not the same person. And I thiiiink by the time we record the next month's episode, we may have reached our next goal, based on current trends, which is Operation Get Gretchen A Better Microphone.

Lauren: I am so excited about this goal, this is definitely one of those ones where our Patreon supporters help everybody win.

Gretchen: Yeah everybody wins, you all get to hear me on a better microphone, I win, I'm tired of this too, so this might be the last episode where I sound kind of scratchy, hopefully!

Lauren: So that is www.patreon.com/lingthusiasm, or you can find the link at lingthusiasm.com, oh gosh please, yes please, help Gretchen get a better mic.

Gretchen: Stay tuned to the next episode where you find out if this was successful.

Lauren: It's going to be a great reveal as soon as you say a single line.

Gretchen: Yeah, I think I do the intro next time too!

[Music]

Lauren: Constituency is the fancy way of saying that stuff is made up of other stuff, and so that's how fancy word for this very basic fact that is the main force of today's episode.

Gretchen: So far on the podcast we've been approaching language from two ends, we've had this tiny granular end - we've talked about sounds, like the IPA episode, and we're definitely not stopping talking about sounds. And we've talked about words a lot, we’re definitely not stopping talking about words either. And we've also been approaching language from the big macro society end, talking about language and world peace, or kids’ role in language change, but we haven't talked about the part in between, about how the little bits become a capital L ‘Language’. How does that transition happen? And this is a bigger question for one episode, but we're going to start with that.

Lauren: And so I think it's important, even though we talk about sound a lot and we talk about words a lot, but languages aren't just lists of words, so you need something more than words here.

Gretchen: Okay I think languages can be a list of words because have you ever seen those movie cuts where they put all of the words in alphabetical order?

Lauren: For the organisers among you this is the most excellent use of somebody's time, it’s so good.

Gretchen: This is like those deconstructed salads where they line up all the tomatoes and the pieces of radish in pretty patterns rather than in a tossed salad.

Lauren: But in this in this case it's alphabetical patterns.

Gretchen: it's alphabetical patterns. So there's ‘Of Oz the Wizard’, which was some guy who put all of the words in The Wizard of Oz in order, so it starts out with ‘a’ and then gradually works its way down to ‘wizard, wizard, wizard.

Lauren: And there's also a Star Wars recut which I find is very meditative, when you've listened to the word Alderaan 20 times and you’re just in the zone.

Gretchen: We will link to those if you have somehow missed them or if you just want to experience them again. But like, if all of your movies just had all their words in alphabetical order, I don't think that would be a very good movie watching experience. It'd be an interesting avant-guard movie experience once to watch a movie that was like deliberately in alphabetical order.

Lauren: Yeah, you’d hope it's a short story for the sake of someone's linguistic ingenuity.

Gretchen: Yeah, I'd watch a short film, maximum 20 minutes, someone please make that. So language not just about the words next door, so you can't just look at one word and what is immediately next to it, this structure and the constituency is happening across bigger relationships and groups of words. There's units of words that aren't always obvious from what's next door, and my favourite example of this, the best example, is the phrase ‘time flies like an arrow’, which with the corollary ‘fruit flies like a banana’.

Lauren: It’s still just... it's just so perfect.

Gretchen: It's so beautiful.

Lauren: I know we have this problem sometimes with linguistics where if you've done one Intro to Linguistics course you've done a few, because everyone uses the same anecdote, but there’s just something so perfectly constructed about this structural ambiguity.

Gretchen: Yeah, so if you've somehow missed the ambiguity or if you just want to hear it explained to you, ‘time flies like an arrow’ refers to time which is a thing that flies like an arrow flies, whereas ‘fruit flies like a banana’ does not mean that apples and oranges and pears all soar across the room in the same way that a banana soars across the room, which maybe they do, but it refers to fruit flies which are kind of flies who are fond of bananas.

Lauren: In the first sentence, ‘time’ is the thing that is doing something, whereas in the second sentence, ‘fruit flies’ are the thing that is doing something, so the sentences are being cut up in different ways and that gives them their different readings.

Gretchen: Or to use the terminology that we're introducing in this episode, ‘time’ is constituent by itself, well, all words are constituents by themselves which is not terribly interesting, but ‘time flies’ is not a constituent by itself, the ‘flies’ part goes with the ‘like an arrow part’. Whereas in the second sentence ‘fruit flies’ is constituent by itself and then the ‘like a banana’ part is also another type of constituent. So how you group the words even when ‘flies’ and ‘like’ are the same in both sentences, how you group them is what's changing the meaning there.

There's another example of structural ambiguity which is from the BBC radio drama ‘Cabin Pressure’, which is hilarious and you should all listen to it, but in one case one of the characters says ‘Oh, I know what's going on, I went on a course on understanding people in Ipswich’ and the other character says ‘Well, if I ever want the people of Ipswich understood, I'll let you know.’

Lauren: I actually had the ‘understanding people in Ipswich’ as one constituent in my head when I first read that, I wasn't reading it very carefully, on your blog post which you had about it which we’ll link to, and I was like ‘why would you need to? Is it a dialect thing that people in Ipswich have?’ so I completely fell for that reading.

Gretchen: Yeah, you completely got the wrong interpretation, so obviously there are generic courses of understanding people and some of them, one assumes, happen in Ipswich, but in this case the character is deliberately misinterpreting the other one saying ‘Well yeah, that's fine for the people of Ipswich, but what about the person in front of us right now who's not from Ipswich?’

Lauren: A couple of years ago, you had the LingVids video series and you did a little bit of demonstrating how these constituents can move around and be analyzed in relation to each other.

Gretchen: We did a series of a videos before I decided to become an audio person rather than a video person, and one of the questions that we asked for the purpose of the video is ‘is a sentence more like a bracelet or like a mobile?’ So you can think of a couple analogies for how a sentence works.In a bracelet analogy, you think, ‘okay, if the words in the sentence are kind of like beads on a string, the way we see a sentence written on a page and it's just flat, and there the one word and the beads can only really notice or are influenced by the beads directly next to them because that's all that's there that's touching them, there's just one string that runs through the whole thing.’ Whereas if you make a mobile, like a hanging mobile from a ceiling, then you have stuff hanging off of stuff and then some of the bits that hang off has other things hanging on from them and so there's dependencies and there's relationships between some of the parts of the tree or some of the parts of the structure that are groups. So if you have something like a course on understanding people in Ipswich, is it a course on understanding people and the whole course is in Ipswich, so ‘in Ipswich’ and ‘course on understanding people’ both hang off the two parts at the top of a mobile, or is it ‘a course on understanding people in Ipswich’ in which case ‘people’ and ‘in Ipswich’ are hanging off the same bit and ‘the course on understanding people’ is all the way at the top, so there's ways of thinking of how to group things. So that's the video that you can watch, it's a little bit easier. You can't see me but I'm gesturing!

Lauren: There's ways of thinking about things but conveniently in videos there are also ways of seeing things to go with that explanation, so that's on the Lingvid videos.

Gretchen: And we'll link to that too. And the fancy words that linguists give this particular type of constituency where there's more than one different meaning is structural ambiguity, but we're going to we're going to stick with introducing one new term at a time so you don't have to remember structural ambiguity if you want to.

Lauren: And you’ve talked about some metaphors like bracelets or mobiles for how constituents can relate to each other.

Gretchen: Some people also use the idea of nesting dolls inside each other for constituents, or bowls that get bigger and bigger and nest in each other. A problem that I have with that is that it's hard to account for several things happening at once. It's very linear, there's only one set of layers as you go out and that's not what generally happens with sentences, there's generally more than one kind of set. So I thought of a new-age metaphor which I am very proud to share with you guys. This is a cooking metaphor.

Lauren: Yes! I'm on board already!

Gretchen: So if you're making a cake, you have a set of steps to follow, so you cream the butter and the sugar and then you add the eggs and you add the vanilla. And then you go over to another bowl and you have the flour and you have the baking powder and you have the salt and the cinnamon or something if you want it and you mix those together. And then you add the one bowl to the other bowl and then sometimes you also add pre-prepared ingredients like chocolate chips which also have stuff in them, they have cocoa butter.

Lauren: what are they constituted of, hmmm....

Gretchen: And so there's several different kind of subroutines or sub bowls or sub-containers that you need to take care of separately, and each of those has a particular order that you're adding stuff in and then also sometimes you have to go to this other bowl and do stuff. Or when I make cream cheese brownies, which is a recipe that I like a lot, you make the brownie stuff and then you have to make the cream cheese mixture and you add the sugar to the cream cheese and stuff and then you swirl the cream cheese mixture on top, so you have several bowls going on. So it's not just one set of nesting bowls, it's like when you do stuff.

Lauren: and exactly the same ingredients you use for your cream cheese brownies, I might use to make chocolate chip cookies.

Gretchen: With cream cheese icing.

Lauren: With cream cheese icing, I don't do that but...

Gretchen: I don't know if anyone has but it's all good...

Lauren: some kind of weird biscuit/ sandwich... I mean it wouldn't be as tasty but it would be still a valid use of the same set of material.

Gretchen: I think we need to determine this empirically and have a bake-off.

Lauren: Okay, I have not made that recipe before so I feel that I’m at something of a disadvantage. All novel baked goods, all novel utterances. So in the same way that I can use exactly the same ingredients to make banana pancakes or banana muffins, but the order in which you pull them together creates something different--

Gretchen: What you put in first and what you mix separately makes a difference. Or something like a sauce, like you make the salad and then you make the salad dressing, and you mix the salad dressing in its own bowl and then you can pour it over the salad as one thing, that's different from making a salad where you throw the salad dressing in with all the other ingredients all separately. And so what that's getting at is if you have ‘time flies like an arrow’ you can just kind of add each word - ‘time’ gets added to ‘flies like an arrow’, ‘flies’ gets added to ‘flies… like an arrow’, ‘like’ gets added to ‘an arrow’. But if you have something like ‘fruit flies like a banana’ you've got to combine ‘fruit’ and ‘flies’ together first.

Lauren: I have a bowl of fruit flies here Gretchen!

Gretchen: This is my baking, I'm really good at baking!

Lauren: mmm protein...

Gretchen: So if you have fruit flies (or raisins or something?) that you want to put in your bananas, you have to combine fruit and flies together as words before you can add that whole thing to ‘like a banana’.

Lauren: I just want to suggest for a moment that maybe some of the more attentive listeners are wondering if we're not just talking about something that they think of as grammar.

Gretchen: I think grammar is often used imprecisely, and so constituency is a specific thing within the idea of grammar, so yeah this is this is partially grammar but it’s useful to divide that up into specific ideas.

Lauren: Yep, so this is one particular part of putting together words to create meanings.

Gretchen: I thought you were going to say ‘I think some of our more astute listeners are you wondering if we're not talking about politics?’ because constituency is also a thing in politics.

Lauren: Sorry for anyone who found this thinking it was a politics podcast.

Gretchen: Not a politics podcast. So electoral districts are also constituencies, and a constituent is a person who lives in an electoral district. And they come from the same metaphor, they're related to the word ‘constitute’, so a person who is a constituent decides who constitutes their Parliament or their Congress or their set of representatives in politics. So they're related but they're not the same thing.

Lauren: We've been talking about this as though it just objectively exists, but how do we know constituency exists other than you talking about bowls and other metaphors?

Gretchen: Especially if you can’t create one of these ambiguities that prove very nicely that something is going on -- obviously not all sentences are ambiguous, and so how do you do this? The cool thing is that there are totally ways to do this, there is totes science guys!

Lauren: This is us getting our linguist lab coats on.

Gretchen: So, you know how in chemistry you can add drops of a known chemical to a mystery liquid and see if it turns green or something - I don't know very much about chemistry, this is what all the scientists do in the movies.

Lauren: These are definitely not chemistry lab coats people.

Gretchen: And it'll tell you like if it turns purple it'll tell you whether it's an acid or a base or something like this. So there is stuff you can add to sentences that's known quantities that behaves in certain ways around constituents and then see what happens, and see whether a particular piece of a new sentence is a constituent or not.

Lauren: So we don't have something like a Large Hadron Collider to show you around.

Gretchen: Large Hadron Constituencer!

Lauren: Yep, unfortunately we haven't built one of those to smash words and phrases into each other, but that's why linguistics is really cool, because you don't even need the imaginary lab coats that we're wearing right now, you just need some linguistic intuitions and you can do the science.

Gretchen: You can do science right there in your ears, in your mouth, in your talking.

Lauren: In the privacy of your own mouth!

Gretchen: In the privacy of your own home, you too can do the science, you don't need test tubes or safety goggles.

Lauren: Try this at home!

Gretchen: Do try this at home, it's okay, it won't break anything.

Lauren: Other than some rules of constituency.

Gretchen: No constituents were harmed in the making of this experiment.

Lauren: So there are a whole range of constituency tests that linguists use to figure out whether something as a constituent or not and these are often language dependent. Some of them you can use in a lot of languages, others are really specific to a particular language. And there are some good videos and actually the Wikipedia summary for this is pretty good as a starting point, so we're not going to go through all of the main tests for English constituency testing, but we are going to share a couple to give you an idea of how it works.

Gretchen: Yeah and we will link to more lists so if you think ‘I want to test this’ you know where to go. The core idea of a constituency test is you want to say ‘I’ve got a sentence and I've got a couple words in this sentence’ - so any individual word is going to be a constituent because you could say it by itself if you want so that's not very interesting - but if you've got two words or three words or five words, a string of words in the sentence and you want to say ‘are these words functioning together as a unit or is there some break between them?’. And the whole sentence is also going to be a constituent but within a sentence you're going to have some groups of words that are more influenced by each other and some that aren’t. And so what we're doing is saying ‘okay here's a group of words that we're wondering about. Let's put it through a bunch of other contexts where we know that things that are units do act together and if this one does that too then it is a constituent, and if it doesn't do that too then it's not.

Lauren: So we need a test subject.

Gretchen: I think we should use ‘time flies like an arrow, fruit flies like a banana.

Lauren: Okay that is a very excellent set of guinea pigs to bring into the lab space.

Gretchen: Because this will give us some contrast. We’ve kind of spoiled it for you already, but we want to find out if ‘time flies’ is a constituent, and we will also want to see if ‘fruit flies’ is a constituent.

Lauren: So, the first test that we are going to subject them to is the questions test, which is more or less using questions to see if they can stand alone, because often if you ask someone a question they just answer with a stand alone response, so if you say to someone ‘what did you do last night?’ they don't say ‘last night I went to the cinema’ they just say ‘I went to the cinema.

Gretchen: You can answer with a fragment and those fragments are all constituents. So if we say ‘what likes a banana?’ we can answer that with ‘fruit flies’, but if we say ‘what likes an arrow?’, we don't want to answer that ‘time flies’, or like we could but it would be something very very different. And so this is telling us that ‘fruit flies’ is a constituent, you can use it as an answer to a question and ‘time flies’ is not a constituent. But if we say ‘what flies like an arrow?’ we can just answer that ‘time’ and that's totally fine. So sometime you need to think creatively about what that question needs to be.

Lauren: Yeah, where as what ‘what flies like a banana?’ is literally only a banana. Another test that we could subject them to is the test of substitution.

Gretchen: So this means because we know that any individual word is a constituent, if you can find an individual word that you can substitute for a longer string of words that you're wondering about, then that means that this longer string of words has to also be constituent, as long as the sentence keeps doing the same thing.

Lauren: So for example you could say ‘I like cake’ or you could say ‘the very beautiful, intelligent woman who has just finished her job in London and is moving back to Melbourne to do a new job likes cake’. Although the second one is very, very long it fills basically exactly the same role in the sentence as the one letter pronoun ‘I’ and in this case just semantically happens to be the same person!

Gretchen: Happens to be true! yeah so often people use pronouns for this, you can substitute the entire thing with a pronoun. So if we take our ‘time flies’ example if we say ‘time flies like an arrow’ you could also say ‘it flies like an arrow’ but if we want to say ‘is ‘time flies’ a constituent?’ then you have to say ‘it likes a banana’ or ‘they like a banana.

Lauren: ‘they like an arrow?’. We've got cross contamination on the sentences.

Gretchen: So hard to do orally! Yeah the arrow, and if that’s supposed to mean the same thing that ‘time flies like a’ we're dealing with little flapping Timelords, we're not dealing with time flying. Where as for ‘fruit flies like a banana’ if you have ‘it flies like a banana’, again you've created a very different sentence where you're talking about something that is thrown across the room, whereas ‘they like a banana’ is a reasonable and cogent substitute for ‘fruit flies like a banana.’

Lauren: There is also another thing that is not part of the standard canon of constituency tests, but I like it as a way of showing that anyone who uses the internet know instinctively what a constituent is, and that's because when we use hyperlinks and clickable links on the internet we rarely break constituent boundaries with those, we usually have a single constituent or a phrase within a single hyperlink.

Gretchen: So this is like the anchor text for a hyperlink, so when you you highlight a couple words and then you make them into a link: the words that you highlighted are probably a constituent, you're probably already doing this subconsciously.

Lauren: So you would say, if you were writing about ‘time flies like an arrow’ you might have a hyperlink for ‘time’ and that would take you to a dictionary definition of time and you might have ‘flies like an arrow’ might be a hyperlink to a video that shows an arrows flying. Whereas if you have the other sentence you might have seen like ‘fruit flies’ and that takes you to the Wikipedia page for fruit flies and you might have ‘like a banana’ and then you have a list of animals that eat fruit.

Gretchen: but you'd be unlikely probably to make ‘time flies’ the anchor text of your hyperlink, unless you're talking about Timelord flies, which in which case it would be a constituent.

Lauren: Yeah and it would be very, very unlikely to get something like ‘time flies like’.

Gretchen: Oh yeah that'd be really weird. But it's surprisingly common, next time you're reading an article that has links in it, check them out to see if they’re constituents, there’s a fun thing to do. My favourite example of people doing subconscious constituents takes us back to doggo.

Lauren: Yes!

Gretchen: This is the best thing.

Lauren: I’m already there.

Gretchen: One of the people behind the doggo thing is a Twitter account called @dog_rates, dog underscore rates, by a guy named Matt Nelson, a lot of people have seen it has like two million followers so you've probably seen this account. This account says things like ‘what a cute pupper 10/10 would would pet’ and it's great, but the same guy also started a second, more experimental Twitter account, and it's called @dog_feelings, and this is an account where the dog just says stuff in a spaced out doggy sort of voice. And it's more interesting linguistically, to my mind at the moment when we're talking about constituency, because what this dog character does on this Twitter account, which we're definitely going to link to you should definitely go check out because it's really funny, the seed of the account is words in all lowercase and he'll put periods between every couple words - sometimes after a single word, sometimes after two or three words, sometimes he’ll even go up to like four and so he'll put periods between them periodically, kind of in the rhythm of a wagging tail or like you know dogs aren't super smart linguistically, so they'll kind of pause a lot and what's really interesting to me is that the pauses often obey constituency boundaries. I'm sure this guy knows no linguistics, I don't think he's doing it consciously.

Lauren: But even intuitively it's falling into constituency. I mean, I can read a couple of examples but it does take us into the always-difficult territory of how written memes sound out loud.

Gretchen: I think we should read an example or two

Lauren: Okay, I'll do my best thoughts of dogs voice ‘my human. is sad again. I can tell. because. he only gave me. one pat. when I. put my head. in his lap'

Gretchen: What's cool about this is all of these pauses are constituents, so ‘my human’, that's a constituent, ‘is sad again’ is a constituent, where as if instead it had been ‘my human is. sad again’ then that wouldn't have been a constituent. So speaking of pauses, Lauren you do prosody.

Lauren: I don't do prosody but I really like it. I mean I *do* prosody as in I modulate the way that I speak using intonation.

Gretchen: I don’t, I talk like a robot.

Lauren: Yeah, I have to put your intonation in post hoc in the editing phase. So. Intonation contours, we don't often think about what they contribute but when it comes to spoken language they are often the thing that is doing the heavy lifting in disambiguating sentences so things like ‘time flies like an arrow, and fruit flies like a banana’, the intonation there helps people. It’s not as useful as some other examples.

Gretchen: Whereas if you just say ‘time.. flies.. like.. an.. arrow..’ it's harder to tell what you mean by it.

Lauren: Yep, and so prosody can often give us some clues as to what's happening in terms of how the constituents are grouped, and that helps disambiguate things. My favourite meme example is a picture of some arctic ice and some glow sticks and small fluffy things, with the line down the bottom ‘stop clubbing baby seals’, which when you say it that way entirely deserves dancing.

Gretchen: Baby seals, what are you doing partying so late, you've got to get up tomorrow!

Lauren: awwww you’re only babies!

Gretchen: you’re only babies, are you even allowed to drink yet?!

Lauren: Which has an obviously very different reading to ‘stop clubbing baby seals.’

Gretchen: Yeah, as in stop hitting them with clubs

Lauren: And so it's prosody, and it's the absence of prosody in the photo meme that is creating the joke.

Gretchen: And these memes often come around with captions like ‘this is the importance of commas,’ but commas are just an imperfect representation of prosody. I think a lot of these ambiguity examples work better in writing, precisely because we're so good at prosody, like how you didn't get the people in Ipswich example even though it was totally clear to me listening to the audio of it.

Lauren: You would have to be deliberately trying very hard to mishear ‘I did a course on understanding people… in Ipswich’. So prosody is doing all the heavy lifting there and it's completely underrated, so just giving a shout-out to my mate prosody.

Gretchen: Yeah, it's not necessarily terribly good as a constituency test because commas are weird and generally linguists don't like to use written stuff as a test, but if you can think of ‘where could you put commas in this sentence and have the meanings still be preserved?’ those are going to be constituency boundaries. It's not necessary going to be all of them, but it's going to be some of them, because that's one of the things that pauses indicators is where there are some breaks between stuff.

Lauren: We've been talking about things like intonation and what words are, entirely with English example sentences, that is because that is the language that is the medium of this podcast, but as always, because we like talking about all of the world's languages, we want to stress that these certain types of tests can be done, all languages break down structures to some degree in this way.

Gretchen: Yeah all languages have constituents, they have stuff that is more closely associated than other stuff, which tests you can use to show that differs depending on the language and what exactly they use to create those relationships. So in some cases you can do constituency with parts of a single word, not just with groups of words as a whole. So there's some examples of that in English, one example that is very clear is ‘undoable’. So ‘undoable’ can mean two things, one thing it can mean is it’s ‘un’ ‘doable’, it's not able to be done, and then the other thing it can mean is it's ‘undo’ ‘able’ which is it's able to be undone.

Lauren: As in, you can Control-Z this.

Gretchen: You can Control-Z this, there's an eraser here, whereas this is just impossible it's ‘un…doable’. And you can get more elaborate types of constituency with with things on a word as well as between words. So one example that I have for this comes from my misspent Latin education, which was not misspent at all I loved it, and this is a thing that Latin poems would do which is they would really mess around with a word order. In English the word order is very important, but Latin poems especially would often do something different. So let’s say you have the phrase ‘from a long river’, you'd have ‘the river’ in one line of the poem and ‘ the long’ in another line of the poem and you had to realise that they were actually being associated with each other, and it wasn't just like there's ‘from a river’ and there's ‘from a long something’, you had to realise that they were a constituent together, they were actually trying to talk to each other and the poet had just moved them around to get a better rhythm.

And the way that you do this in Latin is the endings would have to match. So the word for river in Latin is ‘fluvius’, which the form of it when it's a subject, and then you have ‘longus’ which would be the form of the adjective when it's a subject matching the masculine ‘us’ ending of fluvius. But if you have ‘from a long river’ that's an ablative, so now you have ‘fluvio longo’, and even if ‘longo’ is in line one and ‘fluvio’ is in line three, you can still be like ‘oh they're both in the masculine ablative singular maybe they're actually supposed to be together, maybe they're actually constituent’. So in English constituents tend to be right next to each other but in other languages you can really move them around, when you have something else that tells you ‘oh these are things that you're supposed to be interpreting together.

Lauren: So that’s how you kind of first encountered the idea of constituency?

Gretchen: Yeah, I was decoding poems in high school thinking ‘oh these two things associate’ and then when I got to constituency later in linguistics classes I was like ‘oh this is the same thing’. How did you first encounter constituency?

Lauren: Before thinking about it in terms of linguistics, I think my first realisation that different words and sets of words could all feel the same kind of grammatical spot and be one constituent was essentially playing a version of mad libs.

Gretchen: Oh yeah okay

Lauren: So if they wanted something that was a noun you could just write ‘butt’ or you could write ‘my brother’s big fat smelly butt’ and either way it would work, and be hilarious.

Gretchen: Yeah very hilarious when you're like seven.

Lauren: So that is where, it was trying to be funny in mad libs that taught me to think about just how much you could cram in while still actually being the same type of constituent.

Gretchen: This gets us back to the grammatical gender point which we talked about in episode two about pronouns, why do languages even bother with having gender, well sometimes it can help you figure out what's a constituent because if you have adjectives that have to agree with gender. Particularly when you have a language like Latin, or Old English would do this too where you could move words around like this, the gender endings could help you find the rest. It’s a little like one of those like GPS microchips you put in your dog, like ‘we've tagged you, you belong with us here.’

Lauren: I think that there is also a larger theoretical importance to why we should care about constituents and that goes back to the thing we we're talking about earlier, language isn't just made up of individual words, you can't just take all the words from a film and remix them.

Gretchen: Yeah, and humans don't just learn how to make sentences by memorising all of the possible sentences. Like ‘time flies like an arrow, fruit flies like banana’, someone came up with that and you understood it even the first time you heard it, because you knew what the words meant and you knew how to interpret the constituent relationships between those words. It's a thing that languages have where you can make up, right now, a sentence that no one's ever heard before because you know about the relationships between them

Lauren: It fills in, as we said, that kind of middle spot between just individual words or sounds and this larger, full discourse conversation

Gretchen: There's other things that fill it in, we can talk about semantics at some point, but yes figuring out what language is in the human mind since we don't just say individual words it's partly figuring out what kinds of constituency relationships do we have. I think there's also a practical importance to it, so one of the exercises that Intro to Linguistics students typically get set is you need to do a bunch of constituency tests and then you need to draw trees. But the trees themselves are are are only a means to an end, they’re not an end in themselves, they're just a representation of all the constituency information you can extract from this sentence in a very convenient and visual form. Then when you start looking at them then you can say ‘oh okay well here's how these two sentences actually have the same structure because their trees look identical.’

Lauren: And when you draw syntactic trees it's one way to very quickly see that sentences that look the same on the surface have different structures. So ‘fruit flies like a banana’ the ‘fruit’ and the ‘flies’ are together as a constituent, and they're in a separate node in the tree, whereas ‘time flies like an arrow’, ‘time’ is all alone, lonely time in its lonely node, and so you very quickly see that even though they appear the same their structures are different.

Gretchen: Yeah so it's a convenient way of visualising that information and conveying it, but a lot of people got very buried in the ‘oh I need to figure out what are these constituents and what's going on here’ and it can be hard, the first ten or twenty or thirty trees that you draw, every single combination of words you have to run through a bunch of constituency tests, but it's kind of like learning how to navigate or learning how to make a map of the terrain, thinking about what kinds of things have relationships and getting good at just spotting them. I don't have to run constituency tests on every sentence I see now to see whether something's a constituent because most of the common types of ones I can just spot them. And occasionally I get something confusing like ‘oh is that a constituent?’ I have the tests available, but most of the time I don't need them, just because it's a practice type thing you do when you're beginning to flex your linguistic muscles.

Lauren: And I think sometimes people just think that syntactic tree drawing is some academic exercise that we just make our students do so that they suffer, or if they are the subset of people who go on and study syntax, who immediately fall in love with it and draw a tree for everything.

Gretchen: Or it's kind of like a meaningless intellectual exercise like ‘oh I can do sudoku I can draw a syntax tree it's great it's fun but where do you go from there?’

Lauren: But they do have really important implications, especially in the field of computer language and how computers interact with language. So for example Google Translate, just like in your films Google doesn't just go word by word and translate each individual word when you put a sentence into their translation portal, instead what happens is it starts thinking in terms of constituents and in terms of larger phrases and it tries to match those up within its corpus, and similarly with their search engines you may type in a whole sentence but it knows how to extract the constituents that are relevant for searching.

Gretchen: Yeah anything that's trying to do it like a natural language interface is trying to figure out okay how do you understand the parts of a natural language thing. So there’s practical reasons why constituency is important but also once you get used to constituency you can make lots of fun jokes with structural ambiguity and lots of fun jokes with time flies.

[Music]

Gretchen: For more Lingthusiasm and links to all the things mentioned in this episode go to lingthusiasm.com You can listen to us on iTunes, Google Play music, Soundcloud or wherever else you get your podcasts and you can follow at Lingthusiasm on Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr. I can be found as at GretchenAMcC on Twitter, and my blog is All Things Linguistic.com.

Lauren: I blog and tweet as Superlinguo. To listen to bonus episodes, ask us your linguistics questions and help keep the show ad free, go to patreon.com/lingthusiasm, or follow the links from our website. current bonus topics include behind-the-scenes story of doggo speak, and how to explain linguistics to employers, how to teach yourself linguistics, and an episode on swearing. And you can help us pick the next topic by becoming a patron. If you can't afford to pledge that's okay too: we also really appreciate it if you could rate us on iTunes or recommend Lingthusiasm to anyone who needs a little more linguistics in their life. We are especially doing a bit of a shout-out to our Australian, Canadian and Great British iTunes-using listeners to help us be rated on those stores.

Gretchen: Something you might not know is that iTunes only gives an average based on the country, so we have quite a few ratings on American iTunes now, but if you’re from another country and you'd like to rate us on iTunes that would be super awesome.

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Gretchen: Lingthusiasm is created and produced by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne, our producer is Claire and our music is by The Triangles. Stay Lingthusiastic! [Music]

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