Canguro English

Welcome to The Story of Language: an original podcast series about language, linguistics, cognition, and culture. In this episode we discuss embodied cognition and the uncontroversial fact that the brain is an organ of the body, which then leads to the very controversial conclusion that our brain is no more important than our skin, and that imagining the world as if you had eyes in your toes can lead to some revolutionary new think...

Welcome to The Story of Language: an original podcast series about language, linguistics, cognition, and culture. In this episode we discuss the content of Dan’s book Dark Matter of the Mind, which lays out Dan’s theory of culture. The book contains bold statements as ‘brains do not learn’ and ‘science is NOT pure rational thought’, but after this conversation you might change your mind about the raw power of viewing the world from...

Welcome to The Story of Language: an original podcast series about language, linguistics, cognition, and culture. In this episode we talk about the big questions in language acquisition. Is there a Language Acquisition Device? Is language learned or innate? How does child learning differ from adult learning? Should syntax be the basis for language analysis? And are humans really the only things on the planet with language, or do ot...

People are passionate about language, especially language change, and words matter. And nobody knows this better Peter Sokolowski, who is an editor at the Merriam-Webster dictionary, one of the most famous and most trusted dictionaries in the world. Peter has spent his life immersed in words and their meanings, and all the complications that come along with that work.  In this interview we talk about the role of the dictionary...

It’s an unfortunate fact that many people don’t know the truth about how language works outside of their grammar books, in the real world, but recently I spoke to someone who is trying to change that. Shana Poplack and her sociolinguistics laboratory at the University of Ottawa are known as the mythbusters, because they destroy damaging myths about language and language change. They don’t look at language in its ideal state: they l...

There are few people in the world who know as much about where words come from as Mark Forsyth. His first book, The Etymologicon, was a journey through the origins of many common words and their connections, and he has since written various other books about words, language, and writing. In this interview Mark tells fascinating and entertaining stories about where words come from, how to remember them, and how to use those words to...

It’s an unfortunate fact that most of linguistic theory is based on a few major European languages, especially English, which actually damages our understanding of how the thousands of languages in the world might work. But there is one man who has spent his career trying to correct the balance. Robert Van Valin is one of the developers of Role and Reference Grammar or RRG which aims to explain language by focusing on some of the m...