Word to the Whys

Word to the Whys

The podcast where linguists talk about why we do linguistics. A companion to any Intro Linguistics course.

Episodes

April 21, 2021 1 min
A brief welcome to our new listeners. Find the transcript here:
https://sites.google.com/view/word-to-the-whys-podcast/home/Welcome
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Meg Grant talks to Félix Desmeules-Trudel about why we do Language Acquisition, and why everybody has an accent! Find the transcript here: https://sites.google.com/view/word-to-the-whys-podcast/home/second-language-acquisition
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November 20, 2020 20 mins
Meg Grant talks to Nancy Hedberg about why and how we do Pragmatics, and the real meaning of "Black Lives Matter"!
Intro and Outro music is "Alien Language" by Podington Bear on freemusicarchive.org
Find the show notes and transcript at this link:
https://sites.google.com/view/word-to-the-whys-podcast/home/pragmatics
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November 16, 2020 19 mins
Julie Doner talks to Ai Taniguchi about why we do Semantics, and why linguists are more interested in words like "every" than whether cereal is soup!
Intro and Outro music is "Alien Language" by Podington Bear on freemusicarchive.org
Find the show notes and transcript at this link:
https://sites.google.com/view/word-to-the-whys-podcast/home/semantics
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October 5, 2020 17 mins
Nathan Sanders talks to Catherine Anderson about what babies & children know about language, and how we can tell what they know!
Intro and Outro music is "Alien Language" by Podington Bear on freemusicarchive.org
Find the show notes and transcript at this link:
https://sites.google.com/view/word-to-the-whys-podcast/home/language-acquisition
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October 1, 2020 16 mins
Catherine Anderson talks to Meg Grant about why and how we do Psycholinguistics, whether we even need psycholinguistics in a world with neural imaging, and why your prof might mention vegetables in stats class!
Intro and Outro music is "Alien Language" by Podington Bear on freemusicarchive.org
Find the show notes and transcript at this link:
https://sites.google.com/view/word-to-the-whys-podcast/home/psycholinguistics
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September 28, 2020 11 mins
Daniel Currie Hall and Tim Mills talk about what's interesting about Phonology.
Intro and Outro music is "Alien Language" by Podington Bear on freemusicarchive.org
Find the show notes and transcript at this link:
https://sites.google.com/view/word-to-the-whys-podcast/home/phonology
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September 24, 2020 22 mins
Tim Mills talks to Julie Doner about why and how we do Syntax, whether grammar might be in human DNA, and whether there's a single "right" model of syntax.
Intro and Outro music is "Alien Language" by Podington Bear on freemusicarchive.org
Find the show notes and transcript at this link:
https://sites.google.com/view/word-to-the-whys-podcast/home/syntax
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September 7, 2020 16 mins
Meg Grant talks to Nathan Sanders about why we do Phonetics, and how signed languages have phonetics even though they don't have sound!
Intro and Outro music is "Alien Language" by Podington Bear on freemusicarchive.org
Find the show notes and transcript at this link:
https://sites.google.com/view/word-to-the-whys-podcast/home/phonetics
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September 7, 2020 19 mins
Bronwyn Bjorkman and Catherine Anderson talk about what's interesting about Morphology, and why it's hard to figure out the past participle for "dive".
Intro and Outro music is "Alien Language" by Podington Bear on freemusicarchive.org
Find the show notes and transcript at this link:
https://sites.google.com/view/word-to-the-whys-podcast/home/morphology
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