“And that’s what ideologies are: the air that you’re breathing, something that feels like it’s common sense.” From start to finish, this episode is about ideologies: their consequences, their makeup, and the struggle to shake their influence.
Savithry Namboodiripad, an associate professor of Linguistics at UMichigan leverages her linguistics background to critique ideologies of the native speaker, monolingualism, multilingualism, and more. Her research often proceeds on two separate tracks: studying language (often syntax or language contact), and studying the field of linguistics: where our received theoretical framings come from, and how to reach stronger conclusions based on multi-disciplinary evidence.
In this episode, we discuss how to dismantle pernicious ideologies through better experimental design and theoretical framing, and then we get to questions that are far greater than just the field of linguistics. For instance, why must we always get to the “pure” natural object? How have ideas about language always transcended academic discourse?
Throughout, we express a lot of frustration for the academic frameworks that neglect to unsettle eugenicist, misogynistic, or racist ideologies. But it’s important to remember that linguistics is not alone in its failure. Science needs variables, and society provides them. Frameworks make things make sense, so they stay. Linguistics is caught in limbo between formal failures and the impositions of our content: language.
Contact, Cognition, & Change Lab
Rejecting nativeness to produce a more accurate and just Linguistics
Towards a Decolonial Syntax: Research, Teaching, Publishing | Decolonizing Linguistics
Why we need a gradient approach to word order
Mother Tongues and Nations: The Invention of the Native Speaker
The Emergence of the English Native Speaker: A Chapter in Nineteenth-Century Linguistic Thought
The AI Con may as well be the answer to the question: what happens when a linguist and a sociologist come together to write a book? Co-written by Emily M. Bender and Alex Hanna, The AI Con isn’t just a book, it’s an instruction manual to guide readers through this era of AI hype. In short, this book does what academic scholarship does best: close read texts, historical patterns, marketing schemes, statistics, politics, and more—and find a way to connect these granular details and examples to broader trends in our society. The AI Con sits along this continuum between close reading and abstraction. It’s a book about “AI” technology, yes, but it’s also about the demands of an economy that values human labor and intelligence less and less. It’s a book about the ideals of democracy conflicting with economic pressures; the mutually determining relationship between worldviews and technology, or technology and institutional priorities; the power of technology if people have autonomy over it; and the problems with western epistemological orientations when they are imposed via technology onto populations and individuals who never consented for this technology to be imposed on them. This book is about a lot. But it’s also funny, and witty, and accessible, and written with the best intentions. Throughout this episode, Emily and Alex discuss their writing process, the pernicious economic undercurrents that paved the way for this AI hype era, contrasting epistemological orientations, how technology perpetuates societal biases, and much more.
Sébastien Bubeck, et al, Sparks of Artificial General Intelligence: Early experiments with GPT-4
Ruha Benjamin, Race After Technology
Virginia Eubanks, Automating Inequality
The Less People Know About AI, the More They Like It
Ars technica: “Most Americans think AI won’t improve their lives, survey says”
Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass
Tomayto Tomahto is produced, written, and edited by Talia Sherman. Artwork by Maja Mishevska.
Justin Khoo, an associate professor of Philosophy at MIT, begins this episode with the assertion that philosophy asks the most fundamental questions we can possibly articulate—but this assertion is not innocent. Asking the most fundamental questions we can possibly articulate may come at the cost of undermining conceptual, schematic, ideological, and often disciplinary frameworks upon which scientific findings are predicated. Through discussion of code speech, political speech, philosophy of language, aesthetic objects, hypothetical epistemic advantages, and the foundations of our current political (dis)order, this episode draws attention to stubborn frameworks and axioms, not necessarily undermining them, but questioning their validity and utility.
This episode at times historicizes, allegorizes, analytically analyzes, narrativizes, and outright complains about the objects we're discussing—be it the referents of language or a film or a quote by Trump or the blind-spots of a discipline. The very fact of our discussion of the so-upheld "distinctions" between various modes of methodologies and ideological orientations demonstrates the apparent need for a division among academic disciplines—but why?
If there's a degree of meta-discourse throughout this episode, it's in reference to our frightening political climate. Parts of the world are literally on fire and yet we pontificate about Trump's contradictions and the subversive strategy of code speech. I want to acknowledge this tension, and optimistically suggest that perhaps exposing contradictions or calling out hypocrisy is a small act of resistance, even if it does project the frame of rationality on completely irrational actions.
Willard Van Orman Quine ; Two Dogmas of Empiricism
Michael Lynch: Trump, Truth, and the Power of Contradiction
Jason Stanley: Democracy and the Demagogue
‘You Can’t Pin Him Down’: Trump’s Contradictions Are His Ultimate Cover
Jennifer Lackey: Acting on Knowledge
Justin's podcast: Cows in the Field
Artwork: Maja Mishevska, Brown '27
Throughout this episode, Chiara Repetti-Ludlow, a postdoctoral research fellow at Carnegie Mellon's Neuroscience Institute, asks us to consider the essentials of speech processing and its constraints. We hear phonetics, but we understand phonology. How and why? To answer those questions, Chiara takes a highly interdisciplinary approach. We know that linguistics is an interdisciplinary field—it has to be. We can't divorce language from its cognitive, physical, and social apparatuses, nor can language be extricated from human interaction. But academic inquiry has a way of siloing different subfields. And, frankly, it's easier to stick to a rigid set of questions and methodologies. Chiara Repetti-Ludlow's research is exactly what we often hope for in linguistics: interdisciplinary, multi-textured, and conscious of the strengths of different subfields. By bringing together methods and insights from neurolinguistics, phonetics-phonology, historical linguistics, sociolinguistics, and psycholinguistics, Chiara's research attempts to answer granular questions about speech processing.
Chiara is a current postdoctoral research fellow in the Carnegie Mellon University Neuroscience Institute. She earned her PhD in Linguistics at NYU.
Variable stem-final fricative voicing in American English plurals: Different pa[ð ~ θ]s of change
In early 2023, Susan Blum came on Tomayto Tomahto to discuss linguistic anthropology. 2 years later, she's back to discuss her work on schoolishness, ungrading, and linguistic ideology. From plagiarism to authentic learning, imperialist language ideologies to biased methods and metrics of Western science, this episode looks critically at what we "know," how we know it, and where the perpetuation of knowledge might hinder new discoveries. Science promises objectivity, but does it deliver? How might anthropology promise subjectivity, deliver complexity, but ultimately nudge our cultural, psychology, and linguistic understandings toward objectivity?
We can be angry with students for cheating and we can lament the existence of AI for aiding and abetting—or we can ask: why are students cheating in the first place? Surely there’s something amiss with our education system that a substantial portion of students feel no intrinsic motivation to learn and therefore happily outsource their essays and projects, right? Combining questions of methods, results, epistemological orientations, and the political ramifications of research, this episode highlights the merits of an anthropological approach to learning, language, and inquiry.
Susan Blum's personal website; Notre Dame profile
Schoolishness: Alienated Education and the Quest for Authentic, Joyful
John Warner: More Than Words: How to Think About Writing in the Age of AI
A defining quirk of fields like English, Linguistics, Comparative Literature, etc is that the the objects of study mirror the medium through which the objects of study are explicated. Literary scholars produce literature to explain literature. We explain language through language, not always the same language, but a linguistic medium matches a linguistic medium nonetheless. Climate change is not the same as language, not at all. So why is it that we make sense of our climate through language? Josh Willis, a Principle Research Scientist at NASA joins Tomayto Tomahto to discuss the communications war of global warming (or is it climate change?). We discuss why the explanatory language of global warming can be exclusionary or inaccessible and weigh the benefits of using plain-er language. Ultimately, it’s on hegemonic systems and power structures, not individuals, to reduce our global emissions, so why is it that individuals feel such pressure to make consequentially sustainable consumer choices?
Josh Willis studies ocean warming and rising sea levels at NASA. He also teaches improv. His research profile can be found here
"What frame allows you to take seriously the consequence of ideological overdetermination without conceding that it has a reality or a natural position?” This is one of many questions that Jonathan Rosa poses throughout this episode. What perspective allows us to see race and language as ontologically overdetermined without essentializing that overdetermination to the point of inextricability? Taking a few steps back, this episode is largely about questions and questioning. Why have certain fields maintained the practice of using race as a variable, thereby stabilizing the idea of race? Whose interests are served by entrenching the categories of race, ethnicity, and so on?
Through discussion of a raciolinguistic perspective and its reception, raciontology and ontological overdetermination, and critique of power in general, this episode centers around hierarchies of the human and the problems that humans are made into based on their particular position within hierarchies. Rather than viewing race, ethnicity, disability, (fill in the blank), as intersectional phenomena, Jonathan asks that we move instead towards thinking of identity as a process of interconnection, and question the goal of intersectionality as a framework.
For me, this all comes down to a rather unsettling problem: what if the inequities, pernicious ideologies, and their enabling structural frameworks aren't dismantled but rather perpetrated through the academic inquiry that originally sought to obliterate them? And what if that academic inquiry still purports to serve a remedial, ameliorative function? What then? This isn't to say everything is a paradox; this is to say that paradoxes abound. Description can become prescription. So if nothing else, I invite you to struggle through the frustration of irony. I invite you to squirm at the failures of academic inquiry and hegemonic ideas which have prevailed for quite some time. But hopefully we'll get to better questions and answers, and perhaps better ways of failing.
Jonathan Rosa is an associate professor in the Graduate School of Education at Stanford. He is the author of a terrific book, Looking like a Language, Sounding like a Race. I recommend reading it.
Stanford profile, all publications
The Viral Underclass by Steven Thrasher
Beyond Yellow English: Towards a Linguistic Anthropology of Asian Pacific America
Angela Reyes' Language and Ethnicity
Ana Celia Zentella's Puerto Rican Code Switching
Michael Berman's Toward a Linguistic Anthropological Approach to Listening
Josh Babcock's Toward a “Both-And” Semiotics of Intersectionality: Raciolinguistics beyond White Settler-Colonial Situations
While legal academia is no stranger to questions of linguistics, it has been estranged (until now) from the practice of adopting linguistic theory and methods. In Part 2 of our conversation, Alex Walker and I discuss the implications of applying optimality theory (OT) to law. By utilizing the formalism of OT, Alex argues our entire legal system and conceptualization of law will change for the better. Rather than conceptualizing law as a set of rules, Alex argues we should view law as a tapestry of ordered preferences. For example, during the 51 years that Roe v. Wade dictated the “rules,” anti-abortion laws were never repealed or struck down, they were simply suppressed. Our system has never been about any given rule, but rather about the multitude of preferences continually shifting in their hierarchy. From AI judges to forum shopping, OT has something to offer the legal system both practically and Platonically.
Somewhat ironically—perhaps paradoxically—I’ve found that the application of OT to law pushes legal questions further away from linguistic ones. If law is about consequences and outcomes and why those outcomes exist, then it’s not really about the semantic change of a singular noun or the bounds of an entailment condition, right? And if law’s fulcrum isn’t language, then perhaps our legal outcomes—our laws, current precedent, and so on—shouldn’t be predicated upon questions of linguistics or deontological “rules.” But in order to come to that conclusion, perhaps we need the formalism of a linguistic theory.
Watch a short video on optimality theory here
Asking ChatGPT for the Ordinary Meaning of Statutory Terms
Legal academia is no stranger to questions of linguistics. After all, law is, in some sense, a linguistic construction. But our entire legal system interfaces with language far more than we might think. For a long time, the relationship between linguistics and law has concentrated on philosophy of language and forensic linguistics. Lawyers and linguists become friends over debates about entailment conditions or Constitutional arguments predicated upon the semantic change of a singular noun (arms, anyone?). But Alex Walker (the current Rappaport Fellow and Lecturer on Law at Harvard Law School), works not at the intersection of linguistic structure and the law, but rather on the legal system's reception of linguistic utterances. In Saussurean terms, this is about parole, not langue.
In Part 1 of our conversation, Alex explains his work on linguistic discrimination in the legal system. Why are some voices unable to be heard properly in courtrooms? What is Dialectal Due Process and how will its implementation improve the situation? While linguistic prejudice and misinterpretation are ubiquitous, the consequences can be graver when someone can’t be understood on a witness stand as opposed to a job interview. That's a key part of this conversation: the ideas discussed here closely resemble ideas and concepts discussed in the past by sociolinguists. What's different is the methodology. As a legal scholar, Alex is interested in proposing policy and legal frameworks (backed-up by philosophical, economic, and historical arguments) to address problems that are not inherently linguistic, but rather instantiated through language. Racism won't be eradicated through linguistic justice alone, and linguistic justice won't solve the problem of mass incarceration, either. This is about making sure all people are understood and respected—linguistically and legally.
As always, it was an honor to interview someone so committed to interdisciplinary scholarship. The questions I ask and the arguments he offers are nothing if not legal—litigious, even—but they are concerned with language. And if all people are to be taken seriously in legal contexts, we need to hear them first.
Artwork by: Maja Mishevska, Brown '27 (https://mishevska.myportfolio.com/)
Ben Zimmer, a language columnist for the Wall Street Journal, is a self-described "linguist, lexicographer, and all-around word nut," but I think this episode proves him to be a paragon of linguistic curiosity. He's committed to bringing the nuances and complexities of language to a general audience, and all through his work on words—which, as we know, are often persona non grata in the linguistics community. But nevertheless, this episode focuses on words and their political impact.
Words—signifiers—have power; they can index history (re: slay), political allegiance (🍉), in groups and out groups, overt and covert prestige, age, gender, and a whole lot more. Whether it's cunty, -ussy, rizz, nasty woman, enshittification, or ucalagon, we will discuss words' potential to be used and abused for political power. What happens when language becomes a conscious phenomena wherein the symbols we invoke index a political telos?
This episode stretches across time and space to get at the importance of language when it’s invoked in a word-like form. From Bakhtin to Saussure to discussions of Trump and Biden, this conversation is alive with the awesomeness of language.
On a personal note I would like to thank Ben for being such an inspiring figure for young language scholars like myself. Thank you for the work you do, and thank you for doing it so thoughtfully.
Traveling Among the New Words: Lexical Adventures in the Digital Age
Artwork by: Maja Mishevska, Brown '27 (https://mishevska.myportfolio.com/)
People often talk about language as "a window" into many things. Language can teach us about the mind, the brain, history, etc. But language is also a medium for discrimination, ridicule, oppression, unequal labor, and various other insidious practices. Linguistic oppression, as Kelly Elizabeth Wright tells us, isn't really about language, it's about how practices of oppression exploit language in their conquests.
Kelly E. Wright uses language to study and address forms of oppression, labor, racism, sexism, ableism, and the ideologies of what makes something "standard." This episode will address the question of sociolinguistic labor: why it exists, why it persists, and how to address it. We discuss how language is used as a barrier, a tool for discrimination and inclusion, a proxy for race and gender and class, among other things. If nothing else, this episode will show how studying language empowers you to make a difference in the world and highlight systemic issues.
For the full, unedited version of this episode, head to youtube.
Dr. Wright's Public Scholarship
Housing Policy and Linguistic Profiling
There’s a lot that I can say about Emily M. Bender, but I think that a philosophy professor of mine said it best when he described her as the “cutting edge of technology and AI and linguistics and ethics.” Obviously some of her cutting-edge-ness concomitantly stems from the cutting-edge-ness of large language models, deep fakes, and 'artificial intelligence' inventions. But out of all the computational linguists, Emily M. Bender stands out to me because she's made the problem of unregulated AI pertinent and understandable to everyone—linguists, computer scientists, climate activists, lawyers, everyone. Her message about LLMs and other AI inventions is clear: we have to do something, and soon, preferably yesterday. Because there is great incentive for AI to remain unregulated at the cost of our democracy, our right to privacy and ownership over our data, our planet, and (as she calls it) our "information ecosystem."
This episode answers all the questions you've had about 'AI' technology: how is the language of an LLM intrinsically different from the language of a human? What are the legal implications of un-watermarked synthetic media? What's going on with deep fakes? How can linguists use their knowledge to effect change? And throughout it all, you'll hear Emily's wisdom and empathy radiating through her wealth of knowledge.
On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big? 🦜
Baldwin: Understanding the link between joint attention and language
Patricia Kuhl TedTalk: The Linguistic Genius of Babies
To study language is to study something uniquely human. To study language throughout time and history is to study the evolution of something uniquely human, to determine the variables and constants which shape human existence. Historical linguistics remains one of my favorite subfields of linguistics because it’s so much more than just one subfield. To study language diachronically (through time), historical linguists can examine many different aspects of language at once. We can wonder about the social conditions that might cause semantic change, or think about biological evolution as a catalyst for sound change.
Brian Joseph (OSU) has been in the field of linguistics since the late 70s. He’s written books on everything from syntax universals, to morphology, to clitics. He’s written papers on things as specific and niche as phonesthemes, to broader concepts like the connection between historical linguistics and sociolinguistics, or the problematic of “change” and historiography. On top of all that, he was the President of the Linguistic Society of America in 2019. Needless to say, I was humbled by the chance to speak with him. This conversation encompasses questions of why and how language changes. Whether through physical, cognitive, or social means, language responds to human evolution accordingly, leaving all linguistic utterances as evidence of both our history and our future. After all, what is "synchrony" if not a contradictory quality nearly impossible to qualify?
Presidential Address: What is Time?
Picture this: it's early January, 2024, and hundreds upon hundreds of linguists have gathered for the Linguistic Society of America (LSA)'s annual meeting in New York City. With so many language nerds in one place, I couldn't help but interview as many people as I could about their favorite linguistics fact.
This episode contains tantalizing tidbits of information about everything from onomastics, non-concatenative morphology, and the McGurk effect—to historical events effecting language change, and statistics about sociolinguistic judgements. There are allusions to the debate of creole uniformitarianism vs exceptionalism, as well as examples of the Great Vowel Shift and the ongoing discussion of language's encapsulation of culture. From etymology facts, to tricky syntactic constructions, to cross-linguistic phonological observations, to the entrenchment of misogyny through language, you will be entranced and entertained for the entire episode.
The voices showcased here represent a diverse field; linguists hail from all backgrounds and subfields, and they work in industries like academia, healthcare, technology, journalism, and media. Who knew linguistics was such a versatile discipline that can totally and most definitely aid you in a lucrative career where you'll never have to worry about "tenure"??
Several interviews were filmed and posted to Nicole Holliday's tiktok page, accessible here.
Thank you to all who participated in this episode. Being a linguist is one of the greatest privileges I have ever known. I feel immeasurably lucky to be able to share that title with all of you.
Voices heard throughout the episode, in the order they appear:
Heidi Harley, Professor at University of Arizona
Nicole Holliday, Professor at Pomona College
Daniel Ginsberg, Director of Strategic Initiatives at the American Anthropological Association
Canaan Breiss, Professor at USC
Caitl Light, Academic Advisor at Loyola University Chicago
Kirby Conrod, Professor at Swarthmore College
Allison Casar, PhD candidate at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Joshua Dees, PhD candidate at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Walt Wolfram, Professor at North Carolina State University
Gretchen McCulloch, Internet Linguist and host of Lingthusiasm: a podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics
Kelly Elizabeth Wright, Post-doc at Virginia Tech
Jordan Douglas Tavani, PhD candidate at UCSB
Rachel Burdin, Professor at UNH
Gabby Poplawski, Undergraduate student at Pomona College
Jamaal Muwwakkil, Post-doc at UCLA
Michel DeGraff, Professor at MIT
Aaliyah Bullen, Undergraduate student at Swarthmore College
Paul Reed, Professor at University of Alabama
Alex Johnston, Professor at Georgetown and Consultant
Brad Davidson, Director of Medical Anthropology at Havas Health and You; Penny Eckert, Professor Emeritas at Stanford
Ceci Cutler, Professor at CUNY Graduate Center and Lehman College
Valerie Fridland, Author of Like, Literally, Dude, and Professor at University of Nevada, Reno
Mike Stern, PhD student at Yale
Katie Russel, PhD candidate at UC Berkeley
Bruno Ferenc Segedin, PhD student at Brown
Alexa Little, Learning Experience Designer at Veeam Software
Emily Bender, Professor at University of Washington
Ben Zimmer, Columnist for the Wall Street Journal
Aiden Malanoski, PhD candidate at CUNY Graduate Center
Jon Stevenson, PhD candidate at University of York
Byron Ahn, Professor at Princeton
and me, Talia Sherman, Undergraduate student at Brown
Steven Pinker, the Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard University, has studied the mind through a myriad of lenses, including language. Throughout Steve's career, he’s published books and articles on topics such as language acquisition, rationality, human nature, trends of global violence, writing and style, and language structure. He went from academic, to public intellectual—in 2004, he was named one of Time Magazine's 100 most influential people in the world today. And inevitably, the algorithms suggested I listen to his speeches.
As a younger linguist, I spent many an hour watching Youtube videos of Steve Pinker. Through his speeches, informational videos, interviews, and TedTalks, I learned how to use language as a means to learn about humanity and cognition. I began to see language as a product of evolution and culture and society: language exists because of human existence, but also in light of human proclivities, as a tool to advance our relationships and inventions. So naturally I spiraled into jittery nervousness when he responded to my email. But as it turns out, Steve is a really nice guy. He’s brilliant, he’s famous, he’s certainly well-read, but no amount of accolades, I’ve come to realize, can darken Steve’s blinding elucidations or his ability to educate any individual, regardless of their background. This is the genius of Steve Pinker: he’s able to educate the general public about all sorts of topics without diluting the significance or complexity of his message. It was an honor to interview him not only because of his impact, but because of his passion for interdisciplinary theories and inquiry.
After explaining the trajectory of his career, Steve talks about his research on language and language acquisition, including his work on pragmatics and their social and political implications—why do humans say things like “wanna come up for Netflix and chill?”? If language is an evolutionary adaptation, how can we use that insight to better understand the evolving purpose of language? What makes language so essential to the human experience? And what’s Steve working on right now?
What our language habits reveal
Linguistics, Style and Writing in the 21st Century
Although Cory Shain (currently at MIT, soon to be at Stanford) studies language, therefore making him a “linguist,” his research could easily be classified as belonging to a number of other disciplines. To understand the computations responsible for language processing, he engages heavily with computer science. To study the functional organization and architecture of language in the brain, he uses methods of neuroscience. To round out the complexities of his research, he pulls from the theories and insights of cognitive science and psychology. Thus, Cory Shain actively questions the boundaries between language and other parts of human communication and cognition by remaining curious about how language works, not just what language is.
In this episode we first dig into the section of his research that’s dedicated to understanding the problem of difficulty in language processing. What mediates the difficulty of processing cost: a sentence's predictability or its frequency?
Then, we come to a truly awe-some question: how and why do we define what counts as language? Is language solely the processes that a specific network or cortex carries out? Can language encompass our intuitions into what someone else might be thinking? Why is there a common assumption that a language-specific network exists, and how does such an assumption influence our understanding of both the brain and of language?
No matter your previous understanding of language processing, the language network, or theory of mind, you will finish this episode having learnt something new about language, the brain, dependency locality, the importance of similar results across studies with varied methods, or perhaps the overlap between industry and academia.
Language and thought are not the same thing: evidence from neuroimaging and neurological patients
I've heard it said that the best way to concretize a friendship is to interview your friend on a podcast. So that's what this episode is: a conversation between myself and my brilliant friend, Joseph Rager. Despite studying both Linguistics and Romance Languages and Literatures at Harvard during undergrad, Joseph is now pursuing a doctorate in Comparative Literature at UC Berkeley. How does his knowledge of linguistic methods and theory inform his analysis of literature and poetry? If literature is truly language, how do we study it scientifically? How can literature represent our spoken language, with all its indexicalities and quirks? Joseph and I discuss all these questions and more.
We talk about his thesis, which investigated the role of Spanglish and code switching in poetry and poetic analysis. We dive into the politics of aestheticizing of sound, of translanguaging, of linguistics itself; this episode is a reminder that language can and has been used as a means of exploitation and colonization. We express wonder and even frustration at the many barriers to education, the existence of genre, the way that language mediates our world, our conception of self, and our identity presentation. We inevitably gab about literary theory (Derrida! Barthes! Structuralism!), his favorite books, and the "brutal" world of academia—all this encapsulated in an episode that could be mistaken for a conversation between two people on a cross country flight at 3am (which, by the way, we've had).
In all teary-eyed-ness, I would like to thank Joseph for being so thoughtful, so intelligent, so kind. He's brought so much joy into my life and he will soon light up yours. I believe we can all learn from his experience and example: literature is fun, and it can be inaccessible, but at the end of the day, anything can be analyzed as a literary object. And it is the methods that matter, not the content of what you read. So start analyzing and questioning, and you might end up in academia. Which can't be such a bad place to be if people like Joseph are in it, right? Roland Barthes' The Death of the Author
Unspeakable Sentences by Ann Banfield
Negra, Si Tú Supieras: song based on works of Guillén, heard throughout episode
It’s rare to meet your academic inspiration incarnate, and even rarer to take a class with them, so I was enthralled, overjoyed, and sweating my pores out when I got the chance to take Professor Nicole Holliday’s Language and Society class. This past semester, I witnessed all that Professor Holliday brings to linguistics: superb teaching, endless energy and enthusiasm, an insatiable love of learning, and innovative research methods. Her experiments seek truth and action: from politicians, to ASR, to digital voice assistants, to biracial individuals, she studies prosody and suprasegmentals, aiming to answer one question: what does it mean to sound black? Throughout this episode, Professor Holliday and I discuss the impact of her research and findings; we talk about how AI can discriminate and reinforce linguistic bias against people of marginalized identities. We parse apart theories of dialect evolution and the development of African American English, and we examine the intersections between different subfields of linguistics. Finally, Professor Holliday explains how studying language will help you make sense of the world, humans, and human invention. This is an episode for sociolinguistic nerds, avid, prospective, or otherwise.
Dr. Nicole Holliday, an Assistant Professor of Linguistics at Pomona College, is a recipient of the LSA's Early Career Award. Check out the links below. . .
Professor Holliday's Google Scholar
Rob Podesva: Phonation type as a stylistic variable: the use of falsetto in constructing a persona
What can the bilingual brain accomplish more efficiently than the monolingual brain? Megan Zirnstein, a cognitive science professor at Pomona College, researches bilingual cognition, a topic of particular interest throughout this episode. In addition to discussing Professor Zirnstein's research, we talk about the field of cognitive science and bilingualism research: where it's headed, where it came from, and why it's such a multidisciplinary and slightly amorphous corner of academia. And of course, in a move that will surprise no one, we talk about the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, linguistic determinism, linguistic relativity, and the causal relationship between the emotional resonance of a language and decision making. Key topics and concepts mentioned in this episode include: psycholinguistic literature (eg, Alan Green's adaptive control hypothesis), Lera Boroditsky, the eugenicist history of bilingualism research, ways to confront and address bias in research methods, and the fundamental differences between cognitive scientists and linguistics. Check out the links below to watch Lera Boroditsky, read Prof Z's research, and much more!
Prof Z's research:
Literature/TedTalks mentioned throughout episode:
We did it, Joe: Tomayto Tomahto has been in existence for over a year. That's one year, 12 episodes, and way too many instances of editing audio into the wee hours of the morning. But it's all been worth it.
In this episode, I'm joined by Professor Donna Jo Napoli from Swarthmore College—an absolute legend in the field of linguistics. She's an author, a mathematician, a linguist, a teacher, a dancer, and she's so, so passionate about the power of language. We talk about the intersection between math and linguistics, how biomechanics effect the lexicon of sign languages, the physical and mental properties of articulatory ease, the various social meanings of prosody, automatic processing in relation to linguistic judgments, and the joys of studying language scientifically. We touch on the difference between quantitative and qualitative linguistic studies, Donna Jo's reverence for teaching, and most importantly, how studying linguistics "frees your brain." Because it does. It will. Donna Jo's wikipedia page, articles, TedTalk, teaching profile, personal website, and more are linked below.
REACTIVE EFFORT AS A FACTOR THAT SHAPES SIGN LANGUAGE LEXICONS
Production, perception, and communicative goals of American newscaster speech
Spotlight Interview with Linguistic Society of America
