All Things Linguistic

Time 2021-08-30 08:39:18

Web Name: All Things Linguistic

WebSite: http://allthingslinguistic.com

ID:189374

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lingthusiasm:Transcript Lingthusiasm Episode 59: Are you thinking what I m thinking? Theory of MindThis is a transcript for Lingthusiasm Episode 59: Are you thinking what I m thinking? Theory of Mind. 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 59 show notes page.[Music]Gretchen: Welcome to Lingthusiasm, a podcast that s enthusiastic about linguistics! I m Gretchen McCulloch.Lauren: I m Lauren Gawne. Today we re getting enthusiastic about whether you re getting enthusiastic about theory of mind. But first, our most recent bonus episode is on translation in fiction mostly translating between human languages and non-human languages but all kinds of translation.Gretchen: You can get access to this translation episode about some books we ve been reading recently and 50 other bonus episodes by becoming a patron at patreon.com/lingthusiasm. Here s a bit of a preview into the books we talked about.Lauren: We talked about Semiosis by Sue Burke, and A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine, as well as The Devil Comes Courting by Courtney Milan. And, Gretchen, you have read Native Tongue by Suzette Haden Elgin.Gretchen: I have finally gotten around to reading Native Tongue, which has been much recommended to me.Lauren: A classic piece of linguistic sci-fi.Gretchen: You don t have to have read any of these books beforehand. We don t provide plot spoilers, although we ll talk about some of the things in the setting. It s fun whether you ve read any of them or not at all. You might end up with some new things to read.Lauren: You can get access to that episode and all of our bonus episodes at patreon.com/lingthusiasm.[Music]Lauren: Gretchen, I m gonna run an experiment on you.Gretchen: Okay, I like experiments.Lauren: Excellent. This one involves a lot of a set up, but it s great because you can do it. If you are listening along, you can also do the experiment along with us.Gretchen: Great! What s our set up?Lauren: We have Sally and Anne.Gretchen: Okay.Lauren: Sally has a basket. Anne has a box. Sally has a marble Sally with the basket and she puts her marble into the basket. Then she goes out for a walk. Sally s not here. But we ve got a basket with a marble in it.Gretchen: Sally s not here. We ve got her basket with the marble in it. Okay.Lauren: We ve got a box, and Anne is still there. Anne takes the marble out of the basket and puts it in the box.Gretchen: So, now we ve got a marble in a box.Lauren: We ve got the marble in the box. Sally comes back, and Sally wants to play with the marble. Where is Sally going to go to get her marble?Gretchen: I m going to deduce based on the fact that when Sally left the room, she left the marble in the basket she probably still thinks the marble is in the basket because she d have no reason to assume that things would ve changed, and so she s gonna try the basket first because she doesn t know that Anne has moved it.Lauren: That is a perfectly reasonable deduction to make. You are a veritable Sherlock Holmes.Gretchen: Thank you. Did I pass the test?Keep reading 3Lingthusiasm 2 days ago 48 notes Gestures in podcastingsuperlinguo:Podcasts are an audio-based genre. As someone who works with gesture, and often talks about gesture on podcasts, I m acutely aware of the lack of visuals in podcasting. Audio-only communication is a radical departure from the way humans have communicated for most of human history, and while it is possible to communicate just using speech, this doesn t mean that gestures are not contributing; people podcasting, doing radio or speaking on the phone will still gesticulate as they speak. Occasionally I ll notice that gestures break through , and will be explicitly mentioned as the person is talking. I ve given three examples that I ve noticed in podcasts, but I m sure there are many more. I also have a hunch that gestures that are specifically mentioned during a podcast are of a specific kind, in that they re important enough in the mind of the speaker to be worthy of comment. My guess is that these are gestures that are particularly illustrative, or they re backchanneling gestures done by the other participants in the conversation. If you also hear examples of people speaking about gesture in a podcast, let me know! I ve set up a very short google form to collect examples: https://forms.gle/f1LbWEAWUTcX9uFq5One of the biggest challenges of collecting examples of this is the fact that many podcasts still don t make transcripts available, so it s hard to pull together a large corpus to search. I hope to eventually do something with this, but if you d like to use this as a research project, please get in touch!Example 1: The CultureEpisode: The Kardashians: Saying goodbye to America s Royal Family (July 2nd 2021) Brodie Lancaster, while talking about the mutual rise of the Kardashian family and the popularity of Kimye: I m making a motion of like braiding something together (timecode: 28:54) [no transcript]Listening to this episode of The Culture on a long walk, it was this example that made me realise this was a thing I d been thinking about long enough that it was time to turn it into a post. Example 2: The Vocal FriesEpisode: Between Iraq and a Hard Place Transcript (12th December 2019)Zach Jaggers: We also see cases where there s a loanword from another language used in a borrowing language where it s not because there was some kind of, quote hand quotes. Sorry, I gesture a lot. [Laughs] [transcript]In this episode there s a string of examples where Jaggers uses tone of voice to indicate quotation, but also overtly marks that he s doing handquotes as well. I like the reflexivity of acknowledging the limits of podcasting in this example.Example 3: LingthusiasmEpisode: Why spelling is hard but also hard to change (June 20th 2019)Gretchen McCulloch: This is what the primary function of the French accent circonflexe, which is the one that looks like a little hat I m making the little hat sign with my hands as I say this because that was how we always talked about it in school is you have to make the hat sign with your hands [transcript]Gretchen and I gesture all the time while we re recording Lingthusiasm, but here Gretchen felt particularly compelled to share her gesture with everyone, because it s so much a part of the story of the circonflexe for her. Thoughts for nowEach of these examples shows the person who is speaking feels compelled to draw attention to what their gestures are contributing to the content of what they are saying. I m sure there are other ways in which gestures manifest themselves in the final product of a podcast. There are also other features of face-to-face communication that have the potential to make themselves known in podcasts and other voice-only media. Liveshow audiences are something that particularly come to mind, especially since there has been so little opportunity for live recordings in the last 18 months. Cite this blog postAll original content on Superlinguo is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. If this post has inspired you to think and write about gestures in podcasts, please let me know! You can also cite this blog post:Gawne, Lauren. 2021. Gestures in podcasting. Superlinguo. https://www.superlinguo.com/post/659622302480318464/gestures-in-podcasting Accessed DATE.A stable URL for this page at The Internet Archive will be generated shortly. 3Superlinguo 6 days ago 153 notes lingthusiasm:Lingthusiasm Episode 59: Are you thinking what I m thinking? Theory of MindLet s say I show you and our friend Gavagai a box of chocolates, and then Gav leaves the room, and I show you that the box actually contains coloured pencils. (Big letdown, sorry.) When Gav comes back in the room a minute later, and we ve closed the box again, what are they going to think is in the box? In this episode, your hosts Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne get enthusiastic about Theory of Mind our ability to keep track of what other people are thinking, even when it s different from what we know ourselves. We talk about the highly important role of gossip in the development of language, reframing how we introduce people to something they haven t heard of yet, and ways of synchronizing mental states across groups of people, from conferences to movie voiceovers. Announcements:This month s bonus episode is about some of the linguistically interesting fiction we ve been reading lately! We talk about the challenges of communicating with sentient plants (from the plant s perspective) in Semiosis by Sue Burke, communicating with aliens by putting babies in pods (look, it was the 1980s) in Suzette Haden Elgin s classic Native Tongue, communicating with humans on a sailing ship using a sorta 19th century proto-internet in Courtney Milan s The Devil Comes Courting, and taking advantage of the difficulty of translation in communicating poetry across cultures in A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine.Join us on Patreon to listen to this and 53 other bonus episodes. You ll also get access to the Lingthusiasm Discord server where you can discuss your favourite linguistically interesting fiction with other language nerds!Here are links mentioned in this episode:Wikipedia entry for Theory of MindWikipedia entry for the Sally-Anne Theory of Mind testVarious Theory of Mind tests you can do with childrenDo 15-Month-Old Infants Understand False Beliefs?Theory of Mind in ravensTheory of Mind in chimpsWikipedia entry for Dunbar s numberEvidentiality in Yolmo - Lingthusiasm Episode 32: You heard about it but I was there - EvidentialityDefinitions and Examples of Psychological Verbsxkcd Lucky 10,000 comicYou can listen to this episode via Lingthusiasm.com, Soundcloud, RSS, Apple Podcasts/iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also download an mp3 via the Soundcloud page for offline listening, and stay tuned for a transcript of this episode on the Lingthusiasm website. To receive an email whenever a new episode drops, sign up for the Lingthusiasm mailing list.You can help keep Lingthusiasm advertising-free by supporting our Patreon. Being a patron gives you access to bonus content and lets you help decide on Lingthusiasm topics.Lingthusiasm is on Facebook, Tumblr, Instagram, Pinterest, and Twitter.Email us at contact [at] lingthusiasm [dot] comGretchen is on Twitter as @GretchenAMcC and blogs at All Things Linguistic.Lauren is on Twitter as @superlinguo and blogs at Superlinguo.Lingthusiasm is created by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our senior producer is Claire Gawne, our production editor is Sarah Dopierala, our production manager is Liz McCullough, and our music is Ancient City by The Triangles. 3Lingthusiasm 1 week ago 98 notes Linguistics Jobs: Interview with a CEO of a SaaS companysuperlinguo:Today s interview is with Alyona Medelyan, CEO of a Thematic, a company that provides customer feedback analysis assoftware as a service (SaaS). The SaaS model means that they create software that people use regularly and subscribe to using, rather than just buying once-off (like getting a netflix subscription rather than buying a DVD of a single movie). Alyona s story is a great example of how it s possible to craft your own opportunities, rather than building projects for other people s companies. You can get in touch with Alyona via LinkedIn, or Twitter, and you can check out the Thematic website. An exciting development in today s interview is that after 5 years I ve added another question to the standard question set! This new question asks about the transition from university to work, and I hope that it can help to demystify a period that can often be stressful. Thanks to Alyona for being the first interviewee to answer this new question.What did you study at university? I did my undergraduate and Masters degree in Germany. My Major was German Linguistics, with two Minors were Computational Linguistics and Computer Science.I ended up doing a PhD specializing in Natural Language Processing.What is your job?As a Co-Founder and the CEO of Thematic. I m in charge of a young company. My job is to grow the company as fast as possible in a sustainable way (meaning building a solution people want and not running out of money). I do operations, company culture, focusing the most on Sales Marketing. This means lots of meetings, strategic planning, looking at data, and also simply getting things done. I love my job, even though it has many ups and downs. If we win, it s the team s win. If we fail, it s my failure as the CEO. And yet, building something from nothing and learning how to motivate a team to succeed has been transformative for me as a person.How does your linguistics training help you in your job?Our solution is a customer feedback analysis platform. We analyze feedback that people leave through reviews, surveys and contact center, e.g. chat or support tickets. The core technology and our IP is about analyzing text. So, it s built on the core principles of linguistics. Having linguistic training gave us a critical advantage over many competing solutions. Where others treat words like numbers, our technology treats them semantically. We use the notion of concepts when analyzing data. Because we use this approach, we can also automatically create taxonomies of concepts and themes from text. Interestingly, another key feature of our product, sentiment analysis sits at the intersection of linguistics and computer science. It s both through my training at university, but also internship at Google, where I gained useful skills to now apply in my job. What was the transition from university to work like for you? Straight out of university, I joined a startup as a Software Researcher. Our team implemented new ways of analyzing documents and search queries. After building a few sales demos, I was invited to present them at trade shows. Luckily, I already did this during my internship while studying Linguistics, so it wasn t new. I quickly got promoted to lead the R D department and was invited to participate in sales and strategy meetings. This all happened within a year or so, so I had to quickly adapt to new things. Ultimately, I decided to become a consultant. I founded Thematic after keep getting requests to analyze customer feedback.Do you have any advice do you wish someone had given to you about linguistics/careers/university?For me, internships were a key factor to my success. I ended up doing 3 different internships. One at a 15 people company, another at a research institute, and a final one at Google. You get exposed to many different ways of building a career and get to learn what s the best fit. You also meet many different people and make connections that will be valuable in your career going forward. In all cases, my internships were paid, but it wasn t much. This was a while ago, but for reference, in one case, I got paid 700 Euros for a month, more than half of which was my rent. What s more important was the amount of time experienced folks at the company spent supervising and training me.Any other thoughts or comments? One skill that I learned during my studies that benefited me was writing. You end up writing your research papers, your thesis, I even wrote a blog about my research. This has been useful when starting my own company and writing content pieces to educate others about what we do and why it matters. Related interviews: Interview with a Communications SpecialistInterview with two Communications ProfessionalsInterview with an Editor and CopywriterRecent interview:Interview with a Communications and Engagement AssistantInterview with a Technical WriterInterview with a Stay-at-home Mom and Twitch StreamerInterview with a Peer Review Program ManagerInterview with an Associate at the Children s Center for Communication, Beverly School for the DeafCheck out the full Linguist Jobs Interview List and the Linguist Jobs tag for even more interviews 3Superlinguo 2 weeks ago 60 notes Lingthusiasm Bonus 54: Sentient plants, proto-internet, and more lingfic about quirky communication lingthusiasm:Lingthusiasm Bonus 54: Sentient plants, proto-internet, and more lingfic about quirky communicationOne of the really nifty things about stories is how they can explore striking and unexpected ways that communication could be different from what we re used to, whether that s communicating with alien life forms or across space and cultures. In this bonus episode, Lauren and Gretchen get enthusiastic about some of the linguistically interesting fiction we ve been reading lately! We talk about the challenges of communicating with sentient plants (from the plant s perspective) in Semiosis by Sue Burke, communicating with aliens by putting babies in pods (look, it was the 1980s) in Suzette Haden Elgin s classic Native Tongue, communicating with humans on a sailing ship using a sorta 19th century proto-internet in Courtney Milan s The Devil Comes Courting, and taking advantage of the difficulty of translation in communicating poetry across cultures in A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine. Warning: this episode may make you want to read some books! We don t spoil major plot points, but we do discuss setup premises and tiny worldbuilding details; if you re someone who likes to go into a book wholly ignorant, check out the books before listening! Listen to the quirky communication in lingfic episode, and get access to 53 more bonus episodes by supporting Lingthusiasm on Patreon. 3Lingthusiasm 3 weeks ago 49 notes A crash course in getting Twitter, for linguists and other people in specific nichesThis is a repost of a how to twitter article that I put up on Medium in early 2016. Medium has been getting glitchy lately, so I m reposting it here. The terminology has gotten a tiny bit dated (RIP eggs), but people still say they ve found it useful years later, so it seemed worth preserving.I freaking love Twitter, and I ve gotten so many fantastic links and internet friends out of it. But a lot of people still struggle with what to do on it, and Twitter s onboarding process doesn t help.My two best tips are:Follow real people rather than the impersonal mega-accounts Twitter recommends. Find them by looking through who a few interesting people who seem to get Twitter are following. Unfollow anytime.Tweet every day for 30 days. Then you can stop, if you want, and you ll have a reasonable understanding and an established-looking Twitter account you can always come back to. But you probably won t want to stop by then.Still feeling unconfident about Twitter? For my extensive, step-by-step guide to getting really good at Twitter for personal+professional purposes, including detailed notes on livetweeting and conference tweeting, keep reading.(This guide assumes you know or can figure out the basics of actually making a tweet, you re just having trouble figuring out what to say or how to make Twitter relevant to you. I m using illustrative examples from Linguist Twitter since that s my corner of the internet, but I trust that you can replace that with your field if necessary.)Keep reading superlinguo:lingthusiasm:New Lingthusiasm Merch!Kiki/bouba scarves, What the fricative shirts, IPA backpacks, and more!A new round of Lingthusiasm merch is here! Lingthusiasm the podcast transforms your boring commute or chores into a lively, nerdy conversation, and we also help you wear your linguistics fandom on your sleeve, on your feet, and surrounding your notes!Kiki and bouba on scarves, mugs, notebooks, and more!If I give you a rounded, lumpy shape and a sharp, spiky one, and tell you that one is called kiki and the other bouba, which name would you attach to which shape? It turns out that people s responses are surprisingly consistent! This classic experiment in cross-modal perception featured in Lingthusiasm episode 21: What words sound spiky across languages?, has become a favourite subject of linguistics memes, and is now available as Lingthusiasm merch!You can now ask random people at a conference, in class, or at work which one is bouba and which is kiki, in black, red, green, yellow, pale blue, pink, or white. (We ve also released the bouba/kiki images under a CC-BY license, should you wish to use it in linguistics experiments of your own.) What the fricative? on t-shirts and more! You know how some pieces of technical terminology just really sound like they moonlight as minor swear words? What the fricative totally looks like something you exclaim when you stub your toe, and yet it actually just refers to the entirely innocuous class of sound that is produced by creating friction with the stream of air as it comes out of your mouth, such as /s/, /z/, /v/, and yes, /f/ itself. Fricatives were featured in Lingthusiasm episode 58: A Fun-Filled Fricative Field Trip.Now you can confuse people by not actually swearing and secretly give yourself an excuse to chat linguistics with them, thanks to our What the Fricative items in black or white text! (Is this your first time hearing about fricatives? We re going to have a whole episode about them next week, you re just finding out about this early because you re a patron!) Our classic International Phonetic Alphabet print on backpacks, duffel bags, and phone cases! The original merch item that started it all, our print with all of the characters of the IPA on it, is now available on more items beyond the scarves, socks, mugs, masks, and notebooks that you might already be familiar with! The earlier merch is all still around, if you ve been vaguely thinking about getting an IPA scarf, lingthusiasm logo sticker, NOT JUDGING YOUR GRAMMAR, JUST ANALYSING IT tote bag, or just having a browse.Check out our linguist-turned-artist Lucy Maddox s website for more of her ridiculously charming work.All of the Lingthusiasm merch makes a great gift for the linguist or linguistics fan in your life! Check out the merch page at lingthusiasm.com/merch for the previous rounds of Lingthusiasm merch.As ever, we love seeing photos of any Lingthusiasm merch in your lives! Tag us in them @lingthusiasm on social media!Relevant kiki bouba links:Lingthusiasm Episode 21: What words sound spiky across languages? Interview with Suzy Styles When does maluma/takete fail? Two key failures and a meta-analysis suggest that phonology and phonotactics matter: New article in i-PerceptionKiki Bouba image for linguistic experiments (under a CC-BY license) 3Superlinguo Source:lingthusiasm 1 month ago 637 notes June 2021: texting periods, LingComm21 meta posts, and finally a new bookshelf!June 2021: texting periods, LingComm21 meta posts, and finally a new bookshelf!I’m quoted in a New York Times Wordplay piece about ending texts with a period. Now that Because Internet has been out for two years, I can attest that people have successfully used it as a way of opening up cross-generational conversations about changing texting norms.Gretchen McCulloch, the Canadian linguist and author of “Because Internet,” dedicated an entire chapter of her book to…View On WordPress

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