LingthusiasmPSA: How writing your own linguistic example sentences can go wrong...
Listen to more of 'Frogs, pears, and more staples from linguistics example sentences' here https://lingthusiasm.com/post/723422789301829632/episode-82-frogs-pears-and-more-staples-from
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[Video: green background with white text and sound wave. Audio: Gretchen and Lauren discussing potential pitfalls when writing example sentences.]
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Lingthusiasm - Episode 82: Frogs, pears, and more staples from...
Episode 82: Frogs, pears, and more staples from linguistics example sentences Linguists are often interested in comparing several languages or dialects. To make this easier, it’s useful to have data that’s relatively similar across varieties, so that the differences really pop out. But what exactly needs to be similar or different varies depending on what we’re investigating. For example, to compare varieties of English, we might have everyone read the same passage that contains all of the sounds of English, whereas to compare the way people gesture when telling a story, we might have them all watch the same silent film and re-tell it back. In this episode, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch get enthusiastic about linguistics examples that have been re-used in lots of studies to get large groups of people to produce comparable language data. These sentences are supposed to be pretty unremarkable so we can focus on doing linguistics on them, but they end up having a sort of charmingly banal vibe that makes them much beloved by people who have spent tons of time poring over recorded files. We talk about The North Wind and the Sun, the Stella passage, the Rainbow passage, the Harvard Sentences, the Frog story, the Pear story, and the Tweety Bird video. We also talk about what goes into creating different genres of reusable example sentences, from phonetic balancing to what makes a concept culturally specific, as well as our experience learning about and coming up with various examples. Have a favourite recurring example that we didn’t have space for here? Let us know! Read the transcript here. Announcements: In this month’s bonus episode we present: LingthusiASMR, a very special bonus episode, in which your hosts Gretchen and Lauren get enthusiastic about linguistics in a very relaxed manner by reading one very large classic set of charmingly banal linguistics example sentences. Several people have told us that this has helped put them to sleep, which isn’t usually our goal but it sure is for this episode! Join us on Patreon now to get access to this and 70+ other bonus episodes, including our upcoming linguistics advice episode where we answer your questions! You’ll also get access to the Lingthusiasm Discord server where you can chat with other language nerds. Here are the links mentioned in the episode: Wikipedia entry for ‘The North Wind and the Sun’ Illustrations of the International Phonetic Association (IPA) International Phonetics Association - Journal of the IPA The Speech Accent Archive - Please Call Stella The Speech Accent Archive - Submissions The Rainbow Passage Gender Reveal Podcast episode discussing gender and voice The Harvard Sentences Superlinguo post on The Harvard Sentences Wikipedia entry on ‘The Frog Story’ Frog Story corpora ‘Visual narrative comprehension: Universal or not?’ by Neil Cohn The Pear Story video Pear Film World Corpus ‘The Pear Stories: Cognitive, Cultural and Linguistic Aspects of Narrative Production’ By Wallace L. Chafe ‘A Pear Story Study of information status, thematic role and animacy in Meithei (Manipuri, Meiteiron)’ by Shobhana L. Chelliah ‘The Chinese Pear Stories - Narrative Across Seven Chinese Dialects’ by Mary S. Erbaugh Looney Tunes ‘Canary Row’ video ‘Language Unlimited: The Science Behind Our Most Creative Power’ by David Adger (with David’s cat and husband as the example sentence names) ‘Don’t Touch My Projectile: Gender Bias and Stereotyping in Syntactic Examples’ by Monica Macaulay and Colleen Brice ‘Gender bias in linguistics textbooks: Has anything changed since Macaulay & Brice 1997?’ by Cépeda, Kotek, Pabst, & Syrett ‘The Diverse Names Generator: An app for decreasing bias and promoting inclusion’ by Maura O’Leary, Rainey Williams, Mario Peng Lee Diverse Names Generator You 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. To receive an email whenever a new episode drops, sign up for the Lingthusiasm mailing list. You can help keep Lingthusiasm ad-free, get access to bonus content, and more perks by supporting us on Patreon. Lingthusiasm is on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Mastodon, and Tumblr. Email us at contact [at] lingthusiasm [dot] com Gretchen 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 assistant is Martha Tsutsui Billins, and our editorial assistant is Jon Kruk. Our music is ‘Ancient City’ by The Triangles. This episode of Lingthusiasm is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license (CC 4.0 BY-NC-SA).
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