lingvids:

Is a sentence more like a bracelet or a mobile? Watch our first video and find out! 

I’m excited to finally share this video and the LingVids project with you! The mobile metaphor is one of my favourite syntaxy analogies, but it really takes visuals (or better yet, manipulables) to explain it.

A note of context: this is a video establishing why you might want trees or structure of any kind when analyzing sentences, and it deliberately plays fast and loose with what exactly that structure might be. Partly that’s because it makes sense to justify having any structure at all before trying to establish what that structure should look like, and partly that’s because, well, have you ever tried to build a syntax tree mobile out of wooden dowels, string, index cards, and clothespins on a single tabletop? A more complicated tree just wouldn’t fit. If you’re looking for various more detailed approaches to drawing a syntax tree though, I have a whole series for you (and yes, I wrote that series several months ago knowing that this video was coming up). 

LingVids is a joint project involving me and ling-friends Leland Paul Kusmer, Josh Levy, and Caroline Andrews. You can spot each of our hands and voices in different videos, which will appear on the first of the month (and that’s not an April Fool’s joke!). LingVids has accounts in the usual places (twitter, tumblr, youtube, facebook) if you want to keep track of it directly, or of course you can also stay tuned here for updates. In the meantime, for an excellent linguistics videos project that I’m not affiliated with, also check out The Ling Space. 

lingvids:

Blurring our words together isn’t just about speaking fast — it can also show us how words move around as we form a question. 

My favourite thing about this topic is that it’s easy to think of words like “wanna” as just “lazy” short forms, but we actually use them according to very sophisticated rules. 

lingvids:

Structural Ambiguity: sometimes a single sentence has more than one meaning.

I like introducing structural ambiguity early in syntax because it helps answer the question, “What’s the point of drawing trees?” Trees convey information about the relationships between words that we have to be aware of in order to understand the sentence, but which we don’t normally think about. And syntax – in fact, linguistics in general – is about consciously figuring out all the things we’re subconsciously doing when we use language. 

This video also refers to the two previous lingvids videos: Is a sentence more like a bracelet or a mobile? and What “wanna” tells us about forming questions.

lingvids:

A reflexive pronoun needs to refer to something, but how do we know which word it refers to? Here’s a first look at the puzzle. 

The fourth LingVids video gets into reflexive pronouns and anaphora. We didn’t get into how you’d draw a tree for this construction, because it’s a little more complicated, but it’s still useful to notice that it’s not just the linear order that’s important for interpreting sentences.