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22: This, that and the other thing - determiners
🕑 Added 2018-07-19 21:33:15 +0000 UTC When linguists think about complicated words, we don’t think about rare, two-dollar words like “defenestration”. Instead, we think about the kinds of words that you use all the time without even thinking about it, like “the”. You might not already know that defenestration refers to throwing something out of a window, but once you find out, it’s easy to explain. But what does “the” mean? And, for that matter, what kind of a word even is “the”?If you think back to when you learned about nouns and verbs, you might have been told that “the” was an article. But this brings us to a circular question, which is, what exactly is an article, other than “that thing that ‘the’ is”?
In this episode of Lingthusiasm, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch get enthusiastic about a bigger-picture answer to the question of how “the” works, one that joins together a bunch of words that might not seem related at first glance, including the, that, each, my, and five. Welcome to one of our favourite word classes: the determiner!
Determiners are probably the most underrated word class. We use them all the time, and linguists have been talking about them by this name as a unified category for nearly a full century, and yet they’re still rarely discussed outside linguistics. That’s a shame, because determiners are also a really interesting way that languages differ from each other.
To see this episode's shownotes, go to https://lingthusiasm.com/post/176067102571/lingthusiasm-episode-22-this-that-and-the-other
Comments
Lingthusiasm
Interesting, thanks for the examples! (Yeah, it's confusing sometimes that Patreon interprets the enter key as send rather than new line, if you want a new line hit shift+enter)
Monica
I did it again. Why. The point is that I find it interesting that "ano" is the one used for situations like "I saw THAT cat" where it references a previous knowledge or situation, rather than a certain distance away (though it also does that in other contexts). Both ano and sono are used as filler words too, invoking some vague unnamed topic that the other person might find of interest, maybe. Anyway I mostly found it interesting that "THAT cat" is "ANO neko" and I don't think I've heard sono neko in the same way.
Monica
Lol I've never commented before on patreon and accidentally sent my comment too soon.
Monica
Japanese has three different categories of distance for "that" too - kono, sono, and ano. (You can use the ko/so/a for things like locations and people too with different suffixes.)
Lingthusiasm
Ah, interesting! I guess it's like how in Doctor Who you have "The Doctor" but you never refer to the various ones across incarnations as "The Doctors"
I've been contemplating the "Flashes" question because there have, in fact, been Flash duplicates not to mention the whole Flash family and different men that have been The Flash, but without rewatching or reading various things I'm not actually 100% sure if they never call them "The Flashes". But my sense is that they avoided using "The Flashes" by having the category of people with hyperspeed powers called 'speedsters' and then only the current main Flash is *The* Flash whereas everyone else gets some other moniker (e.g. "Kid Flash") or is talked about as "ex-speedster" or "the previous Flash".
Lingthusiasm
Yes! I think this is documented as a Northern vs Southern California thing, not sure about elsewhere! (I know that the highway into Toronto is typically called "the 401" though, not just 401) <a href="http://mentalfloss.com/article/71459/why-southern-californians-say-freeway-numbers" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">http://mentalfloss.com/article/71459/why-southern-californians-say-freeway-numbers</a>
Freeways in Southern California are arthrous, whereas I believe they're anarthrous elsewhere in the country. I'm glad to finally have an adjective to describe this phenomenon!
