So, a couple months ago, I posted a review of the TEFLology Podcast series, in which I said that I had started listening to the TEFLology Podcast as a way to increase my professional development in my spare time.
And then once I completed TEFLology I moved onto to The Ling Space Youtube channel as my next listening project.
Actually, I discovered The Ling Space through TEFLology in an indirect sort of way. Via TEFLology, I learned that there is an active TEFL community on twitter. So, I started looking up linguists I knew and subscribing to their twitter feeds. Among the linguists I started following was Stephen Pinker (whose book on linguistics I had enjoyed) and Stephen Pinker tweeted about The Ling Space.
Latest Ling Space: Building words out of pieces (Derivational and Inflectional Morphology). https://t.co/AYuWioosUV via @YouTube— Steven Pinker (@sapinker) June 18, 2016
The Ling Space consists of a series of 10 minute videos each on some aspect of linguistics.
At the time of this writing, they're up to 91 videos, but the series is still ongoing.
Being a completist, I wanted to listen through all the videos in order as a series, but as far as I could tell, there was no playlist available containing all the videos. So I created my own. It's my gift to you Internet.
...although be warned, I indulged my completist tenancies when making this playlist and included all the videos--including the trailer, the outtake episodes, and both versions of the same Daniel Dennet interview (the original and the re-mastered audioversion).
The Review
These are short little fun videos.
The presenters don't strike me as media professionals, but the videos are semi-professionally done, with theme music, and eye catching graphics.
At around 10 minutes (or less) for each video, these are prefect for the short attention span of the digital age.
And the presenters know their audience as well--they're on Youtube, so plenty of references are thrown into geek culture. Linguistic phenomena is always illustrated with references to Harry Potter, Game of Thrones, X-Files, Star Trek, et cetera.
Despite the pop culture friendly tone of these videos, some of the linguistic theories being explained can get a bit technical, particularly some of the ones that deal with universal grammar and sentence trees.
Since I only had these videos on as background noise in my apartment, I can't claimed to have fully absorbed absolutely everything, and some of the more technical stuff flew right by me.
[Sidenote: In my review of TEFLology, I complained that the information content of each episode was light, and the banter/discussion quotient was high. This had seemed like a waste of air time to me, but I'm now beginning to better appreciate how that format helped me to absorb new ideas. On TEFLology, any new information was given in small doses and always thoroughly discussed. On The Ling Space, they rush through new information fast, and if you're not listening closely, you can miss a lot. Since I mostly had these videos on as background noise in my apartment, I'm sure I missed a lot.]
But although I can't claim to have absorbed everything in these videos, I did pick up a lot.
I'd recommend this series without hesitation to anyone else looking to brush up on their linguistic knowledge.
Odds and Ends
The makers of The Ling Space appear to have a working knowledge of several different languages, and pull on many of them for examples. Among the languages they are familiar with is Japanese (which happens to be the only second language I know).
Fortunately for me, Japanese pops up as an example frequently.
I particularly enjoyed their episode on oyagi-gags--(literally "uncle jokes" in Japanese--although The Ling Space translates it as "dad jokes".)
It's weird how certain senses of humor appears to be associated with certain ages. When I was in Japan, I remember my young Japanese friends would complain about the "oyagi gags" that the old men in their office were fond of telling.
Actually, me and the other foreigners were quite fond of "oyagi gags". It was fun for us to see Japanese people playing with the language, and it was good practice for us as language learners. But young Japanese people hated them.
Stephen Pinker, Noam Chomsky, and The Ling Space
It's no surprise that Stephen Pinker is a big fan of this series, since the view of linguistics in The Ling Space is very partial to Chomsky's theories of Universal Grammar, of which Stephen Pinker is also a big advocate.
(Noam Chomsky is referenced repeatedly in these videos, and at one point Chomsky is called the "godfather of modern linguistics".)
In fact many of the episodes especially, much of the material covered in The Ling Space was simply reviewing for me stuff I had already learned from Stephen Pinker's book. (Not that I'm complaining about that. It's good for me to review this stuff, or else I'll start to forget it.)
Stephen Pinker actually shows up personally in this series in one of the interview episodes.
One the anti-Chomsky side, however, Daniel Dennet appears to be very uspet about Chomsky's reluctance to accept evolution as an explanation for Universal Grammar.
My only insight into this evolution controversy comes via Stephen Pinker's book. According to my memory of Stephen Pinker's paraphrase of Chomsky, Chomsky's thinking goes something like this: if we are committed to the naturalist worldview that evolution is, in one way or another, responsible for all of human behavior, then fine, we can say that Universal Grammar came from evolution. But we have no theoretical model for how evolution could possibly have produced something as complex as Universal Grammar.
(This is one of the few points in his book where Pinker differs from Chomsky, and in his book Pinker provides an explanation of how Universal Grammar could have come from evolution. Chomsky, apparently, never altered his view, and Daniel Dennet is not happy about it.)
This Series is Still Ongoing
The Ling Space channel is still active, and they're still putting out new videos. So I'm going to try to do short mini-reviews for each episode (as I have been doing with TEFLology) and indexing them below.
* Topic 78: What Do You Start with in a Third Language? L3 Acquisition
* Topic 79: What Does Possession Tell Us About Syntax? Determiner Phrases
* Topic 80: What Do Nasal Sounds Look Like? Sonorant Acoustics
* Topic 81: What Could Alien Languages Look Like?
* The Linguistics of Arrival
* Topic 82: What Constraints Are There on Linguistic Sounds? Optimality Theory
* Topic 83: How Do We Capture the Truth of Beliefs? Type Theory
* Topic 84: How Can We Tell What Roles Nouns Play? Case Theory
* Interview with Anne Charity Hudley
* Topic 85: How Do Babies Build Sentences? The Stages of Child Syntax
Link of the Day
noam chomsky on universal grammar and the genetics of language with captioning
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