65: Knowledge is power, copulas are fun

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. The pen is  mightier than the sword. Knowledge is power, France is bacon. These,  ahem, classic quotes all have something linguistically interesting in  common: they’re all formed around a particular use of the verb “be”  known as a copula.

In this episode, your hosts Lauren Gawne and  Gretchen McCulloch get enthusiastic about copulas! This is a special  name for a way of grammatically linking two concepts together that’s  linguistically special in a lot of different languages: sometimes it’s a  verb that’s super irregular (like be/is/was in English, Latin, and many  other languages), sometimes it’s several verbs (like ser and estar in  Iberian and Celtic languages), sometimes it’s a form of marking other  words (like in Nahuatl, Auslan, and ASL), and sometimes it’s not even  visible or audible at all (like zero copula in Arabic, African American  English, and Russian). We also talk about some of the fun things you can  do with copulas in English, such as the lexical gap that’s filled  by “ain’t”, the news headline null copula, and the oddball philosophical  experiment known as E-Prime.

Announcements:

We're doing another online Lingthusiasm liveshow on April 9th (Canada) slash 10th (Australia)! (What time is that for me?) It will be a live Q&A for patrons about a fan fave topic: swearing!  We'll be hosting this session on the Lingthusiasm patron Discord  server. Become a patron before the event, and it will also be available  as an edited-for-legibility recording in your usual Patreon live feed if  you prefer to listen at a later date. In the meantime: tell us about  your favourite examples of swearing in various languages and we might  include them in the show!

LingComm  Grants are back in 2022! These are small grants to help kickstart new  projects to communicate linguistics to broader audiences. There will be a  $500 Project Grant, and ten Startup Grants of $100 each. Apply here by March 31, 2022 or forward this page to anyone you think might be interested, and if you’d like to help us offer more grants, you can support Lingthusiasm on Patreon or contribute directly.  We started these grants because a small amount of seed money would have  made a huge difference to us when we were starting out, and we want to  help there be more interesting linguistics communication in the world.

For links to everything in this episode: https://lingthusiasm.com/post/676480179186597888/episode-65-knowledge-is-power-copulas-are-fun-it