112 Love language
Structured Visions
To what extent is who(m) you’re allowed to love analogous to syntactic structure? In this episode I explore the idea that human beings, in initiating themselves into language, surrender the higher consciousness that the rest of the non-human world enjoys. This is a problem when it comes to love. If we see the world in terms of nouns, verbs, adjectives and prepositions, then love becomes part of a transitive syntactical arrangement which requires a subject that is separate from an object. But it’s worth considering the distinct pleasure of separation. It makes it possible to experience the...
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111 The linguistics of tapping
Structured Visions
What’s your favourite way to alleviate anxiety? Mine is tapping, also known as Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT). Linguistically, tapping is fascinating, because it reveals an inherent contradiction that your body ends up resolving for you. When we tap into (pardon the pun) the world beyond language—our bodies, the earth—we access the worlds ‘created from silence’, the mystery, and the spaces where something new can emerge. The stories I read in this episode are and . My favourite EFT resource is . Sign up for the Grammar for Dreamers newsletter here: Subscribe on , or...
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110 Clap if you believe in fairies
Structured Visions
Do you believe in fairies? In his , American anthropologist Walter Evans Wentz hypothesises ‘tentatively’ that the invisible world of fairies should be examined ‘just as we examine any fact in the visible realm wherein we now live, whether it be a fact of chemistry, of physics, or of biology’ (pp. xvi-xvii). In this episode I put forward my own hypothesis: that human language is what keeps us from seeing fairies… and all the other multidimensional mysteries of the material world. What is it about language that so comprehensively excludes us from a more expansive experience of the...
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109 What makes you so special?
Structured Visions
The paradox of being human in a Western, settler, colonizing culture is you’re supposed to be special and… you’re not supposed to be special. It’s a culture that’s clinging to the idea of human exceptionalism, which is the assumption that humans are better, smarter and more conscious than the rest of the world. Human language is held up as evidence of what makes humans so special. Posthumanism is a movement that challenges this assumption. My position is that language does make humans exceptional, but not exceptional in the sense of ‘better.’ I think language makes us less...
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108 Adulting, and stuff like that
Structured Visions
Conversations with final-year university students has brought back all the fears that I had in my mid- to late twenties about having to be a grown up. The secret to soothing those fears for me was… studying linguistics. More specifically, it was ‘like’ and stuff like that (discourse markers and general extenders). If you’re curious about what made me want to investigate American speakers’ use of like in conversation, have a listen to . In this episode I discuss general extenders, which take the form CONJUNCTION + PROFORM + (optional) MODIFER: and stuff (like that), and things (like...
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107 Heaven and Earth
Structured Visions
The idea that human language comes from the land is not new. It’s rooted in Indigenous ontologies of language. But for those of us who haven’t grown up in an Indigenous culture and are swimming in the ideas of a Western, colonising culture, it can be very difficult to see language as anything other than a human construct. In this episode we ponder the heaven-Earth binary and wonder about what it may have to do with the differences between saying and doing. We marvel at the verbal processes in Gerard Manley Hopkins’s ‘’ and imagine a world in which the loving Creator of human beings...
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106 Prosody and peak experiences
Structured Visions
Have you ever had a peak experience? Did you ever try to tell someone about it? Also, how good is your singing voice? If you’re a native speaker of a tonal language like Mandarin, you may have an excellent singing voice (or at least, you’re more likely to pass a test for perfect pitch, according to ). But in a language like English requires you only to grasp the difference between rising and falling tones—and these only in relation to each other—and this only for paralinguistic information (like whether someone’s being sarcastic). If human language had evolved differently, we might...
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105 Given, new and the selfless know-it-all
Structured Visions
What if you could know everything, but you had to lose your self in the process? We discuss two layered structures in human languages. The first is word order, such as Subject-Verb-Object (SVO) and Subject-Object-Verb (SOV). The second is information structure, which is the system by which people in interaction navigate their interlocutor’s knowledge state, orienting what they say to make a distinction between given and new information. All human languages start from the assumption that human beings in interaction know different things, or are putting their attention to different things. In...
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One from the archives: The Gift (Episode 24)
Structured Visions
If you listened to last month’s episode, you’ll know that I’ve taken a short break from podcasting to finish off the book I’m writing. I’m thrilled to tell you that the book is now finished, and I’m very happy with it. I can’t wait to tell you more. (In fact, if you sign up to my newsletter at you’ll hear more sooner!) I’m so excited to get back to podcasting monthly, which I’ll do again at the end of January 2025. In the meantime, please enjoy this episode from the Structured Visions archives. Episode 24, The Gift, originally aired on Christmas Day, 2015. I hope you’re...
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One from the archives: How linguistics can save the world (Episode 60)
Structured Visions
I’m taking a short break from podcasting as I finish off the book I’m writing, but I’ll be back in the New Year. In the meantime, please enjoy this episode from the Structured Visions archives. Episode 60, How linguistics can save the world, originally aired on June 1, 2018. This podcast has been an amazing way for me to develop some unusual ideas about language. Recently I was wondering when I first came up with the idea that the Earth has its own language of which human language is one small but significant part. Episode 60 is one of the early recordings of me fleshing out that idea. I...
info_outlineHave you ever had a peak experience? Did you ever try to tell someone about it? Also, how good is your singing voice?
If you’re a native speaker of a tonal language like Mandarin, you may have an excellent singing voice (or at least, you’re more likely to pass a test for perfect pitch, according to a study reported in Scientific American). But in a language like English requires you only to grasp the difference between rising and falling tones—and these only in relation to each other—and this only for paralinguistic information (like whether someone’s being sarcastic).
If human language had evolved differently, we might all be amazing singers. Or so we might glean from Steven Mithen’s book, The singing Neanderthals (which I also discussed in Episode 78 of Structured Visions). Mithen proposes that human language evolved from music. All that remains that’s vaguely musical in language now is prosody. But what a diminished form of music it is!
In this episode we explore the quality of human language to reduce, constrict and thereby oppress, especially in relation to trying to put peak experiences into words. One of the features of a peak experience, according to Abraham Maslow in Religions, values and peak-experiences, is that ‘the whole universe is perceived as an integrated and unified whole.’ One of the reasons, I suggest, that it’s hard to express these mystical experiences is that language is structured around the principle of the self. Peak experiences refuse to be contained within the membrane of self.
And yet, when you look for it, it’s there. Within your self, somehow.
That’s the contradiction: the you that dissolves in a peak experience remains present by its inability communicate it.
What if we think of human language as developed by the Earth itself, as part of the Earth’s agentive evolution? What if the Earth produced selfhood to experience mystery?
Entertaining that possibility offers us the opportunity to explore the mysteries within us, and to keep sacred the mysteries of others.
Have you ever had a peak experience? Tell me all about it.
The story I read in this episode is ‘The luthier.’
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