Show notes
"More people have listened to this episode than you have." Why does this sentence look so right, but feel so wrong? When your grammar says one thing, but your brain says another, you may have found a linguistic illusion. We're talking to Dr Dan Parker, author of Linguistic Illusions: A Case Study on Agreement Attraction. Video for this episode: Timestamps Start: 0:00 Intros: 0:27 News: 6:30 Related or Not: 34:22 Interview with Dan Parker: 49:53 Words of the Week: 1:38:00 Comment: 1:54:16 The Reads: 1:58:19 Outtakes: 2:05:39
Highlighted moments
We recently covered a study that showed that some languages just don't show attraction effects. If you try to tempt them with a plural or something, they just don't go for it. Like, for example, Czech is one of these.
“I think about them in the same way that when you look at like say a model of the solar system, right? So remember you, you can, you see those models where it's like a crank gear thing of the sun and the planets go around and they're on this wire, right? And so we can think of the solar system as this model where these wires go around. We can, uh, talk about the orbits in this circle here, right? Or this ellipse, you know, but we go out into space and of course there's not these actual wires or these lines in which they, they follow.”
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