Structured Visions

Join me on a journey from humanism to posthumanism with a focus on how we understand language, more-than-human communication, semiosis and information theory. We discuss Eduardo Kohn’s How Forests Think, specifically his ideas about the Earth’s open and emergent semiotic system, of which human meaning-making is a subset. We explore the idea of human language … Continue reading Episode 114  T...

Join me in the pleasure of observing conversation, particularly times when people report the speech of others. They can do this using direct speech, indirect speech or narrative reports of speech events. Here are examples of all three: Mrs Jenkins told the class shat she was cancelling the field trip (indirect) There was a roar … Continue reading Episode 113 We are all grammatically dis...

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 … Continue reading Episode 112 Love language

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’, … Continue reading Episode...

Do you believe in fairies? In his 1911 book, 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 … Continue reading Episode 110 Clap if you believe in fairies

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 … Continue reading Episode 109 What makes you so special?

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 … Continue reading Episode 108 Adulting, and stuff like&#160...

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 … Continue reading Episode 107 Heaven and Earth

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 … Continue reading Episode 106 Prosody and peak experiences

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, … Continue reading Episode 105 Giv...

Do human beings have more or less consciousness than the rest of the living world? Is language an addiction? We’ll explore both points by examining the relationship between language and time. To participate in the world of human language, we have to reduce ourselves to little cutie pies known as ‘selves,’ who exist at a … Continue reading Episode 104 Consciousness is more than just a little...

In this episode I’ll try to convince you that using language to express the self is like a dog chasing its own tail… or a snake eating its tail, if you prefer ouroboros imagery. My perspective is that human language is the one-dimensional structure that shapes the self and thus limits access to the vast … Continue reading Episode 103 Inhabiting language

Have you ever felt like you don’t belong? My own red thread through the labyrinth of linguistics has been the theme of not belonging. We explore the grammatical shape belonging takes in everyday conversations about fitting in. We discuss how selves can grammatically ‘detach’ from bodies, and the transformative possibility of embodied selves. Join me … Continue reading Episode 102 How to&#160...

What’s the difference between me and you? And what’s so bad about big egos, anyway? In this episode we explore the relationship between ego and language. We move from Freud’s psychoanalytic theory to D.T. Suzuki’s explanation of the Zen Buddhist perspective. We explore Suzuki’s analysis of two poems about encounters with flowers, one by Basho … Continue reading Episode 101 You, me and big&#1...

What are your top three wishes? Are they selfish? As it happens, your wishes may be worse than selfish—they may be toxically self-effacing. If you participate, on whatever level, in a society in which people are continually and oppressively bullied into thinking they need to be someone other than who they are, then you may … Continue reading Episode 100 Selfish wishes for social change

What new language would you most like to know? Is astrology on your list? Does astrology count as a language? Maybe the language of the stars could be classified as a pidgin, a language without native speakers. But if, as discussed in Episode 96, ‘The Earth’s language’, languages are ways of organising information, then it … Continue reading Episode 99 Linguistics and astrology

Counting… that’s maths, right? Actually, it’s language. And as we’ll discover through a series of absurd tasks (like, ‘count everything you can see’), you can’t count anything until you know what ‘counts as’ a thing. Language draws the lines around what counts, and it shifts and changes as it does so. In this episode we … Continue reading Episode 98 Linguistic singularities

What’s the weirdest thing about human language? We explore linguistic polarity and all its bizarre implications. Embedded in every human grammar is a way of turning a positive clause (I’m listening) into a negative clause (I’m not listening). Grammatical negation is one of the ways we can do denial. (‘I’m not scared of that dog,’ … Continue reading Episode 97 The intimacy of denial

We start the episode, as always, with a couple of questions: There’s an answer to Question 2 that will be true for anyone who says it. ‘I am here.’ But if you write it on a piece of paper, and then leave the room, it stops being true. Does that make spoken language more genuine? … Continue reading Episode 96 The Earth’s language

What happens when we die? Ideas about the afterlife (or the lack of an afterlife) requires theory building based on either faith or experience. What if you don’t have faith in stories about the afterlife and you’ve never experienced anything resembling a near-death experience (NDE)? In this episode I’ll guide you through a language-based exercise … Continue reading Episode 94 Language and th...

Is there a distinction between you and the rest of the world? Where do you stop and the rest of the world begin? What’s the meaning of the word ‘now’? The gift of language is that it shapes and reshapes the experience of separateness. It’s a gift because it’s fluid. It’s more a membrane than … Continue reading Episode 93 Where do you stop and the rest of the world begin?

When was the last time you lost language? And… how do you feel? The one time it feels like I’m losing language is when I let myself feel what I really feel. (We’re talking about weeping, wailing, keening—the dripping-nose ugly cry.) I’ve been thinking a lot about emotions and language because I’ve just made a … Continue reading Episode 92 The grammatical shape of emotions

Linguistic interaction involves much more than simply sharing information. It requires shaping the information so that it will fit in to a pre-existing structure. This is where we might run into problems if we ever get the chance to chat with intelligent extra-terrestrial beings. To what extent can we communicate if there is no shared … Continue reading Episode 91 The limits of language and&...

What’s the worst relationship you’ve ever been in? What’s the difference between this and that? There are at least three ways of understanding that second question, each of which reveals a different level of abstraction: metalinguistic, anaphoric and exophoric. Our exploration of this and that (proximal and distal demonstratives, that is) reveals the gift, the … Continue reading Episode 90 L...

‘Dreams, it turns out, are like clauses. They can be configured and reconfigured in an infinite number of ways. They are quanta of information about what could be transformed in the world, whether it’s your own world or a bigger social world, or both.’ (from my new book, Refreshing Grammar, p. 127) Can something be … Continue reading Episode 89 Grammar as a gateway to mystery