Linguistics Behind the Scenes

Transcripts

Trailer: Welcome to Linguistics Behind the Scenes!

Christina: Hi! I’m Christina. I’m a professor of English and Digital Linguistics.

Dominic: And I'm Dominic! I'm a language enthusiast.

Christina: And this is Linguistics Behind the Scenes.

Dominic: What you always wanted to know about language and how to explore it.

Christina: In this podcast, we’re going to explore topics like...

Dominic: How has Star Wars impacted the English language?

Christina: How many words are there for talking about being drunk?

Dominic: What about the language of comic books?

Christina: And many, many more!

Dominic: Christina, what makes this podcast unique?

Christina: That it’s got you and me in it, of course.

Dominic: Of course! And we are linguistics nerds, and we're going to pick the topics in linguistics research that our audience might find funny, interesting, or surprising.

Christina: Yes! And you’re going to get a behind-the-scenes tour of research projects and I’ll tell you all the interesting stories that happened in the background.

Dominic: I can't wait! So make sure to stay tuned right here and join us for new episodes as they become available.

Christina: We look forward to you joining us on Linguistics Behind the Scenes!

Episode 1: How has Star Wars changed the English language?

Dominic: Hello everyone, and welcome to the inaugural episode of our podcast.

Christina: I'm Christina Sanchez-Stockhammer. I'm a professor of English and Digital Linguistics from Germany, and I'm very excited about almost everything that has got to do with language.

Dominic: And I'm Dominic Piazza. I'm a language enthusiast with a background in international relations from the United States, and I'm also very excited to talk to you about all my favorite aspects of linguistics and language.

Christina: And in addition, you're going to get a behind-the-scenes tour of research in digital linguistics, in English linguistics, in all kinds of research that has got to do with language, and we're very happy to show you around and show you the things that you may not get to see or hear anywhere else.

Dominic: Indeed, we couldn't be happier. This is just one of our favorite subjects to talk about. And Christina, how are you today?

Christina: I'm fine. And you?

Dominic: I'm doing pretty well. You know, I've been playing this new Indiana Jones game and I must say, I find him quite inspirational, right? He speaks so many languages with this really deep knowledge, and he travels all around the world to solve these mysteries, and yeah, I want to be like him.

Christina: Yeah, he's really cool, even though some archaeologists might say he destroys a bit too much, too many archaeological remains in the process of actually finding treasures. But of course, it's lots of fun and I have to say, I'm a huge Indiana Jones fan. And he also inspired my own app Bridge of Knowledge, which I will talk about in another installment of this podcast.

Dominic: You're probably right. I suppose it wouldn't be a good action movie without the cave collapsing in on him every single time he finds the special artifact. But you're right, it might be a little bit too destructive for modern sensibilities. But you know, Indiana Jones is a George Lucas production, and George Lucas likes to do a lot with language. He has another very famous movie series, one might say, Star Wars, which has aliens and all sorts of different species and language. And Christina, I think you recently did some research on the language of Star Wars.

Christina: Yeah, I did, because I'm a huge Star Wars fan myself. I actually motivated myself to study for my A-levels by allowing me to have some Star Wars stickers every now and then.

Dominic: Oh that's wonderful, Star Wars stickers. That's wonderful. I'm also a very big fan and actually, I'd like to know, the age-old question: Which order do you think the films should be watched in? Do you think you should watch them in release order or do you think you should watch them in the numbered order?

Christina: Well, I'm personally a huge fan of the middle trilogy, the original Skywalker trilogy. So I would start with part four, then part five, then part six, then part seven, eight, nine, which I really enjoy very much as well. And then, end with one, two, three. What about you?

Dominic: I think I'm inclined to agree with you, and I think the prequels are more enjoyable when you know everything that happens later. But you know, on the subject of order and how we structure things, putting the back in the front or the front in the back, there's a certain character who speaks in a very unique manner, yeah? Yoda. What do you think of Yoda?

Christina: I think Yoda is fascinating. People quote Yoda all the time and very often, when people use an unusual sentence structure, they refer to Yoda.

Dominic: Oh, yeah, you're absolutely right. Yeah, or Yoda speak, Yoda talk. And, you know, Star Wars is such an absolute behemoth of pop culture that it's really fascinating, the way it's permeated our mainstream culture.

Christina: Absolutely, and even our language. I mean, if you think about words like Jedi, Lightsaber, Yoda, Padawan, or even the expression to the dark side, they are very often used in contexts that have nothing to do with Star Wars. And that is what my research was about.

Dominic: Wow.

Christina: Yeah, it's cool. Have you ever been using these words in any ways that are probably not directly making an allusion to the films themselves?

Dominic: Oh, certainly, absolutely. I mean, especially when it comes to the dark side, I kind of figured that maybe this phrase already existed in English and that maybe George Lucas just drew inspiration from that.

Christina: Yeah, I mean, the dark side, the light side, so this idea of darkness being related to evil and of the light being related to something positive. I mean that has been around for ages. I mean, it's a very traditional idea. And it's an idea, it's a metaphor, which also makes sense if you think about it, because when it's dark, it's more difficult for you to do things, you know, you might bump into objects, you know, so it's obvious why it's better if there is light. So, it really makes sense. But in this idea of kind of moving to the Dark Side, behaving in a way that is less moral than you behaved before – this is something which was apparently influenced by the Star Wars franchise, because I looked at texts from different years, so at a historical corpus of English. And I noticed that before Star Wars, “to the dark side” wasn't really used in that sense very much. So the references that you have before that time with the “to” in front of it, well, they rarely carry that idea of immorality. It's more like “going to the dark side of the house” and things like that.

Dominic: Oh my gosh, that's so fascinating. So okay, it certainly seems here that Star Wars popularized, or may have even spawned, this specific kind of usage of it, and people are kind of using it in their general language without specifically referencing the movies. Because I know, I think, that's one of the really key distinctions here that when you're referencing something kind of on purpose, it's not really the same as sort of using the language almost generically.

Christina: Yes, I mean, very often if you think about movies, as you call them, or films, as I sometimes call them, if you think about that, then very often if you quote something, if you have a language reference in some way or another, then it is because you really want to allude to that film. So, if I might say something like "May the Force be with you,” then I'm very obviously referring to Star Wars in some way or another, and it's relatively rarely the case that you just have individual words that become part of the English language that actually come from a film. One of the exceptions is Mini-Me, and I really like the word Mini-Me, because, I don't know, have you got an idea where that comes from?

Dominic: Oh, goodness. No, I don't.

Christina: Have you ever watched the Austin Powers films?

Dominic: Ah, I haven't, but I'm very familiar with them.

Christina: Yeah, because there’s someone, he's called Dr. Evil. and he's got a clone. And that clone looks very much like him, just small. He's even wearing the same clothes and trying to behave in every way like Dr. Evil himself. And, so that's the Mini-Me, that's where that comes from. But interestingly, when people are using the word Mini-Me now, they're not using it in that sense. They're actually using it in a fashion context. So you might talk about a woman who is dressed in a particular way wearing a particular dress and accompanying accessories, and she's just dressed like her daughter, and the daughter is then her Mini-Me. And people who are talking about that, well, they will presumably not be aware of the fact that this comes originally from a reference to Dr. Evil's clone.

Dominic: Oh, wow, okay. Yes. We might even call that, when you wear matching outfits, we might call it twinning. Actually, there's a really great word in Japanese, wasei-eigo, which is Japanese-created English, English that they've created, but that English speakers don't say, and it's pea-rukku, which means “pair look”. And so maybe this pair look would be a little bit of a Mini-Me when you wear matching outfits.

Christina: Aw, it's so sweet, I love that. It's so cool that you speak Japanese.

Dominic: Oh, yes, and sometimes Japanese reminds me a little bit of Yoda because it has a different sentence structure, a different word order. It's subject-object-verb, so the verb comes at the end, which German does sometimes, but not in all cases. Japanese does it in all cases, and so sometimes you kind of have to reprogram your brain to kind of express ideas in a way that may not seem natural to an English speaker.

Christina: Yeah. You mentioned German and there, it's true, we have that, but it's just in a subordinate clause. So usually in a main clause, this is not the case. So, I could say, okay, it's not the standard, it's just like, yeah, special cases, subordinate clauses. But of course, these are also quite common. So, to give you an example, “Weil ich Linguistik liebe” you know, “Because I linguistics love.” Yeah, so you wouldn't say “Because I love linguistics,” but “Because I linguistics love.” But of course, this is something which you would use after an introductory part of the sentence, which makes it clear that this is a special one, a subordinate one. So, for example, “I'm doing this podcast because I love linguistics”.

Dominic: Yes, exactly. And in Japanese, I think you would have to essentially say, “I love linguistics, so I'm doing this podcast,” essentially. So everything has to be kind of structured differently. But, yeah, you're right, when it comes to German and the linguistic classification, we might say that it's subject-verb-object, but with a significant asterisk. That's a little bit of a joke in the language learning community. So, people are using these words in the English language, but how often, how frequently, do they actually use them?

Christina: I would say more often than I expected. I mean, I didn't check on every word, so, I mean, there's some words like “TIE fighter” that probably are less frequently used. But at least, if you look at those words that are recorded in the Oxford English Dictionary, which I love, by the way, one of my favorite dictionaries. So the word “Jedi,” the word Jedi is used, let me think, once every four million words. Now, what does that mean? I wanted to make sure that I knew if that was a lot or not. And so I checked in the same corpus, and I found that other words with a similar frequency were “dizzy,” so when you're dizzy, when you're nauseous. And also the word “jewel,” like jewelry, rings that you’re wearing. So, I was really surprised that Jedi is as common as these two words, which are very general language words.

Dominic: That really puts it in perspective.

Christina: Yeah, definitely.

Dominic: To do this research, you said you used a corpus, you used corpora. What is that tool? How does that work?

Christina: So, a corpus is a collection of texts, a digital collection of texts. You could think about it like having lots of Word documents on a computer, and you just search them. So it’s a bit like a Google search.

Dominic: Oh yeah, like Control-F.

Christina: Yeah, exactly. And so the nice thing, actually, is that in contrast to a Google search where you get those different hits underneath each other with a bit of context, there are special tools like AntConc, for example, which is produced by Laurence Anthony. That's, yeah, why it's called AntConc–Anthony Concordancer.

Dominic: Oh nice, it’s one of those syllabic abbreviations. Those are very popular in languages like Russian. They love syllabic abbreviations. Nice.

Christina: Yeah, and also in the east of Germany, by the way, you find a lot of syllabic abbreviations.

Dominic: Oh, very nice.

Christina: So in Chemnitz, for example, you find, yeah, different local institutions like the Rawema-Gebäude, which is a building where the syllables also refer to, well, to the full expression. Which I can't reproduce here, but I know it's one of those, yeah, syllabic abbreviations.

Dominic: Oh, that’s cool.

Christina: But in any case, so that concordancing tool is very, very helpful, and it's also free, by the way. So anyone interested in it could just use it. And so this concordancing tool allows you to search for certain words or also patterns in a text. So you might look for the word, yeah, “side” or the two words “dark side,” and then you just try to see what comes in front of it, or “to the dark side.” So that's what I did. So I searched for “to the dark side” and then I tried to see, okay, what occurs to the left of it, for example. And then you just sort it. That's the nice thing. So you get it neatly underneath each other, and by sorting those different hits that you find, you can get an overview of what types of context a certain word or expression occurs in. That's extremely helpful if you try to form generalizations about language, which we linguists try to do all the time.

Dominic: Yeah, very cool. So it's a lot more powerful than just a simple Control-F. These are some really granular tools that you have here. That is awesome. So we've established that there's this difference between maybe trying to specifically reference the movies and maybe using these words, this language, kind of more generically, without specifically referencing Star Wars. And it's this latter category which we might say is more interesting. So when it comes to kind of references versus innovation, what did you find there?

Christina: I've found that, actually, there's a lot of innovative uses of words from Star Wars in the English language. So among the examples that I looked at, I found that over a third are actually contexts where Star Wars is only mildly alluded to, if at all. So, for example, someone might be called a “finance Jedi,” or in the context of dating, someone might tell another person, “This is how it's done, young Padawan,” you know? And so, obviously, I mean, there is this allusion to Star Wars, but you don't necessarily have to think about Star Wars while using it in that context because it's got nothing to do with the films themselves. And so here a word like “Padawan” is used in the sense of an apprentice or a person who you are showing the ropes to, basically. And, yeah, you often get that. Also, I mean, “Yoda” is used in the meaning of a mentor, so sometimes people talk about wanting to meet “their Yoda.” And if you talk about wanting to meet “your Yoda,” well, the use of “your” here already implies that it's a more general meaning, and that it's not just the person or the character of Yoda, but this idea of a mentor.

Dominic: Oh, that's excellent. Well, I would very much like to become a language Jedi. For now, I might remain a Padawan, but we'll see if the Force is with me.

Christina: Oh, probably you already are.

Dominic: Aw, thank you. What initially gave you the idea to investigate this?

Christina: Actually, one of my students. I was teaching a translation class and we were translating a text about Dickens World, which is a theme park. I think it closed in the meantime and I mean, what would you imagine a theme park about Dickens to be like, Dominic? What would you expect?

Dominic: I would imagine it would be themed around A Tale of Two Cities and many of his famous works.

Christina: And of course, if you think about the kind of general attitude, the general spirit of the theme park, apparently it was relatively dark. And so, in the text they said that it felt like “Disney turned to the dark side.” And then my student asked me when we were translating this, “Do you think this is a reference to Star Wars?” And I said, “Could be, but I'm not a hundred percent sure about that.” And that got me thinking about Star Wars as a potentially interesting topic for linguistic research, and then I tried to see if there's other words, expressions, that might have entered the English language in the meantime. And I really liked this idea, because if you think about the Star Wars films, what really makes that universe special is that it's a used universe. So it's not all shiny science fiction, but, yeah, the different spaceships et cetera, they’re all very used. And so you're trying to kind of transmit this idea of this is familiar in a certain way. And so, I quite like this idea that therefore it's relatively easy for those Star Wars words, at least to a certain extent, to enter our universe and somehow it feels familiar.

Dominic: Well, it's a long time ago.

Christina: In a galaxy far, far away.

Dominic: Yes, and this is so cool because, you know, Star Wars, pop culture, entertainment, you know, it's so cool that it actually has some very real scientific merit for these types of investigations, these types of scientific inquiries. I think this is totally fascinating.

Christina: Absolutely, and I mean, if you think about science fiction, sometimes inventions that were just shown in science fiction films in the end became reality, you know. So, it's not just interesting from the linguistic perspective, but of course, also from the perspective of inspiration. I think quite a lot of researchers actually do take inspiration from science fiction when they're developing, yeah, new devices, for example.

Dominic: Well, Star Wars is certainly hugely successful, but we know that not everyone has seen the movies. Sometimes it can be very surprising if you meet someone who hasn't seen any of the movies. You kind of wonder, “Oh my gosh, where have you been? It's such a huge part of our culture.” So, what did you find? Do people actually have to know the Star Wars movies, or have to have seen the Star Wars movies to be using this type of language?

Christina: Not necessarily. I mean, there are some people who haven't watched the Star Wars films, but they still know what a Jedi is. Actually, I asked my mother, because I know she didn't watch the Star Wars films, and I asked her, “By the way, do you know what a Jedi is?” And she said, “Of course I do.” And I said, “Well, I just wanted to ask because I know you didn't watch the films,” but she did. And the same applies to some friends of mine, because the interesting thing about lightsabers, for example, is that they don't just exist as an idea. They also exist in the real world. There's quite a lot of children who are playing with lightsaber toys. And some children that I know had some lightsaber toys at home, and then I asked the parents if they were also Star Wars fans, and then they revealed to me that they had never watched any of the Star Wars films. And I was really surprised. So obviously they just found the toy attractive. And then, I mean, people have those toys and they talk about them and they don't mention it's a toy, but they just talk about their lightsaber. And there's even people out there who do lightsaber dueling as a kind of sport. And so there's different mentions of that in the corpora that I looked at. So that's actually quite fun. Yeah, so you don't necessarily have to have watched Star Wars to talk about it.

Dominic: Oh my goodness, yes. When I was younger, I was obsessed with those lightsaber duels and the fan films that I would see on YouTube. I even tried to put together some myself. So that is really fascinating. That really speaks to the really significant impact that Star Wars has had on our culture. I mean, it's kind of become a part of, almost, the collective human story now. Almost like the fairy tales of yore.

Christina: Absolutely. I entirely agree. And I mean, if you think about the narrative structures, then you will notice that the narrative structures that underlie Star Wars are very similar to those in fairy tales. But of course, fairy tales are a different story, and I hope to tell that one another time.

Dominic: Yes. Well, Christina, may the Force be with you. I think that we’re just about out of time for today's episode. Probably going to wrap things up. But this was a totally fascinating discussion. I'm so happy we got to sit down and talk about this today.

Christina: Yeah, I tremendously enjoyed this too. And to our audience, I hope so did you. So, stay curious. Have fun with language.

Dominic: And join us next time behind the scenes of English linguistics.