Exploring Language Structure, Morphemes, and Inflectional Morphology

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Forming a language tree involves identifying words and morphemes, which are minimal meaning units in a language. Words in English consist of roots (like verbs) and endings that convey information like third-person singular. Morphemes in a word can change its meaning through inflectional morphology, like indicating singular/plural for nouns or past tense for verbs. English has limited inflectional morphology, unlike languages like Russian. English verbs commonly use E.D. for past tense, but irregular words like 'drink' break the rule by not following this pattern.

Edward Gibson is a psycholinguistics professor at MIT and heads the MIT Language Lab. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors:
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OUTLINE:
Here’s the timestamps for the episode. On some podcast players you should be able to click the timestamp to jump to that time.
(00:00) – Introduction
(10:53) – Human language
(14:59) – Generalizations in language
(20:46) – Dependency grammar
(30:45) – Morphology
(39:20) – Evolution of languages
(42:40) – Noam Chomsky
(1:26:46) – Thinking and language
(1:40:16) – LLMs
(1:53:14) – Center embedding
(2:19:42) – Learning a new language
(2:23:34) – Nature vs nurture
(2:30:10) – Culture and language
(2:44:38) – Universal language
(2:49:01) – Language translation
(2:52:16) – Animal communication