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 co…

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 …

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 …

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 excep…

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… s…

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 th…

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 exc…

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 S…

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 …

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. Episo…

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 part…

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 tha…

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 conv…

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…

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 whic…

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 nativ…

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 ‘co…

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) …

We start the episode, as always, with a couple of questions:

1.       What are the differences between spoken/signed language and written/printed/digital language?

2.       Where are you?

There’s a…

What would your name be without language?

In this episode we explore the problem of names in truth conditional semantics, with a look at Gottlob Frege’s explanation of sense and reference, Bertrand R…