LanGoPod Episode 5: Set your phrases to stun

LanGoPod is a podcast that helps you learn languages more effectively by understanding linguistic principles. 💬

In this episode of LanGoPod, we talk about how language learners can benefit from thinking about word classes and the phrase as a syntactic unit.

We start off by attempting to define the word and then introduce the notion of word class. Phrases are labeled for the word class of the head of the phrase. For example, a noun is the head of a noun phrase. We can identify phrases through constituency tests, and in this episode, we employ one coined by Haj Ross as OCM (“Only Chunks Move”). For our “Comparatively Speaking” section, we examine plural suffix allomorphy in English, nouns and verbs in Portuguese, and talk about the idea of "adjectives" in Korean and Chinese.