for the masses
I feel, often, that I’m unable to explain linguistics to a general audience. No: I’m unable to explain what *I* study to my family.
When I did syntax I tried to give them the examples of wanna-contraction.
- I wanna/want to go back to sleep.
- What do you wanna/want to win?
- Who do you *wanna/want to win>
The question is why can you not say wanna in the last one?
This is one of those questions you see in an intro linguistics textbook, and the answer is supposed to prove something about — I’m not always sure, but generally something about movement in a GB-ish approach.
I’m not explaining it further because, frankly, it’s boring. It’s neat to figure out (my cousin did), but it’s really not the best way to get people into it. And it has nothing at all to do with any research I’ve ever done.
Steven Pinker has a book on linguistics, which is fine, but he is not a linguist. Mark Baker has one, but apparently comparing linguistics (”wow, hard!”) to chemistry (”wow, harder!”) is not the way to write a best-seller. As far as I know there are no semantics/phonology-for-the-general-public books.
I never know how to explain things. It’s harder, I think, when I first have to explain the language. (I now have a brief intro-to-Austronesian that I can plug into my papers, in essence. It takes a lot of time when I’m presenting, though.)
Maybe I’m just not inspired enough. Maybe I don’t understand my field enough. But after I say “it’s about how language is structured, and what is and is not good”, what can I say in five minutes so that people think it’s sort of cool?[1]
[1] People who don’t are just mistaken, but I wish I could fix that about my family.