Best Prosody Podcasts (2025)

1
109 What makes you so special? 48:27

4d ago48:27

48:27

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 exceptionalism, which is the assumption that humans are better, smarter and more conscious than the rest of the world. Human language is held up as evidence…

1
108 Adulting, and stuff like that 1:01:48

1M ago1:01:48

1:01:48

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… studying linguistics. More specifically, it was ‘like’ and stuff like that (discourse markers and general extenders). If you’re curious about what made …

1
107 Heaven and Earth 53:27

2M ago53:27

53:27

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 the ideas of a Western, colonising culture, it can be very difficult to see language as anything other than a human construct. In this episode we ponder …

1
106 Prosody and peak experiences 1:00:35

3M ago1:00:35

1:00:35

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 excellent singing voice (or at least, you’re more likely to pass a test for perfect pitch, according to a study reported in Scientific American). But in a…

1
105 Given, new and the selfless know-it-all 53:31

4M ago53:31

53:31

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 Subject-Object-Verb (SOV). The second is information structure, which is the system by which people in interaction navigate their interlocutor’s knowled…

1
One from the archives: The Gift (Episode 24) 32:18

5M ago32:18

32:18

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 very happy with it. I can’t wait to tell you more. (In fact, if you sign up to my newsletter at jodieclark.com/newsletter you’ll hear more sooner!) I’m…

1
One from the archives: How linguistics can save the world (Episode 60) 39:58

6M ago39:58

39:58

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. Episode 60, How linguistics can save the world, originally aired on June 1, 2018. This podcast has been an amazing way for me to develop some unusual ideas …

1
104 Consciousness is more than just a little cutie pie 55:43

7M ago55:43

55:43

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 participate in the world of human language, we have to reduce ourselves to little cutie pies known as ‘selves,’ who exist at a precise moment of time and w…

1
103 Inhabiting language 53:27

8M ago53:27

53:27

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 that human language is the one-dimensional structure that shapes the self and thus limits access to the vast multidimensionality of consciousness. Languag…

1
Episode 102 How to belong 1:09:41

9M ago1:09:41

1:09:41

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 conversations about fitting in. We discuss how selves can grammatically ‘detach’ from bodies, and the transformative possibility of embodied selves. Join m…

1
Episode 101 You, me and big egos 58:37

10M ago58:37

58:37

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 D.T. Suzuki’s explanation of the Zen Buddhist perspective. We explore Suzuki’s analysis of two poems about encounters with flowers, one by Basho and o…

1
Episode 100 Selfish wishes for social change 45:23

11M ago45:23

45:23

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 which people are continually and oppressively bullied into thinking they need to be someone other than who they are, then you may be wishing for things tha…

1
Episode 99 Linguistics and astrology 55:28

1y ago55:28

55:28

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 native speakers. But if, as discussed in Episode 96, ‘The Earth’s language’, languages are ways of organising information, then it might be more accurate to…

1
E04 Advanced English Fluency Workout | Topic: Authenticity 18:47

1y ago18:47

18:47

Participate in an 8-minute English fluency workout with your trainer Daniel E. Cotton. Speak out loud advanced English word groups, phrases, and expressions related to the topic of Authenticity. Expand and enrich your active vocabulary. Polish your pronunciation and prosody. Deepen your retention and automate your recall. FluencyFit oral workouts a…

1
E03 Advanced English Fluency Workout | Topic: Excellence 20:05

1y ago20:05

20:05

Participate in an 8-minute English fluency workout with your trainer Daniel E. Cotton. Speak out loud advanced English word groups, phrases, and expressions related to the topic of Excellence. Expand and enrich your active vocabulary. Polish your pronunciation and prosody. Deepen your retention and automate your recall. FluencyFit oral workouts are…

1
E02 Advanced English Fluency Workout | Topic: Continuous Improvement 17:26

1y ago17:26

17:26

Participate in an 8-minute English fluency workout with your trainer Daniel E. Cotton. Speak out loud advanced English word groups, phrases, and expressions related to the topic of Continuous Improvement. Expand and enrich your active vocabulary. Polish your pronunciation and prosody. Deepen your retention and automate your recall. FluencyFit oral …

1
Episode 98 Linguistic singularities 50:08

1y ago50:08

50:08

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 ‘counts as’ a thing. Language draws the lines around what counts, and it shifts and changes as it does so. In this episode we celebrate the rich lineage o…

1
Episode 97 The intimacy of denial 59:30

1y ago59:30

59:30

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) into a negative clause (I’m not listening). Grammatical negation is one of the ways we can do denial. (‘I’m not scared of that dog,’ said the three-yea…

1
Episode 96 The Earth’s language 56:00

1+ y ago56:00

56:00

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 an answer to Question 2 that will be true for anyone who says it. ‘I am here.’ But if you write it on a piece of paper, and then leave the room, it stops being true. …

1
Episode 95 Your name without language 50:38

1+ y ago50:38

50:38

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 Russell’s claims about the definite descriptors and Saul Kripke’s term for proper names, which is ‘rigid designators’. What would it be like if you were…

1
Episode 94 Language and the afterlife 53:28

1+ y ago53:28

53:28

What happens when we die? Ideas about the afterlife (or the lack of an afterlife) requires theory building based on either faith or experience. What if you don’t have faith in stories about the afterlife and you’ve never experienced anything resembling a near-death experience (NDE)? In this episode I’ll guide you through a language-based exercise t…

1
Episode 93 Where do you stop and the rest of the world begin? 49:18

1+ y ago49:18

49:18

Is there a distinction between you and the rest of the world? Where do you stop and the rest of the world begin? What’s the meaning of the word ‘now’? The gift of language is that it shapes and reshapes the experience of separateness. It’s a gift because it’s fluid. It’s more a membrane than a wall—with every utterance, there’s a new configuration …

1
Episode 92 The grammatical shape of emotions 39:55

1+ y ago39:55

39:55

When was the last time you lost language? And… how do you feel? The one time it feels like I’m losing language is when I let myself feel what I really feel. (We’re talking about weeping, wailing, keening—the dripping-nose ugly cry.) I’ve been thinking a lot about emotions and language because I’ve just made a new course available, The Grammar of Sh…

1
Episode 91 The limits of language and selfhood 42:17

1+ y ago42:17

42:17

Linguistic interaction involves much more than simply sharing information. It requires shaping the information so that it will fit in to a pre-existing structure. This is where we might run into problems if we ever get the chance to chat with intelligent extra-terrestrial beings. To what extent can we communicate if there is no shared common ground…

1
Episode 90 Language, intimacy and narcissism 42:59

2y ago42:59

42:59

What’s the worst relationship you’ve ever been in? What’s the difference between this and that? There are at least three ways of understanding that second question, each of which reveals a different level of abstraction: metalinguistic, anaphoric and exophoric. Our exploration of this and that (proximal and distal demonstratives, that is) reveals t…

1
Episode 89 Grammar as a gateway to mystery 50:10

2y ago50:10

50:10

‘Dreams, it turns out, are like clauses. They can be configured and reconfigured in an infinite number of ways. They are quanta of information about what could be transformed in the world, whether it’s your own world or a bigger social world, or both.’ —from my new book, Refreshing Grammar, p. 127 Can something be both practical and dreamy? Mysteri…

1
Episode 88 Grammar shame 40:25

2y ago40:25

40:25

What’s your most mortifying experience of grammar shaming? Mine involved a misplaced apostrophe in an important email, and I still burn with shame to think of it. Grammar for many has a spectrum of negative associations, which ranges from the imposter syndrome you might get when you realise you can’t tell a preposition from a conjunction to more se…

1
Episode 87 What if you’re an alien? 41:53

2y ago41:53

41:53

If you were told, definitively, that you were an alien, would it relieve a burden? Would it explain, or affirm, a few things? Would you look to the sky and long for home? If you’ve ever felt like an alien, then the story I published recently on grammarfordreamers.com is dedicated to you. According to ‘Exiles’, it’s not you who’s the alien. It’s hum…

1
Episode 86 Feelings are, like, inside things 47:17

2y ago47:17

47:17

When you were a kid, was there something that inspired wonder in you? Is there anything that has inspired wonder for you more recently? For me as a child it was something I read in a picture book: ‘Colours are outside things. Feelings are inside things.’ As an adult it was the idea that language evolves to produce forms that are more subjective, mo…

1
Episode 85 How spooky is language? 48:29

2y ago48:29

48:29

What makes Ouija boards spooky? Is it language? After all, it’s the letters of the alphabet that take up the most space on these devices, and they’re just waiting for something to be spelled out. Who’s doing the spelling? And what kind of spells are they, after all? In this episode we’ll be exploring the occult etymologies of words like ‘spell’ and…

1
Episode 84 Language before language 40:56

2+ y ago40:56

40:56

Where’s home? What’s your first language? What was your language before your first language? Join me to explore linguistic frames of reference in Guugu Yimithirr, polyglot newborns and the beauty and tyranny of language, self and home. The story I read in this episode is ‘Poor Magellan’, and it’s available on grammarfordreamers.com. Connect with me…

1
Episode 83 Language goes viral 40:54

2+ y ago40:54

40:54

How often have you prepared for a job interview by articulating your weaknesses? Apparently describing yourself as an empathic sponge who absorbs all the moods and emotions of the classroom is not the best self-promotional strategy when applying for an academic job. In this episode we explore interviews as discursive practices that require us, as M…

1
Episode 82 The hills are alive 57:11

2+ y ago57:11

57:11

A question for the writers among us (writers of anything—novels, memoirs, short stories, theses, academic articles, monographs): What’s your relationship with words? Are you ringing in the New Year with a commitment to a daily, achievable word count target to ensure you achieve your writing goals by the end of 2023? If so (and I hate to break this …

1
Episode 81 What are your pronouns? 47:03

2+ y ago47:03

47:03

‘What are your pronouns?’ How often do you get asked that question? How does it make you feel to be asked? When did the question first start making sense to you? This episode explores the ways that pronoun usage has shifted over time to reflect new ways of thinking about the relationship between self and society. We’ll draw upon Brown and Gilman’s …

1
Episode 80 Is nothing sacred? 52:23

2+ y ago52:23

52:23

Is nothing sacred? What images or memories does this question conjure for you? Also, what are your aims? (Don’t answer that. This is not a self-help podcast.) When I ask my undergraduate students to articulate the aims for their entrepreneurial projects, I hope and pray they won’t ask me mine. Not because I don’t have one. Here it is (don’t tell an…

1
Episode 79 Possession, duality and other grammatical mysteries 1:01:54

2+ y ago1:01:54

1:01:54

In this episode I share what I believe are my most radical ideas, which normally I try to hide so that people don’t think I’m crazy: Human beings are the only living things that experience separation from the rest of the world. What separates us is human language. The experience of separation created by human language is a stage in the Earth’s evol…

1
Episode 78 Love, language, music and aliens 1:00:42

3y ago1:00:42

1:00:42

Have you ever been in love? And if you could send a message to outer space, what message would it be? We’ll use these questions to guide us through an exploration of the evolution of language, music, intimacy and transformation. The book I discuss in this episode is Steven Mithen’s The singing Neanderthals: The origins of music, language, mind and …

1
Episode 77 The erotic power of syllables 1:08:12

3y ago1:08:12

1:08:12

What propels you, what drives you, what directs you in your life? Is it inner guidance? Or is it some external power or sense of exterior obligation? And, on a more light-hearted note, what’s your favourite syllable? In this episode we’re exploring selves, bodies, phonology and phonetics, and Audre Lorde’s essay, ‘The erotic as power’. We’re playin…

1
Episode 76 Quantum linguistics 58:02

3y ago58:02

58:02

Where do you get your ideas? The question presumes instrumentality and exchange, as if you could take a trip to your favourite high street shop and come home with the best ideas you can afford. That same sort of instrumentality comes into play when we think of language as a tool, a means by which we communicate information or express our needs and …

1
Episode 75 Accidentally born again 58:24

3y ago58:24

58:24

What’s your relationship to religion? This could be a tricky question, for lots of reasons. People may not understand your faith. People may not understand how your faith is connected to your culture. People may not understand why you aren’t part of a religion. Maybe your experiences of religion have been traumatic in some way. To make this topic a…

1
Episode 74 Create nothing 53:38

3y ago53:38

53:38

Is there anyone in your life who truly ‘gets’ you? What’s your favourite fairy tale? Have you ever received guidance from a wiser, more loving version of yourself? Believe it or not, there is a connection between all these questions. The first question came into the foreground for me when I first moved to Britain to do my PhD and was regularly doli…

1
Episode 73 The structure of selfhood 55:00

3y ago55:00

55:00

How is language like water? Both are all around us. Both are within us. Both have fascinating structuring mechanisms that we may not know much about. Think about the structure of a water molecule. Its single oxygen atom has a slightly negative charge, and the two hydrogen atoms have a slightly positive charge. The opposite charges attract water mol…

1
Episode 72 Apocalypse fantasies 54:05

3+ y ago54:05

54:05

Have you ever entertained an apocalypse fantasy? The one I invented relieves humanity of its language. Language produces selves, which is not a bad thing. It’s a beautiful thing. It’s the window to intimacy. But what happens when the amount of language we use increases to the extent that we’ve seen in recent years? The production of selves increase…

1
Episode 71 Good news and bad news 48:35

3+ y ago48:35

48:35

Ferdinand de Saussure likened language to a collective treasure that every member of the linguistic community can draw from without its stores diminishing. This idea is quite heartening – almost magical – but it’s also ruthlessly oppressive. What do you want first: the good news or the bad news? The story I discuss in this episode is ‘A day at the …

1
Episode 70 The meanings of life 35:13

3+ y ago35:13

35:13

Happy New Year! The end of the year is a great time for reflection. Why not reflect upon the meaning of life? Or, even better, why not reflect on why we would think there is a meaning to life, and what type of meaning we expect to find (meaning itself has lots of meanings, as linguist John Lyons points out), and what we’re assuming about life when …

1
Episode 69 Our relationship with our world 51:41

3+ y ago51:41

51:41

‘It’s easy to forget,’ said Sir David Attenborough in his address to COP26, ‘that ultimately the emergency climate comes down to a single number — the concentration of carbon in our atmosphere.’ That one number, he goes on to say, ‘defines our relationship with our world.’ According to Attenborough’s framing, the story is a mathematical problem, wi…

1
Episode 68 Life, language and other mysteries 46:26

3+ y ago46:26

46:26

In this episode we’re going to address three questions. What’s a word? What was did it feel like when life first emerged on the Earth? When’s the first (or the last) time you made a real decision? And I’m going to try to convince you that these questions all have something to do with each other. I believe that thinking about words will give us a bi…

1
Episode 67 Imperative blessings 50:53

3+ y ago50:53

50:53

When did you learn that the earth travels round the sun and not the other way round? And when you talk to yourself, which one of the dialoguing characters is you? Language generates multiple selves, and each self comes with its own built in worldview. Is it superstitious to think of selves that are wiser than us, that are protective, that wish to b…

1
Episode 66 A more welcoming world 47:28

4y ago47:28

47:28

Is an enlightened society a society without language? This episode explores what starlings can teach us about selves, the space that surrounds the experience of being, and how to create a more welcoming world. The story I discuss in this episode is called ‘The end of language’. The hack I mention for finding the subject and verb of a clause is call…

1
Episode 65 Psychedelic linguistics 44:15

4y ago44:15

44:15

Have you ever repeated a word over and over again to yourself to experience the dissolution of its meaning? What if you were to do that with the word ‘me’? When I was a little kid, repeating the word ‘me’ became a doorway to a world where I was freed from the self that language had created. It was trippy. In this episode we’ll discuss the role of l…

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