Somewhat recently, I made a little presentation on introductory linguistic concepts for my team at work, since we're an NLP group. I've always thought that people working in natural language processing should have a deeper understanding of linguistics. Because I have a minor in linguistics, I suppose I'm somewhat more qualified than the average bear to speak about linguistics!

I wrote out an extensive set of notes, so it was kind of perfectly suited to adapt this presentation for my blog, especially because I ended up cutting some content when I did this presentation a second time for a larger group. Luckily, I didn't have to cut any content when I was asked to do this a third time, haha. But I'm quite tired of doing this presentation now, at least in the near future, which makes a blog post the perfect delivery format!

(And although I say I “recently” did my talks, the third time was back in July! This post has been in my drafts for many, many months, as it was actually a lot more work to convert than I had anticipated.)

Due to a) my comparatively shallow understanding of linguistics (vs. someone who majored in linguistics/has a PhD/etc.), and b) and the time distance from when I received my minor to now; as well as 1) the target audience of my talk, and 2) the time limitation I had for the talk itself; this will be a very gross oversimplification of linguistic concepts. Please refer to an actual linguistics textbook if you're interested in learning more.

But now that I've given you this disclaimer, let's get into it!