Hi folks!
Some of you may be stuck at home in front of the computer screen for a while to come, so I decided to ask Summer to write something about Zoom for us this month. I had a rather fun experience using Zoom recently. I was trying to convince a sales person that I did not have the funds to spend nearly 160 euros a month (!) on advertising on Google (especially if I have to correct the mistakes of the auto-translated text myself!), so I thought maybe you would appreciate a little light-hearted reminder of the joys of doing business in front of a computer screen. And if you have stories of your own to tell (cat or child vying for attention, connection breaking down, ... or worse!), please share them with me and I'll put the best ones up on my Facebook page (with a free promotion and link to your site if they're really hilarious). Stay safe, sound and sane! Yours, Alexandra

Zoom Fatigue? You're Not Alone
by Summer Worsley

As June gives way to July, many workers across Europe and beyond are diligently logging on and into virtual workspaces. For many, the daily nine-to-five involves seemingly endless hours of video conferencing platform Zoom.
 
Once second fiddle to Skype, Zoom has risen to the fore during the coronavirus pandemic and has become the call option of choice for many businesses. Its use is so pervasive, the verb “to Zoom” and the past tense “Zoomed” are now as widely accepted as “to Google” and “Googled.”
 
But all the video chat seems to be wearing us down and “Zoom fatigue” has entered the popular lexicon with a bang this year.
 
Data from Google trends shows we’ve had so much Zoom fatigue we’ve increasingly searched for that exact phrase along with alternatives such as “Zoom fatigue is real” and “Zoom fatigue is taxing the brain.”
 
So what is it about Zoom that’s causing a collective sign around the world?
 
For many critics, it’s the video element: users feel self-conscious about their appearance or surroundings. Additionally, the lack of direct eye contact that makes decoding extra-linguistic cues that little bit harder.
 
Or the difficulty arises from selecting a suitable background or area to make calls from. Users who live in studio apartments have noted that making calls from their bedrooms (where they predominantly work) feels invasive — after all, not many of us want to invite the boss into our boudoirs.
 
Another critical issue driving Zoom loathing, as pointed out by the Economist’s Johnson column, is that Zoom calls, and video conferencing in general, disrupts the natural turn-taking model that governs human speech and conversational interactions.
 
What is turn-taking? 
Linguists, and conversation or discourse analysts, in particular, use the notion of turn-taking to measure how well speakers adhere to broadly accepted conversational “rules.” Such rules are not set in stone but are well-established across languages and even cultures.
 
Breaching the rules involves transgressions such as dominating the conversation or interrupting the speaker who holds the floor. When speakers are part of a natural conversation, they often adhere to a “no gap no overlap” model of turn-taking. What this means is that the next speaker picks up the conversation without infringing on the previous speaker’s turn and without leaving too much of a gap in speech.
 
While the no overlap here isn’t strictly true (speakers often tag their utterances onto the end of the previous speaker’s utterance) it is done so in a way that doesn’t interrupt or disrupt the previous speaker’s speech. (Coates ‘89)
 
A change in speaker is determined by a broad set of linguistic and extra-linguistic clues that create a transition relevance point (TRP): a junction at which the conversation can pass from one speaker to the next.
 
Frequently in natural conversation, speakers also support each other with minimal responses: interjections such as yeah, yes, mm, mhm, ah, and others that are used to encourage the speaker, display agreement, and indicate that conversation partners are attending to what is being said.
 
Outside of a video conferencing context, turn-taking can be affected by gender, as linguists such as Eldesky, Coates, and Cameron have shown, and by power or status. In the case of the latter, so-called higher-status individuals may hold the floor longer than lower-status individuals and may interrupt more frequently.
 
Turn-taking and Zooming 
Within the Zoomcosm though, the turn-taking model is tipped on its head somewhat. Although video calls represent a relatively stable technology, they are not without their downsides, including latency or lag.
 
When we speak into our computers, the audio and video data is chopped into tiny pieces, sent via a different channel to the receiving computers, and then reassembled in a process known as packet switching. But when packets are delayed, by even a tiny bit, the software providing the platform has to decide whether it will present the hastily rearranged packet as is, with glitches, or to delay the output.
 
According to the Economist, Zoom aims for a delay of just 150 milliseconds but this affected by multiple factors including how busy the connections are, the quality of a given participant’s connection, and others.
 
Although 150-millisecond delays seem unimportant, they may impact how a speaker’s utterances and the receiver’s replies are both received and perceived.
 
Some studies suggest that positive replies to questions are viewed as less genuine when there is a delay between the utterance and the next speaker’s reply. There’s also the possibility that video calling dehumanises speakers to a certain extent: one study showed that courts were less trusting in refugee cases when the individual in question presented via video call.
 
Complicating conversational matters on Zoom is that speakers may find it harder to self-select their speech turn in the conversation. Delays mean that opportunities to speak up are missed or that the first speaker, upon passing a TRP with no other speaker taking up the baton, continues speaking for longer than is necessary.
 
And minimal responses, a key part of human speech, become harder to jam into the flow of conversation when latency makes it difficult to respond at the “right” time.
 
These are all interesting areas for further study and it will be interesting to see if conversation analysts turn to video calls as the next big field warranting examination.
 
In the meantime, we suggest investing in some good quality blue-light-blocking glasses [Gunnar makes some great ones like gamers use, or you can also get them in DIY stores; Alexandra' note] and trying to weather the tempestuous Zoom storm as well as you can. And it could be worse… after all, most workplaces have avoided the dreaded Zoombombers, so the only troll you’ll have to contend with is that one coworker who views video conference calls as his solo stage.

by Summer Worsely

Welcome to WTF, a column dedicated to helping with some basic concepts in English linguistics. Up for discussion this month, WTF is a morpheme?
 
In a nutshell:
 
A morpheme is the smallest possible grammatical unit that carries meaning. Words can be monomorphemic or multimorphemic, that is, comprised of one or more morphemes.
 
Here’s an example: talk is monomorphemic, talked is multimorphemic.
 
Here’s another one: lock is monomorphemic, unlock is multimorphemic.
 
Morphemes also come in different types, they can be bound or free which, as the names suggest, means they can stand alone or always have to be bound to another morpheme.
 
For example, talk is a free morpheme while -ed is not. Likewise, lock is free while un- is bound.
 
We can also classify morphemes based on where they occur in a word, describing them as root, affix, and combining form morphemes.
 
You can think of root morphemes as the “core” of a word, so the meaning of unreadable is built around the root morpheme read. The affixes in this word are un- and -able and, as you probably already know, affixes are either suffixes that appear at the end of a word or prefixes that appear at the start of a word.
 
Combining forms are like affixes but they carry a little more lexical weight, you can connect a combining form with an affix to create a word, one common example is cephal- and -ic which together make the word cephalic. There are other types of combining forms too, take a look at this helpful post by Miriam Webster to learn more.
 
Some morphemes have allomorphs, allomorphs are the different pronunciations of the same morpheme in different contexts. Allomorphic morphemes that you use every day include the plural making suffix -s and the past tense suffix -ed.
 
Consider the way you say these words: cats, dogs, horses. In each, the plural morpheme -s sounds distinct from the others. Try again and see how the position of your tongue changes with each word.
 
Another way we classify bound morphemes is by describing them as either inflectional or derivational. The easiest way to figure out the difference is by seeing if the bound morpheme changes the grammatical class of the root.
 
Here’s an example: normal and the affix -ise combine to make normalise.
 
Normal is an adjective and normalise is a verb, the -ise affix in this context is derivational because we can use it to derive a new class of word.
 
Here’s another example: odd and -ly combine to make the adverb oddly.
 
Inflectional morphemes are different because they affect the grammatical or semantic function of a word but never change its word class. For example, take and taken are both verbs.
 
In English, unlike many other languages, there are only eight inflectional morphemes:
 

• -s (plural - one cat, many cats)
• -’s (possessive - John’s paper)
• -s (third-person singular present tense - she plays the piano)
• -en (past participle - she has taken her piano)
• -ed (past tense - she played the piano)
• -ing (progressive - she is playing the piano)
• -er (comparative - John is faster than Mary)
• -est (superlative - John is the fastest runner)

 
Derivation is a far more common word-forming process in English than inflection. Other languages, such as Hungarian, display complex and productive inflection. German, on the other hand, is moderately inflectional, it has a richer inflection system than English but is not considered a highly inflectional language.
 
Note that some derivational morphemes do not change the word’s grammatical category. One example of this is the prefix un-, happy and unhappy are both adjectives. Here, un- has a reversative function.
 
This can get a little ambiguous, consider the word unlockable: does it mean unable to be locked (un- and lockable) or able to be unlocked (unlock and -able)? For this reason, morphologists, that is, linguists who specialise in morphology, adopt a hierarchical approach. Diagrams can help discern the internal structure of a word. Take a look at this handout from Stanford for more info.
 
And the last type of morpheme we’ll look at are infixes. In English, these are rare and occur in inventive expletives: abso-bloody-lutely, fan-fucking-tastic.
 
Okay, got it, but why do morphemes matter?
 
Morphemes matter because words, just like sentences, are governed by rules and have an internal structure. Morphology, morphological research and insights benefit semantics, phonology, and other research areas. In particular, morphology is of interest to cognitive scientists who focus on language acquisition theories.
 
Professional translators also need in-depth knowledge of the target language’s morphological system to avoid any unfortunate mistranslations or clumsy text.
 
Get more info
 
A solid and readable introduction to English morphology is Andrew Carstairs-McCarthy’s Introduction. The book also touches on the formation of English from a historical context and explains where we garnered some of our productive morphemes from.
 
Over at the Ling Space, Moti Lieberman has a series of quick, fun videos on morphology. Find those here.