Slides for ‘How To Do Things With Ideophones’

Slides for a talk titled How To Do Things With Ideophones, presented at SOAS, June 3, 2009. Without the actual talk most of the slides will be either underspecified or dense, but since people have asked for them, here they are. I also have a handout (PDF) containing the conversational extracts referred to in the presentation. Comments most welcome!

(I've embedded this presentation using Slideshare.net. If you'd rather have a copy of the slides, let me know.)

This presentation can be cited as follows:

1. Dingemanse, Mark. 2009. How To Do Things With Ideophones: Observations on the use of vivid sensory language in Siwu, presented at the SOAS Research Seminar, June 3, London.

Slides for ‘How To Do Things With Ideophones’ by Mark Dingemanse is licensed under a CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0 License.

Literariness

Toronto by night

Embedded in the Iconicity conference in Toronto is a pleasant surprise: a three-day workshop entitled Cognitive Poetics: A Multimodal Approach. Speakers include Reuven Tsur, David Herman, Margaret Freeman, David Miall, Zoltan Kövecses, Yeshayahu Shen, Mark Changizi, and of course the organizer, the colourful Paul Bouissac. (As an aside, I can’t resist quoting the latter on the omnirelevance of semiotics: “My definition of semiotics is everything that is interesting.”) Continue reading »

Literariness by Mark Dingemanse is licensed under a CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0 License.

Upcoming talk: Ezra Pound among the Mawu

Up next week: the Seventh Biennial Symposium on Iconicity in Language and Literature (programme here), at Victoria College, University of Toronto, June 9-14, 2009. It looks like an interesting bunch of linguists and literary theorists. I will give a talk on Tuesday the 9th, the abstract for which can be found below.

Ezra Pound among the Mawu: the everyday poetics of ideophones in a West-African society

by Mark Dingemanse, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics

The language of the Mawu people of eastern Ghana has a large class of ideophones: marked iconic words that vividly evoke feelings. Ideophones are found abundantly in African, Asian, and Amerindian languages; as a distinct class of words they are rare in Indo-European (Voeltz and Kilian-Hatz 2001). Their use has been summarized eloquently by Fortune:

‘With them one is in a special realm of spoken art. There is a roundness, a complete shape, not so vividly conveyed by more complex constructions, more formal expressions. They attempt to be a vivid re-presentation or re-creation of an event in sound ... Always they try to capture the freshness of an event and express it of themselves with nothing to dull or cloud the evocation’ (Fortune 1962, 6)

The similarity between ideophonic and poetic language is easy to see (cf. Nuckolls 2006). Yet the shadow of Lévy-Bruhl, who assigned mimesis in language to the realm of primitivity, has loomed large over linguistics and literary theory alike. The poet Ezra Pound, a central figure of Modernism, is a case in point: while his fascination with Chinese writing spawned the ideogrammic method, the mimicry and gestures of the ‘primitive languages in Africa’ would never become more than a mere curiosity (ABC of Reading, 21).

This talk imagines Pound transposed into the culture of the Mawu. What would have struck him about their ways of ‘charging language’ with imagery? I will show that there are three levels of iconicity in Siwu ideophones —direct, relative, and Gestalt iconicity— which are combined in various ways to vividly recreate sensory events in sound. The abundant use of ideophones across a wide range of discourse genres suggests a concern of Siwu speakers with their perceptions. These observations will be juxtaposed with Pound’s views on the ‘word of literary art which presents, defines, suggests the visual image’ (Selected Prose, 321), and his perpetual interest in the exact qualities of perceptions. The goal of this contrastive analysis is to shed light on the linguistic and cultural ecology of an everyday poetic device in the world's languages, and in so doing to rehabilitate what one might call ‘the ideophonic method’.

References

1. Fortune, G. 1962. Ideophones in Shona: An Inaugural Lecture Given in the University College of Rhodesia and Nyasaland on 28 April 1961. Oxford University Press.
2. Lévy-Bruhl, Lucien. 1910. Les Fonctions Mentales dans les Sociétés Inférieures. Paris.
3. Nuckolls, Janis B. 2006. The Neglected Poetics of Ideophony. In Language, Culture, and the Individual, ed. Catherine O'Neil, Mary Scoggin, and Kevin Tuite, 39-50. München: Lincom Europa.
4. Pound, Ezra. 1914. Vorticism. Fortnightly Review 96, no. 573: 461-471.
5. ———. 1934. ABC of Reading. London: Routledge.
6. ———. 1973. Selected Prose. New York: New Directions.
7. Voeltz, F. K. Erhard, and Christa Kilian-Hatz, eds. 2001. Ideophones. Typological Studies in Language, 44. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Upcoming talk: Ezra Pound among the Mawu by Mark Dingemanse is licensed under a CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0 License.

Two talks on ideophones at SOAS

If you're in London and able to come to SOAS at short notice, there will be two talks on ideophones tomorrow afternoon: one by my colleague Sylvia Tufvesson and one by myself. The talks will be on Wednesday, 3 June, 3-5pm, in room 4418 in SOAS. Here are the titles and abstracts:

Phonosemantics and perceptual structures: The case of Semai ideophones

by Sylvia Tufvesson, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics

Ideophonic vocabulary often displays some degree of sound symbolism; i.e. perceived likeness between form and meaning such that words with similar meanings resemble each other phonetically. Languages differ in their means of attaining such form-meaning mapping and these correlations can develop freely in spontaneous speech. This talk examines one such pattern, that of stem alternation. The language of focus is Semai (Austroasiatic, Mon-Khmer), spoken by an Aslian community on Peninsular Malaysia. Semai ideophones convey speakers´ perceptual experiences in semantically detailed ways, often withmultiple aspects of an experience encoded in one word. Data show that through different types of stem alternation, speakers express fine-grained semantic differences between different sensory events. This structural tool is used to switch between sensory modalities or convey differences in the internal structure of a specific sensory event. In addition, some types of alternations are used more productively than others in spontaneous speech, suggesting a continuum of conventionality in the linguistic encoding of perception.

How to do things with ideophones. Observations on the use of vivid sensory language in Siwu

by Mark Dingemanse, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics

Many African, Asian and American languages have a class of words called ideophones: marked words that vividly evoke sensations and perceptions. Hitherto, research on ideophony has focused almost exclusively on the form of ideophones to the neglect of their function. This talk will look at ideophones in actual usage in Siwu, a Kwa language of eastern Ghana. It will be shown that ideophones occur across a wide variety of speech genres, including conversations, arguments, insults, narratives, greeting routines, and special genres like riddles, recreational dances, and funeral dirges. A closer look at data from about 60 minutes of spontaneous conversations will elucidate the different uses to which ideophones are put by both speakers and recipients in tellings and turn-by-turn talk. Some specific genres, including funeral dirges and recreational dances, will be compared to show how the use of ideophones may be constrained by genre.

Two talks on ideophones at SOAS by Mark Dingemanse is licensed under a CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0 License.

AAA Meeting Abstracts online? Only viable if it’s Open Access

The AAA is currently conducting a survey on how to implement a website that would be hosting AAA Meeting Abstracts. As they write,

Specifically, we're investigating posting the 2007 and 2008 AAA annual meeting paper abstracts, which would be posted exactly as they were submitted to AAA and would not be interactive, although they would be searchable. Posting these two years is a substantial project, because the combined total is nearly 7,000 specific abstracts.

Obviously, this would be an interesting resource. With a fulltext search you could track down previous research on your topic of interest, find potential collaborators, or just look up specific abstracts to refresh your memory of a talk. Besides, these abstracts are a record of the collective effort of AAA members; it is somewhat of a letdown that hitherto they have only been available in a bulky printed booklet obtainable at the meeting. Continue reading »

AAA Meeting Abstracts online? Only viable if it’s Open Access by Mark Dingemanse is licensed under a CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0 License.

How is Sotho siks! doing?

In a neat 1965 paper on ideophones in Southern Sotho, Daniel P. Kunene writes about an ideophone derived from a gesture:

There is an interesting and amusing case of the coining of an ideophone from the type of gesture used. The gesture for running is clenched fingers, outstretched thumb pointing upwards and wiggled from side to side in imitation of the swaying of the body as the weight is transfered from the one foot to the other. Normally it is the right hand that is used. By coincidence, the thumb of the right hand represents the number 'six' in counting on the fingers — counting beginning on the small finger of the left hand, and 'crossing over' from the thumb of the left hand (five) to the thumb of the right hand (six). From this has come the ideophone siks in Sotho! This refers to running, especially fleeing from something:

a-re síks

he did this: siks!

he ran away

Kunene calls this an ideophone for structural and semantic reasons: it occurs in the same syntactic slot (introduced by re like most ideophones) and it vividly evokes an event. A footnote however reveals 'Restricted to relatively few people, it is true, but there all the same.' The question is: does anyone know whether the form has caught on and has been used more widely? I've looked around on the web, but googling for short words like that seems hopeless.

References

1. Kunene, Daniel P. 1965. The ideophone in Southern Sotho. Journal of African Languages 4: 19-39.
2. Kunene, Daniel P. 1978. The Ideophone in Southern Sotho. Berlin: Dietrich Reimer.
3. Kunene, Daniel P. 2001. Speaking the Act: The Ideophone as a Linguistic Rebel. In Ideophones, ed. F. K. Erhard Voeltz and Christa Kilian-Hatz, 183-191. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

How is Sotho siks! doing? by Mark Dingemanse is licensed under a CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0 License.

Some miracle of cloning

"See what I just did? Made another me."
Darwin (Marvel Comics), panel from X-Factor issue 37.

There is a very quirky sentence right in the first chapter of Richerson & Boyd's (2005) Not By Genes Alone that unintentionally defeats the very point they are making. After explaining why 'culture is essential' (the chapter title) and noting the influence of Darwin's population thinking on biology, there is the following remarkable aside:

[I]f through some miracle of cloning Darwin were to be resurrected from his grave in Westminster Abbey, we think that he would be quite happy with the state of the science he launched. (p. 5)

Note how that statement in one breath essentializes biology (Darwin = his genes alone) and totally ignores culture (Darwin's clone = Darwin now as then).

It would be a great miracle indeed if the encultured product of a cloning operation on Darwin's remains would view Darwinism as 'the science he launched' and be happy with it!

References

1. Richerson, Peter J., and Robert Boyd. 2005. Not by genes alone. How culture transformed human evolution. Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press.

Some miracle of cloning by Mark Dingemanse is licensed under a CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0 License.

Dashboard Post-it: leave notes on the WordPress dashboard (2.7+)

Dashboard Post-it is a simple plugin for WordPress 2.7 and higher that allows you to leave yourself or other authors a note on the dashboard. It is implemented as a configurable dashboard widget, so you can collapse it, move it around, and edit it as any other dashboard widget. It will accept plain text or (sanitized) HTML. Only users with the capability "Edit dashboard" can edit the note.

As of today, Dashboard Post-it is available for download at the WordPress plugin repository. Screenshots and installation instructions can be found over there.

I wrote the plugin for my own use. There are alternatives, but since some of them stopped working after the changes to the Dashboard in WP 2.7 and others are not widgetized, and since this is a much requested feature, I decided to submit the plugin to the repository.

Dashboard Post-it: leave notes on the WordPress dashboard (2.7+) by Mark Dingemanse is licensed under a CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0 License.

A cultural revival?

Jedesmal, wenn ein Solo beendet hat, fällt der ganze Chor ein und singt einen Refrain, der aber nur aus den verschiedenen Vokalen besteht, die auf alle möglichen und unmöglichen Arten ausgesprochen werden, also eigentlich immer dasselbe. Interessant wäre es, einen solchen Gesang aufzunehmen. (Kruse, Krankheit und Tod in Akpafu, 1911, p. 192)

Everytime when a solo ends, the choir joins in and sings a refrain that just consists of a number of different voices which are uttered in all possible and impossible ways; so in a way it is always the same [words]. It would be interesting to record such a song.

The closing paragraphs of my previous post were cited in several places (e.g. Culture Making, Far Outliers) as evidence of a cultural revival. Although I feel it is really too soon to say whether this is the case, I'm glad to report that the dirges are in fact being played on funerals, to great acclaim. Even people who I don't know very well have told me how glad they are that these dirges are available now. I in turn should thank Timothy "T.T." Akuamoah from Todzi for bringing up the idea of recording the dirges in March 2008. Were it not for his organizing talents, we would never have had so many wonderful singers around. There are plans for a follow-up project involving more recordings in the weeks around Easter.

I don't think Friedrich Kruse, the German missionary whose description of a Siwu funeral dirge is quoted above, ever actually expected these dirges to be recorded. The Germans were quite adamant about their Ewe-only policy in schools and churches; in fact there is no evidence that any of the missionaries (who manned the Akpafu missionary station for a good thirty years altogether) ever learned to speak Siwu — to the contrary, Schosser (1907) records several cases of women who could not yet be baptised because of their limited understanding of Ewe, and the mission chronicles show a glaring ignorance of Mawu culture in general (Bürgi 1921). It speaks for the vigour of Mawu culture that Siwu is alive and well nowadays, and that the Mawu are taking an active interest in their own cultural heritage.

Kananana

Allow me to present another wonderful example of the genre. Last summer I wrote about the ideophone kanana. Here is a funeral dirge in which that ideophone, evoking a tranquil silence, plays a central role. It would normally be sung during the wakekeeping, in the middle of the night.

The song, with call and response revolving around the realization that death strikes everyone —barren women just as well as nursing mothers—, begins and ends in silence. Be silent and stay in your houses. What more can one do in the face of a sad loss? Text, structure, and melody work together to create a compelling and most of all intensely sad dirge.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Parallelisms

The funeral dirges of the Mawu are full of parallelisms. The above dirge features parallelisms within and across lines. Within lines, the powerful contrast between ɔlɛmã 'barren woman' and ɔtalɛpo 'nursing mother' is used to silence all — one's status in life is of no relevance whatsoever to death. Across lines, grave (ìwo, literally 'pit') and grave-mound (sìse, literally 'clay heap') are parallels that help establish a certain poetic balance. Some examples of semantically rhyming words that are commonly used in parallelisms are:

The previous posting noted how the grammatical affordances of Siwu were used to achieve a tight and pithy expression. Here, we see in more detail the work being done by the selection and contrast of semantic units. First of all, ideophones —words that are perfectly suited to vividly express feelings and emotions— are used in the dirges to great effect. Secondly, in a genre where phonological rhyme plays no appreciable role, semantic rhyme is an essential device to achieve poetic balance. (See Fox 1974, Baronti 2001, for parallels from other languages.)

References

1. Agawu, Kofi. 1990. Variation procedures in Northern Ewe song. Ethnomusicology 34, no. 2: 221-243.
2. Baronti, David Scott. 2001. Sound symbolism use in affect verbs in Santa Catarina Ixtahuacan. Dissertation, University of California, Davis.
3. Bürgi, Ernst. 1921. Geschichte von Station Akpafu, 1897-1917. Lome. Signatur 7,1025 - 5/2; Film FB 3697. Staatsarchiv Bremen.
4. Fox, James J. 1991. Our ancestors spoke in pairs. In Explorations in the ethnography of speaking, ed. Richard Bauman and Joel Sherzer, 65-85. 2nd ed. Studies in the social and cultural foundations of language 8. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
5. Kruse, F. W. 1911. Krankheit und Tod in Akpafu. Der Anscharbote, October 29.
6. Schosser, Herman. 1907. Akpafu: ein Stück Kultur- und Missionsarbeit in Deutsch Togo. Bremer Missions-Schriften 21. Bremen: Verlag der Norddeutschen Missions-Gesellschaft.

A cultural revival? by Mark Dingemanse is licensed under a CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0 License.

Man is an animal

Morning clouds in Kawu

It is no news that some humans say that man is an animal, especially not this year. But wouldn't it be rather more interesting if another member of the animal kingdom would weigh in on the matter?

It happens in Kawu, where I am right now for fieldwork (hence the silence on this blog). The call of the ìsakpòlò bird, singing in the early morning, perfectly resembles the tonal contour of the following Siwu phrase:

màturi bra màbɔi

people make animals

'People are just animals'

Recording of the call:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Whistled imitation and pronunciation of the Siwu sentence:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

The first time I became aware of this bird was when one of my assistants said, 'That bird is insulting us.' Next time I'll try to provide a picture of this wonderful bird. Meanwhile, there you go. Man is an animal. You didn't hear this from me. You heard it from the ìsakpòlò bird.

Man is an animal by Mark Dingemanse is licensed under a CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0 License.

Giggles follow-up: smiling verbs and happy adjectives show facial motor resonances

Just a quick follow-up on my earlier post. Foroni & Semin (in press, Psychological Science) do what I hoped somebody did: examining the bodily grounding of non-ideophonic vocabulary related to emotional states. Theirs is not an imaging study like Osaka & Osaka 2005, but a study of motor resonance in facial muscles. The terms tested are action verbs (to smile; to frown) and adjectives for the corresponding emotional states (without overt facial configurational semantics), e.g. 'happy; angry'.

Very briefly, the results indicate that both types of words induce motor resonance in facial muscles, though the action verbs do so more strongly than the adjectives. The authors note the striking similarity of the results to earlier experiments involving visual stimuli (pictures of facial expressions, Ekman style; e.g. Dimberg & Petterson 2000). An interesting second experiment shows that the motor resonance even exerts influence on judgements of the funniness of cartoons: subjects subliminally primed with the verb 'smile' tend to rate cartoons as funnier than subjects subliminally primed with the verb 'frown'. If facial muscle activity is inhibited by having participants holding a pen between their lips, the effect is not significant; neither is it significant in the case of adjectives like happy and angry.

There is some wiggle room still for ideophones. As Foroni and Semin say, 'Not all linguistic expressions have the same consequences. Certain categories (i.e. verbs) induce motor resonance more than others and contribute differentially to the shape of our judgments.' My hypothesis would be that ideophones for emotional states and facial configurations would rival verbs in the extent to which they cause motor resonance. Osaka & Osaka's (2005) results are inconclusive in this regard, because they did not include non-ideophonic action verbs or other words in their comparison.

References

1. Dimberg, Ulf, and Maria Petterson. 2000. Facial Reactions to Happy and Angry Facial Expressions: Evidence for Right Hemisphere Dominance. Psychophysiology 37, no. 05: 693-696.
2. Foroni, Francesco, & Semin, Gün R. (2009). Language that puts you in touch with your bodily feelings: The Multimodal Responsiveness of Affective Expressions. Psychological Science.
3. Osaka, Naoyuki, and Mariko Osaka. 2005. Striatal reward areas activated by implicit laughter induced by mimic words in humans: a functional magnetic resonance imaging study. Neuroreport 16, no. 15 (October 17): 1621-1624.  

Giggles follow-up: smiling verbs and happy adjectives show facial motor resonances by Mark Dingemanse is licensed under a CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0 License.

Giggles and gargles

Illustration © Imai Lab 2006

A 2005 study suggests that Japanese ideophones of laughter activate striatal reward centers in the brain, but I think the results should be treated with caution. And Japanese gargle with salt water regularly as a prevention against the common cold; they even have an ideophone for it (but so do we, don't we?). That's giggles and gargles today. Let's tackle the giggles first.

Ideophones that make you feel good

A 2005 brain imaging study suggests that ideophones for laughter, but not nonsense syllables, activate reward areas in the brain. Here is the abstract:

The neurobiological reward components of laughter induced by words were investigated. A functional magnetic resonance imaging-based brain imaging study demonstrated that visualization of mimic words and emotional facial expressionwords, highly suggestive of laughter, heard by the ear, significantly activate striatal reward centers, including the putamen/caudate/nucleus accumbens, prefrontal cortices, dorsal anterior cingulate cortex and the supplementary motor area, while non-mimic words under the same task that did not imply laughter do not activate these areas in humans. We tested a specific hypothesis that implicit laughter modulates the striatal dopaminergic reward centers by image formation of onomatopoeic words implying laughter and successfully confirmed the hypothesis. [Osaka & Osaka 2005]

Since ideophones have been claimed to somehow establish a more direct link between sounds and sensations than other words, brain imaging of ideophone production and comprehension is an exciting research area. Basically, the finding of Osaka & Osaka is that Japanese ideophones for laughter activate striatal reward areas, just like real laughter and other pleasurable activities do. The ideophones used are ‘ghera-ghera’ (strong laughter), ‘nikoh-nikoh’ (strong), ‘kusu-kusu’ (medium), ‘niyah-niyah’ (medium), ‘herahherah’ (weak) and ‘nitah-nitah’ (weak) (p. 1622, romanization by the authors).

But is it ideophony?

That is an interesting result, but I wonder: does the effect really occur because the words are ideophones, evoking the experience of laughter through their sound-symbolic form and imagistic meaning? Or could it simply be due to the fact that the words have to do with laughter? We can't tell, because the baseline comparison is not with non-ideophonic real words but with nonsense words (called 'nonsense phonemes' by the authors). Since non-ideophonic laughter-related words have been kept out of the comparison, we cannot be sure that ideophony (onomatopoeia/mimesis) is causing the effect, although this is what the authors would like to claim.

There is some reason to think that embodied semantics might be enough to induce such effects; think for example of the brain imaging studies showing that certain sensori-motor cortex areas not only upon tactile stimulation of the body part in question (e.g. the hand), but also during the processing of body part terms and verbs implying them (e.g. hand, grasp; Rohrer 2001). So the question is: would the effect found by Osaka & Osaka also occur with non-ideophonic laughter-related words in Japanese? For comparison, it would also be good to have a not so heavily ideophonic language thrown in. Would the English verbs 'giggle' and 'laugh' also trigger the effect? Sound-symbolic 'giggle' moreso than 'laughter'? Then things start to be really interesting.

A related problem is the claim that 'image formation of onomatopoeic words' plays a role in the effect. Once again this would be an interesting claim to test; native speakers of ideophonic languages often report that ideophones evoke vivid images. But in this study it remains an untested background assumption. The way the experiment is set up doesn't seem to allow for any inferences about it. For all we know the effect might just be due to an association between the sound and the experience of laughter; it is not at all obvious why image formation would come in. One way to approach this issue would be to do imaging studies of ideophones that don't imitate sounds, but other sensory events.

[Update: Kimi Akita notes that the stimuli, described by the authors as 'laughter onomatopoeic words' (p. 1622), actually mix sound-imitating ideophones (geragera and kusukusu) and movement/visual pattern-imitating ideophones (nikoniko, niyaniya, herahera, and nitanita). It doesn't really help that all of the results are averaged. I might add that Japanese itself does distinguish the two groups by the terms giongo and gitaigo, even though to a non-native speaker the actual categorization in this case isn't obvious (I would've grouped herahera with geragera, and I wonder what kusukusu laughter sounds like...).]

Gargles

So much for the giggles. What about the gargles? The gorgeous gargling girl above is one of the stimuli used by Prof. Mutsumi Imai in a study of child-directed speech in Japanese. One of her findings is that when describing scenes like this to their child, mothers will tend to use more mimetics (ideophones) than when they are describing the same scene to an adult.

I'm planning to do a pilot in Kawu using prof. Imai's stimuli, and one question is to what extent the original material would be usable in a West-African context. The idea is that the stimuli can be described using ideophones. Since most of the illustrations are simple events (jumping down, jumping across, throwing, rolling sth. up) I think they should be usable by and large. Perhaps the skin color will have to be changed — I prefer stimuli to be as culturally inconspicuous as possible — though the question is whether that really would affect what we're after.

However, the one stimulus that I think won't be familiar is the gargling one above. In the Japanese context, it is meant to elicit the ideophone garagara, probably in the light verb construction X suru 'do X'. But in Kawu, the scene isn't very recognizable. People usually drink from calebashes (or their hands), though whites are known to prefer cups &mdash so my guess is that the girl would simply be seen as drinking. Since gargling is not a culturally salient event in Mawu society, I don't think people would readily think of it, even if there happens to be an ideophonic word for it.

The Japanese ideophone for gargling is garagara. Interestingly, Kimi Akita tells me that "Japanese mothers tell their kids to pronounce "garagara" while gargling. This is because the articulation (especially, that of the velar consonant) of the mimetic is believed to help kids gargle successfully." Now that's an interesting intermingling of habitus and embodied meaning. I tried this (without any appreciable gargling experience) and nearly choked. This gives a whole new meaning to the phrase "Embodied semantics is a killer idea"!

References

1. Imai, Mutsumi, Sotaro Kita, Miho Nagumo, and Hiroyuki Okada. 2008. Sound symbolism facilitates early verb learning. Cognition 109, no. 1 (October): 54-65. doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2008.07.015.
2. Osaka, Naoyuki, and Mariko Osaka. 2005. Striatal reward areas activated by implicit laughter induced by mimic words in humans: a functional magnetic resonance imaging study. Neuroreport 16, no. 15 (October 17): 1621-1624.  
3. Rohrer, Tim. 2001. Understanding through the body: fMRI and ERP investigations into the neurophysiology of cognitive semantics. Talk presented at the 2001 International Cognitive Linguistics Association, Santa Barbara: University of California.

P.S. Check out the wonderful bibliographies compiled by Kimi Akita:

1. Akita, Kimi. 2009-02. A Bibliography of Sound-Symbolic Phenomena in Japanese. Electronic ms, Kobe University.
2. Akita, Kimi. 2009-02. A Bibliography of Sound-Symbolic Phenomena in Other Languages. Electronic ms, Kobe University.

Giggles and gargles by Mark Dingemanse is licensed under a CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0 License.

AAA Photo Contest galleries now online

The Winners and Finalists of the 2008 AAA Photo Contest are now available in a Flickr gallery. The photos are really beautiful — I'm honoured that one of my submissions is featured among them (and happy that Siwu ideophones are getting some press!).

Click on a photo in the slideshow below to show the author and the caption; or go directly to the slideshow on Flickr.

Edit: The semifinalists are now online, too: Flickr gallery.

AAA Photo Contest galleries now online by Mark Dingemanse is licensed under a CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0 License.

Zotero 1.5 is here: synchronization and tons of other features

It's here. Zotero 1.5 beta. The new version comes with built-in synchronization, exports to more than 1100 citation styles, and supports browsing your library online (see below). Zotero is now better than EndNote on all fronts. Here's a quick overview of the most important features:

• Synchronization. Automatically keep your library in sync across different PCs. If you have access to WebDAV storage, synching can also include your attachments.
• Automatic backup. A copy of your library is stored safely on the synchronization server.
• More than 1100 CSL citation styles. The style repository has grown immensely due to community efforts. Zotero styles are built on the powerful open source Citation Style Language (CSL), an XML dialect.
• Support for EndNote styles. Thousands of EndNote .ens styles can now be used for citation formatting. These styles are available to licensed users of EndNote.
• Rich text notes. Formatting can now be applied to notes with a WYSIWYG editor.
• Automatic detection of PDF metadata. Another much requested feature. Not yet bulletproof because it depends on the information available in your PDF and the repository used to look it up, but a great step forward.
• Shared collections. Easily share and build collections with colleagues.

All of this built on open source technologies and standards, which means that your data is not locked up in proprietary software at the mercy of profit driven companies.

New website features

Browse your Zotero library online [click for fullsize]

Meanwhile, the Zotero website has seen a major revamping, the most important new feature being the ability to browse your library online. Other features are more geared towards social networking activities: users now can have an online Zotero profile, can follow other Zotero users, and can build an online CV.

If you're still stuck on EndNote, check out making the switch to Zotero, or see my review and comparison from last year. Questions? There are lots of helpful and friendly people hanging out in the Zotero forums. You can also post them below.

Zotero 1.5 is here: synchronization and tons of other features by Mark Dingemanse is licensed under a CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0 License.

The Enduring Spoken Word

Science has just published a comment by me on Oard's "Unlocking the potention of the spoken word" (Oard 2008). It is a critique of the monomodal view of language adopted in that article. (If you haven't read the original piece, check it out here, or see my brief summary.) Continue reading »

The Enduring Spoken Word by Mark Dingemanse is licensed under a CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0 License.

I thought I had company (a Mawu dirge)

Women performing a funeral dirge in Akpafu-Mempeasem

Funeral dirges (sìnɔ in Siwu) are a special genre of songs to be sung during the period of public mourning preceding a burial. The musical structures of these dirges and their place in the larger context of the funeral have been described in some detail by Agawu (1988) and before him by the German missionary Friedrich Kruse (1911); however, the linguistic aspects of the genre have not received any attention so far.

The funeral dirge below was recorded August 17, 2007 in Akpafu-Mempeasem, Volta Region, Ghana (along with six other dirges). It was transcribed and translated with the gentle help of Reverend A.Y. Wurapa.

The Siwu is beautifully economic in expression. It contains only two verbs: pia 'be (with)' and ɖe 'be (existential)'. The sɔ that is translated as 'said' is actually a quotative complementizer. An English translation cannot do without marking tense, but in Siwu, the poem does not contain any tense or aspect markers, being set in an aorist-like default that can be interpreted as recent past or present.

Some of the poetic devices at work here are lost in translation. One is the focus construction which emphasizes the content words in the last four Siwu lines ('mourning it is; tears it is; sadness it is; graves it is'). Another is the fact that these content words belong to four different grammatical genders in Siwu: the first is an noun in KA with locative connotation, the second a liquid/mass noun in MI, the third a singular noun in I, the fourth a plural noun in A. I'm not sure whether this pattern is as striking to native speakers as it is to me, but note that the gender is reinforced by the agreement morphology on the 'be'-verb (ka-, mi-, i-, a-). One could think of it as a case of 'subliminal verbal patterning in poetry' (Jakobson 1980).
Continue reading »

I thought I had company (a Mawu dirge) by Mark Dingemanse is licensed under a CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0 License.

A hand drawn map of Kawu

Colleen's post about the Hand Drawn Map Contest reminded me of a neat map of Kawu I was given some time ago. Kawu is the area where I do fieldwork, located in the Hohoe district of Ghana's beautiful Volta Region. This map was drawn in 2003 by John Atsu, literacy coordinator and member of the Siwu Language Committee

Geography: Extent of Kawu. By John Atsu, 2003 [click to enlarge]

The map, which was drawn without any reference to official maps, provides us with a peek in the mind of a native of the area. The main villages (squares) and the tarred roads (thick lines) will be found on any sufficiently detailed map; more interesting are the farm settlements (FM), where farmers stay overnight if they work far from home; and the foot paths (x-x-x-x) that connect the villages where there are no roads.

I'm not sure why the map is oriented as it is (with West on the lower side), not having done fieldwork in enough different villages to be sure about how the Mawu talk about directionality and orientation. The mountainous area on the lower side of the map is simply called Kùbe 'the mountains'; partly in it, partly beyond it lies Awubeame, literally 'in the mountains of the Mawu', the area where the Mawu people lived before they split up into Akpafu and Lolobi.

The Kawu area is divided into two zones: Akpafu (north-west, comprised of Todzi, Odomi, Mempeasem, Adokor, and Sokpoo) and Lolobi (south-east, with Kumasi, Ashiambi, and Huyeasem). The names of the villages are usually prefixed by the traditional area: Akpafu-Todzi, Lolobi-Kumasi, and so on. A mountain ridge, or actually the river Dayi just east of it, provides a natural boundary between the two areas. The main dialectal division in Siwu corresponds to this geographic boundary.

Right in the center of the map lies Akpafu-Mempeasem, the village that is my home base while in the field. There is a foot path from there to Adokor (top left corner) which crosses the mountains (via Todzi) and a densely forested valley, until it reaches Sokpoo, where it changes into a 2nd class untarred road. It's a very nice hike. And this map tells me I should also try to hike to Lolobi-Ashiambi one day — there is a footpath after all.

Below a picture of Akpafu-Todzi, the oldest town of Kawu and the seat of the paramount chief.

Akpafu-Todzi seen from mount Ɔgagɛ̃ , facing north, September 2008.
In the valley lies Akpafu-Odomi.

A hand drawn map of Kawu by Mark Dingemanse is licensed under a CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0 License.

Four Stone Hearth #60

It's that time again! The 60th edition of Anthroblogging's very own blog carnival Four Stone Hearth is up at Middle Savagery. Check it out, there are lots of interesting posts.

Four Stone Hearth #60 by Mark Dingemanse is licensed under a CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0 License.

Finalist in the AAA Photo contest

The results of the AAA photo contest have just been announced. Congratulations to the winner, Peter Biella! Of my four submissions, one made it to the finals (best 20) and one to the semifinals (best 54). All 294 submissions will appear in the AAA Flickr gallery in due course; mine follow below.

My finalist was the following photo, titled "Kããã":

Kyeei Yao, an age group leader, oversees a festival in Akpafu-Mempeasem, Volta Region, Ghana. The expensive draped cloth, the Ashanti-inspired wreath, the strings of beads which are handed down through the generations, and the digital wristwatch work together to remind us that culture is a moving target, always renewing and reshaping itself.
Kããã is a Siwu ideophone for 'looking attentively'.

This picture was taken by my wife, Gijske de Boo, while I was busy videotaping the same events that Kyeei Yao is attending to. Together with the other 19 finalists it will be featured in the upcoming issue of Anthropology News; the finalists will also be hung as prints in the AAA office.

The photo that made the semifinals is called "The drum makers":

Two artisans repair an atumpani drum in preparation for the funeral of a chief in Akpafu-Mempeasem, Volta Region, Ghana. A newly prepared antelope skin is fastened to the hard wood frame of the drum using a nylon cord and wooden pegs.

This picture was taken on the compound of Joseph (the man to the right), very close to my own home in Akpafu-Mempeasem. The earthen wall behind the men is Joe's house, built of sun-hardened puddled mud like most houses in the village.

Bad Death

A submission which I thought was perhaps the most interesting even though it didn't make it to the semifinals was "Bad Death ritual":

A 'bad death' ritual in Ghana's Volta Region. On the village cemetery, relatives of a man who died in a hunting accident listen anxiously to a woman who is possessed by the spirit of the deceased. The hunters, who have just brought the spirit home from the place of the accident deep in the jungle, keep their distance. Red is the colour of danger, black that of death.

This event took place right after a long and tiring march into the jungle and back, to pacify the spirit of a hunter killed in a tragic accident. I was able to take the picture from this perspective because I was dragged right in front of the possessed woman by Foster, one of my assistants, who had been my guide on the expedition. I also have an audio recording of her speech, which turned out to be a very interesting mix of prophesy and admonition. I'll have to write more about that some time.

My final submission was the photo of Akpafu-Todzi which is also featured on this blog.

It's a sunny day in Akpafu-Todzi, the old mountain citadel of the Mawu people in the central Volta Region of Ghana. The town, which has endured numerous sieges and which was the site of an ancient iron industry, is tranquil because this is the time for most people to engage in collaborative rice farming.

Finalist in the AAA Photo contest by Mark Dingemanse is licensed under a CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0 License.

In Siwu, gunpowder doesn’t just go BANG!

Below follows an abstract for a talk I will be giving later this year at WOCAL 6.

Ideophones are marked words that vividly depict sensory events (cf. Voeltz and Kilian-Hatz 2001). This paper presents results of an ongoing research project into the linguistic and cultural ecology of ideophones in Siwu, a Ghana-Togo-Mountain language spoken north of Hohoe in Ghana’s Volta Region. Of central interest to the project is the role played by ideophones in the discursive practice of the Mawu. A range of methods is used to investigate this issue (including elicitation tasks and collections of folk definitions), but this paper will focus on data from natural conversational discourse.

It will be shown that ideophones occur across a wide variety of speech genres, including greeting exchanges, conversations, arguments, insults, narratives, and special genres like riddles (mìdzòlo), recreational songs (àlikpi), and funeral dirges (sìkubiɛnɔ). Zooming in on one usage context, we will look at conversations during the making of gunpowder. [N.B. The conversations are of course in Siwu. The examples are presented in pseudo-English because of the abstract requirements.]

A   Now this stuff here looks ɖɔbɔrɔɔɔ [soft].
B   Wũrĩwũrĩwũrĩwũrĩwũrĩ [fine and granular]
A   Wũrĩwũrĩwũrĩwũrĩwũrĩwũrĩwũrĩwũrĩwũrĩwũrĩ!
B   So it will pass through the gun nipple.
A   Indeed. It won’t be kpokolo-kpokolo [lumpy], you see? It will be very grinded very soft ɖɔbɔrɔɔɔ. So that it can reach inside the gun nipple.

Example (1) shows how, during material culture production, the speakers calibrate their understanding of processes and technologies not with cold technical language, but with ideophones (cf. Nuckolls 1995). Later on in the same conversation, some speakers anticipate the ceremonial gunfire for which the gunpowder is being produced by collaboratively creating a vivid sensory spectacle:

C   When it does tawtaw, you would be standing silently. The gunman topples [because of the recoil] — he puts [this sound] in your ears rrrɔ̂ŋ! Then you’ll just be silenced kananananana, standing there. You’ll be watching things.
E   [In background] It goes gbií im̀ ̀!
C   Boy will it sound — it goes gbíiiìim̀ ̀m̀ !

An analysis of this 'poetry in ordinary language' (Evans-Pritchard 1962) will throw light on the interplay of language, culture and the perceptual world in Mawu society.

References

1. Evans-Pritchard, E. E. 1962. Ideophones in Zande. Sudan Notes and Records 34: 143-146.
2. Nuckolls, Janis B. 1995. Quechua texts of perception. Semiotica 103, no. 1/2: 145-169.  
3. Voeltz, F. K. Erhard, and Christa Kilian-Hatz, eds. 2001. Ideophones. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

In Siwu, gunpowder doesn’t just go BANG! by Mark Dingemanse is licensed under a CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0 License.