Good press for ideophones!

Dutch national quality newspaper NRC Handelsblad featured an extensive interview on ideophones and my research this weekend in their Science section, written by Berthold van Maris. There's no online version of the article, but here is a PDF version if you read Dutch (or even if you just want to appreciate the look of Siwu ideophones in Dutch orthography!).

Klankschilderen: NRC, January 23, 2010, Science section, pp. 4-5

Nog meer goede pers! (30 januari)

Nog meer goede pers! Ik ben geïnterviewd door Dolf Jansen in de Radio 2 show Spijkers met Koppen (zie ook twitter). Met minder dan 10 minuten was het een kort interview, maar ik ben erg trots dat het Siwu het nu zelfs tot op de nationale radio geschopt heeft! Ik ben ook best tevreden met het verloop van het gesprek, hoewel er natuurlijk te weinig tijd is voor nuance. Maar oordeelt u zelf — klik op de speler hieronder om het fragment af te spelen.

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O, en voor de goede orde: (1) ik werk natuurlijk bij het Max Planck Instituut voor Psycholinguistiek, niet bij de 'Universiteit van Nijmegen' zoals Felix Meurders zegt in de aankondiging; en (2) ideofonen zijn dus woorden (ik heb dit een paar keer gezegd maar het is kennelijk toch niet triviaal). Woorden die iedereen die Siwu spreekt kent en die je in een woordenboek kunt opnemen. Het zijn dus geen spontane geluidseffecten, het zijn ook geen tussenwerpsels, maar 'gewoon' woorden die eruit springen vanwege hun opvallende klanken en kleurrijke betekenissen.

Great Minds of the 21st Century: an ABI scam

Just got this letter, on official-looking paper with an official-looking stamp:

Dear Mr. Dingemanse:

You have been nominated to appear in Great Minds of the 21st Century, a major reference directory including just 1,000 of the world's top thinkers and intellectuals. (...) The ABI is contantly engaged with research centers throughout the world as well as its own global network of research advisors sitting on an international board. When the Institute is compiling a volume, these factors come together to point out individuals, through personal nomination, who deserve the recognition of inclusion in a biographical volume. Your contributions to the field of science have warranted the high regard of nomination for Great Minds of the 21st Century.

That's impressive — but it sounds just a liiiiittle bit fishy, doesn't it? As it turns out, the American Biographical Institute, which sends out these letters, has been in business for a long time. Here's the catch:

Inclusion in a volume as prestigious as Great Minds of the 21st Century is quite an accolade, and to celebrate the occasion we offer several mementos, including keepsake copies of the volume at discounted rates to those included only. A Medal of unequaled quality and molded only for Great Minds of the 21st Century honerees is of special significance, as is the Proclamation Plaque designed to indicate your unique selection for this volume.

For $395, I learn, I can get the 'medal of unequaled quality'; and for a mere $595 I get a Hardbound Luxury Keepsake Issue of the 5th Edition of Great Minds of the 21st Century embellished with gold engravings. Remember, just 1,000 of the world's top thinkers and intellectuals will be included. What an honour!

But then, who says that they send this letter to just 1,000 people? Chances are it goes to at least a couple thousands more, maybe even in the ten thousands — and that they start publishing to commemorate hitting the mark of the first 1,000 Great Fools of the 21st Century. In fact, here's someone who once worked at ABI explaining how they work:

ABI buys mailing lists from organizations. Using those names, they send out blanket mailings inviting individuals to be in biographical books. When the forms come back to ABI, they're marked (A) buy, (B) bill and (C) no sale. A forms go directly to the "editors," data-entry drones making minimum wage who never went to college and are beholden to type a certain amount of entries per day. B forms go next. C forms are saved in a pile, and the best are used to fill in the holes in titles such as "2000 Women of Distinction" et. al.

Nah, I think it's not for me. But if you want a nomination, let me know — they also kindly provided me with a section where I can nominate ten colleagues so as to 'assist in their research process'.

‘Do ideophones really stand out that much?’ (with sound clips)

Bulbul posted an interesting anecdote in a comment on one of my earlier posts:

On my way home today, I took the scenic route, through the old town, where the Weinachtsmarkt is in full swing with Christmas lights glowing, Glühwein flowing and all that jazz. As I was trying to get through the crowds, I noticed a black gentleman standing next to one of the stalls obviously admiring something and talking on the phone in a language I could not immediately identify.

And just as I passed him, he said “You know” and then something I would transcribe as “ŋɛrɛrɛrɛ” followed by a laugh. “I bet this ŋɛrɛrɛrɛ is an ideophone” I said to myself and immediately started wondering whether the person on the other end truly understood what was being conveyed – in other words, whether that “ŋɛrɛrɛrɛ” was a word with a shared meaning. Now I know better – assuming I was right in identifying the word as an ideophone, of course.

I still don’t know what language that was (I’m guessing Yoruba based on a few words I might have heard), so do ideophones really stand out that much that even a non-speaker can identify them as such?

Decide for yourself

So that's today's question: do ideophones really stand out that much? This is something you can only decide for yourself. Here are three examples from Siwu. They come from my corpus of everyday discourse and represent the three most common ideophone constructions. These three constructions account for 88% of 230 ideophone tokens in the corpus; the examples thus can be said to be typical of ideophone usage in day to day conversations in Siwu.

I will not transcribe them at this point; I just want you to listen.

Example 1

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Example 2

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Example 3

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Well do they?

Now you're in the position to answer bulbul's question: do ideophones really stand out that much that even a non-speaker can identify them? The answer —mine at least— is yes. If you are a hearing person, I'm willing to bet you had no trouble at all identifying the ideophones in the above three sound samples.

Before I give you the transcriptions, it is worthwile to ponder for a moment why ideophones stand out like this. I've hinted at this on other occasions, for example yesterday's ditty on vivid suggestion, a post on Feedburner's Zap! Pow! Kraaakkkk!, and the last ideophone proeverij; and also in a recent paper, where I wrote:

As marked words, ideophones set themselves apart from the surrounding linguistic material; as a likely locus of performative foregrounding, they stimulate emotional engagement; as depictions, they supply vivid imagery and recreate sensory events in sound, inviting the listener onto the scene as it were.

So ideophones stand out for a reason: to attract attention to themselves as words qua words, to mark themselves as depictions in a stream of descriptive material. Let's suppose the gentleman overheard by Bulbul was indeed using an ideophone. Standing at the Weinachtsmarkt, he was attempting to share a vivid image of something he had in mind with the person on the other end; to do so, he needed to signal that what followed 'You know' was different somehow from bland referential prose; and this he did (unwittingly for sure) by performatively foregrounding 'ŋɛrɛrɛrɛ'.

Of course it's a bit flaky to draw conclusions on the basis of a couple of syllables overheard on a Weinachtsmarkt. Was it Nigerian Pidgin, which we know has lots of ideophones (Faraclas 1996)? Was he codeswitching? Was he perhaps simply stuttering? There's no way of knowing. That's why I gave the Siwu examples, which come from an extensive corpus of everyday social interaction. Want to know what those mean? Click 'Show' below to check it out.

Show »

References

1. Dingemanse, Mark. 2009. Ideophones in unexpected places. In Proceedings of Conference on Language Documentation and Linguistic Theory 2, ed. Peter K. Austin, Oliver Bond, Monik Charette, David Nathan, and Peter Sells, 83-97. London: SOAS, November 14.
2. Faraclas, Nicholas. 1996. Nigerian Pidgin. New York: Routledge.

The power of vivid suggestion

On the whole, however, it is safer to see ideophones and similar sounds as proof of their users' sensitive feeling for language, a deep sensitive attachment to sounds and their power of vivid suggestion or representation. In many cases, a speaker or oral artist can avoid an ideophone by simply duplicating a word of action: for jegidezie tiii, for instance, the narrator could have said jegide jegide, which would translate into something like 'walked on and on.' But tiii has a special appeal both as a sound and as a more dramatic way of capturing the idea of extent.

Isidore Okpewho, African Oral Literature, 1992 p. 96. (The example is from Ijo.)

Okpewho's remarks highlight the importance of the material properties of the ideophonic word. It is not a simple case of having words for things that some other languages may not have lexicalized words for; it is the nature of the ideophonic word —the fact that meaning is suggested by the material properties of the sign— that makes it such a significant linguistic device. What Okpewho calls 'vivid suggestion' I have tried to capture with the phrase 'vivid depiction' in my working definition of ideophones ("marked words that vividly depict sensory events").

References

1. Okpewho, Isidore. 1992. African Oral Literature: Backgrounds, Character, and Continuity. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

The Senses in Language and Culture

The Language & Cognition group at the MPI for Psycholinguistics will present a session on The Senses in Language and Culture at the 108th AAA meeting in Philadelphia, December 2-6. Come visit us on Friday morning from 8.00-11.45 in the Liberty Ballroom A, on the 3rd Floor of the Downtown Marriott.

What? The Senses in Language and Culture, an SLA-sponsored session
When? Friday December 4th, 8.00-11.45
Where? Downtown Marriott, Liberty Ballroom A, 3rd Floor
Who? Stephen C. Levinson & Asifa Majid (organizers); Asifa Majid, N.J. Enfield, Niclas Burenhult, Gunter Senft, Clair E. Hill, Hilário de Sousa, Connie de Vos, Shakila Shayan, Ozge Ozturk, Mark Sicoli, Sylvia Tufvesson, Mark Dingemanse, Olivier Le Guen, Penelope Brown (participants); Lawrence Hirschfeld, William F. Hanks (discussants)

Session Abstract

(See also the program and abstracts for individual talks below.)

How are the senses structured by the languages we speak, the cultures we inhabit? To what extent is the encoding of perceptual experiences in languages a matter of how the mind/brain is “wired-up” and to what extent is it a question of local cultural preoccupation? This symposium brings together the results of a large-scale cross-linguistic project focused on the encoding of the senses in language and culture, organized by the Language and Cognition group, at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen. Continue reading »

Slides for ‘Ideophones in unexpected places’

Slides for my recent paper 'Ideophones in unexpected places', presented at LDLT2 in London, November 13-14. Though the inquisitive rooster in the title slide may not be looking for them, there are ideophones for just about any salient feature depicted in this scene. But what are people using them for? And what specialized uses may arise out of the core interactional functions of ideophones? Those are the questions addressed in this paper.

Supplementary material can be found on another page. A slightly updated version of the full paper is available here (PDF). Here is how to cite it:

1. Dingemanse, Mark. 2009. 'Ideophones in unexpected places'. In Proceedings of Conference on Language Documentation and Linguistic Theory 2, ed. Peter K. Austin, Oliver Bond, Monik Charette, David Nathan, and Peter Sells, 83-94. London: SOAS.

Oh no! Ideophones are not response cries!

In their commentary on Evans & Levinson's recent hotly debated Myth of Language Universals paper, Pinker & Jackendoff briefly mention ideophones — and erroneously shelve them away as 'response cries':

English, for example, has phenomena similar to Chinese classifiers (e.g., a piece of paper, a stick of wood), Athabaskan verb distinctions (among locative verbs; Levin 1993; Pinker 1989; 2007), ideophones (response cries such as yum, splat, hubba-hubba, pow!; Goffman 1978), and geocentric spatial terms (e.g., north, upstream, crosstown; Li & Gleitman 2002)

It is about time I wrote another installment of misconceptions about ideophones. It seems this error is a particularly easy one to make for speakers of SAE languages. In this post I want to flesh out why this might be so, and explain what's the difference. Continue reading »

Coming up: LDLT2 in London

LDLT2, the 2nd conference on Language Documentation and Linguistic Theory, will be held in London this weekend. I'm looking forward to plenaries by Larry Hyman and Tania Kuteva, and to many other interesting talks.

The very last slot on Saturday (17:00-17:30) is reserved for a paper titled 'Ideophones in unexpected places' by yours truly. I am still considering my options for keeping the audience awake, but meanwhile, you can download a short version of the paper or have a peek at the accompanying multimedia (audio samples of two dirges).

In a nutshell, the argument I'm going to make is that ideophones occur across a wide range of discourse genres, some of them well beyond narrative contexts of use. Taking two ‘unexpected’ genres, funeral dirges and greetings, I show that the use of ideophones in each of them is distinctive while at the same time building on core interactional functions of ideophones in everyday conversational discourse.

1. Dingemanse, Mark. 2009. 'Ideophones in unexpected places'. Paper for LDLT2, SOAS, London, November.

Subtitles in ELAN and beyond

ELAN is a tool for creating complex annotations on video and audio resources. It's great for doing the hard work of annotation, but less ideal as a way of displaying the result, for example in a presentation. This brief tutorial covers a common use case: displaying a short stretch of video material with subtitles overlayed on the image. The instructions below are geared towards Windows users, although Mac users can also benefit from ELAN-exported .srt subtitles using VLC Media Player or Quicktime + Perian. Continue reading »

The body in Yoruba

When I finished my MA thesis back in 2006 I made it available online as a gesture to the Yoruba community. It used to be available from my site until I changed servers. Then some good soul uploaded it at Scribd, where it continued to draw visits from various Yoruba forums; however, this happened without my permission and the file was out of my control. I asked the uploader to withdraw it so that I could distribute a slightly updated version. It is now available again on my goodies page, along with some other old and unpublished papers.

Please do not redistribute the PDF file; instead point people to this page or the page http://ideophone.org/goodies/. That way I can update the file if need be, and everyone can be sure they get the most recent version.

The Body in Yoruba (2.45 MB)

Dingemanse, Mark. 2006. The Body in Yoruba: a linguistic study. MA Thesis, Leiden University.