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.

Slides for a talk titled The interaction of syntax and expressivity in Siwu ideophones, presented in Berkeley at the 2009 International Conference on RRG, August 9, 2009. The handout can be downloaded here. The slides are also available as a PDF file. You can cite this presentation as follows:

1. Dingemanse, Mark. 2009. “The interaction of syntax and expressivity in Siwu ideophones”. Paper presented at the 2009 International Conference on RRG, August 9, Berkeley.

Slides for my recent presentation at the 6th World Congress of African Linguistics. Incomprehensible without the handout. Since this is an overview talk, there is some overlap with presentations given in Berkeley (RRG, August 9) and London (SOAS, June 3).

I’m using the following working definition of ideophones: “marked words that vividly depict sensory events” (elaborated here; your comments are welcome).

Cite as:

1. Dingemanse, Mark. 2009. ‘What do we really know about ideophones?’ Paper presented at the 6th World Congress of African Linguistics, August 21, Köln.

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.