Two months ago we started a new book series with the innovative open access publisher Language Science Press: Conceptual Foundations of Language…
Today, Nature published a news feature by Cat Ferguson, Adam Marcus and Ivan Oransky (Retraction Watch) in which I am…
Charles Hockett had interesting views on the relation between iconicity and arbitrariness. Here is a key quote: The difference of…
Organisers Dr. Mark Dingemanse (Max Planck Institute, Nijmegen) Prof. Sharon Rose (University of California, San Diego) African ideophones and their contribution to…
The September/October issue of Scientific American MIND features an article written by me and N.J. Enfield entitled “Universal Social Rules Underlie…
Abercrombie, David. 1968. “Paralanguage.” International Journal of Language & Communication Disorders 3 (1): 55–59. doi:10.3109/13682826809011441. That was almost half a…
Veel wetenschappers onderhouden een haat-liefde verhouding met de media. Media-aandacht is moeilijk te krijgen en als je het eenmaal hebt…
Instead of probing the cultural or historical context for musical utterances, or the complex networks of social interaction that give…
Where moderation is not utterly overstepped, the wealth of sound in languages can be compared to coloration in painting. The…
There is no doubt, from all points of sociological, or psychological analysis, and in any question of theory, the manner…
Guest posting by Gwilym Lockwood, PhD student in the Neurobiology of Language Department at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics.…
Words evolve not as blobs of ink on paper but in face to face interaction. The nature of language as fundamentally interactive and multimodal is shown by the study of ideophones, vivid sensory words that thrive in conversations around the world. The ways in which these “Lautbilder” enable precise communication about sensory knowledge has now for the first time been studied in detail. It turns out that we can paint with language, and that the onomatopoeia we sometimes classify as childish may be a subset of a much richer toolkit for depiction in speech, available to us all and in common use around the globe.