In which I highlight some findings on the language of perception in Siwu, a language of eastern Ghana, as described in a chapter in an eternally forthcoming edited volume. Studying the language of perception shows the deep entanglements of the sensory and social worlds we inhabit.
The Mawu of present-day Akpafu relate in their oral histories that their ancestors lived in the mountains between their current location and the Volta river, in an area currently known as the Togo Plateau. Names they use for this area include Mawu kùbe (‘Mawu mountain’) and Àwubeame (‘in the Mawu mountains’). Hunters who frequented the area told me they were familiar with several ìkpakpi (historical settlements). This post is a synthesis of information from historical maps, scientific literature, oral traditions, and my own trips with Mawu community members.
We have a new paper out in which we find that people overwhelmingly like to help one another, independent of differences in language, culture or environment. This is a surprising finding from the perspective of anthropological and economic research, which has tended to foreground differences in how people work together and share resources.
I have always had a fondness for things considered marginal in linguistics. The tide may be turning for at least some marginalia: work on ideophones is clearly on the rise, and initiatives such as Martina Wiltschko’s Eh lab at UBC and a new nonlexical vocalizations project at Linköping University show there is significant interest in this area. Part I from my notes on a workshop on ‘Ideophones and non-lexical vocalizations’.
Natural conversations are a great source of data for all sorts of linguistic research. Linguists and conversation analysts usually study…
New paper out: Folk definitions in linguistic fieldwork. In which I discuss a procedure that is part of many field…
The September/October issue of Scientific American MIND features an article written by me and N.J. Enfield entitled “Universal Social Rules Underlie…
There is no doubt, from all points of sociological, or psychological analysis, and in any question of theory, the manner…
I just got back from Japan. Because of an early flight out, I booked an overnight stay at Narita Airport…
Slides for a presentation given at the ECSITE 2013 Annual Conference on science communication. I spoke in a session convened…
With the help of the Radboud University and MPI Nijmegen librarians I’ve been tracking down an obscure but historically important…
A new version of ELAN, the widely used tool for time-aligned annotation of linguistic data, was released today by the…
Gérard Diffloth, writing about the paradox of catching ideophones in the wild, notes the following: Il faut donc guetter les…
Archaeologists may be interested to hear the following story, told to me by an elder in Akpafu-Mempeasem in Ghana’s Volta…
We’ve been working on this for quite some time, and we’re excited to go live now: the L&C Field Manuals…
Transient Languages & Cultures published a nice post by Peter Austin last month on the question of how much time…
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
We’ve just launched the web page for a project we’ve been working on in the Language & Cognition group: Synaesthesia…
It is no news that people are animals, especially not this Darwin Year. But normally that something we say of…
A 2005 study suggests that Japanese ideophones of laughter activate striatal reward centers in the brain, but I think the…