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.
New paper! McLean & Dingemanse 2025, A multi-methods toolkit for documentary research on ideophones. In which we review a diversity of methods and analytical approaches to the documentation of ideophones.
This is a the second part in a two part series of peer commentary on a recent preprint.
One of the benefits of today’s preprint culture is that it is possible to provide constructive critique of pending work before it is out. This post is written in that spirit.
It’s a common misconception that iconicity or sound symbolism is universal, perpetuated in part by the almost universal success of famous experiments involving pseudowords like bouba and kiki. But iconicity in natural languages is much more messy than paradigms like bouba-kiki suggest. Which begs the question, what do we really measure when we measure iconicity? This is what our new paper investigates.
News just reached me that we have lost a dear colleague and one of the people responsible for introducing the…
I note with sadness that William J. Samarin has passed away in Toronto on January 16, 2020 at the age of 93. An all too short obituary notes that he was “known for his work on the language of religion and on two Central African languages: Sango and Gbeya”. In linguistics, Samarin was of course also known for his extensive work on ideophones, playful and evocative words with sensory meanings.
I’m happy to co-convene a session to take place at the International Cognitive Linguistics Conference in Nishinomiya, Japan. The session…
Just out in Glossa, the premier open access journal of general linguistics: Dingemanse, Mark. 2018. “Redrawing the Margins of Language:…
In late 2011, I defended my PhD thesis and submitted two papers on ideophones. One to Language and Linguistics Compass,…
Making and breaking iconicity was the theme of a plenary lecture I gave at the 6th conference of the Scandinavian Association…
Here’s the abstract for the keynote lecture I’ll be giving at the 11th Symposium on Iconicity in Language and Literature in…
Ideophones —vivid sensory words found in many of the world’s languages— are often described as having little or no morphosyntax.…
We have a new paper out. It’s actually been available since February in an online-first version, but for those of…
We have a new paper out in Language: Dingemanse, Mark, Will Schuerman, Eva Reinisch, Sylvia Tufvesson, and Holger Mitterer. 2016.…
Just out in Trends in Cognitive Sciences: a review paper by yours truly with Damián Blasi, Gary Lupyan, Morten Christiansen and Padraic Monaghan. It…
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…
Where moderation is not utterly overstepped, the wealth of sound in languages can be compared to coloration in painting. The…
Guest posting by Gwilym Lockwood, PhD student in the Neurobiology of Language Department at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics.…