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.
Lab rotations are a regular feature of work in my research groups. Students join the lab and figure out a…
You hear a word like tugɯn-dugɯn and two possible meanings ‘heartbeat’ or ‘gentle movement’. Which one do you pick? People have intuitions about the fit between forms and meanings, even for words they have never encountered. But can we explain those intuitions? And can we use that explanation to predict what people do in experimental tasks? That is the question we seek to answer in The Anatomy of Iconicity.
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.
Readers of this blog know that I believe serendipity is a key element of fundamental research. There is something neatly…
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.
What do words like waddle, slobber, tingle, oink, and zigzag have in common? These words sound funny, but they are also iconic, with forms that resemble aspects of their meanings. In a new…
I’m happy to co-convene a session to take place at the International Cognitive Linguistics Conference in Nishinomiya, Japan. The session…
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 II from my notes on a workshop on ‘Ideophones and non-lexical vocalizations’, in which I make a distinction between (iconic) depictions and (indexical) displays, and point out the issue of lexicality is orthogonal to this.
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’.
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…