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Farewell, Mr. Ideophone: William J. Samarin (1926-2020)
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 […] ᐅ keep reading
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Semantic primitives and conceptual decomposition
Thought-provoking discussion on semantic primitives and conceptual decomposition this morning at @in_interaction, led by Guillermo Montero-Melis. We went from Wittgenstein & Osgood via Rosch & Lakoff to Kemp & Tenenbaum and recent work by Mitchell, Binder, and others. The paper that drew most attention was Binder et al. 2016’s ‘Toward a brain-based conceptual semantic representation’ […] ᐅ keep reading
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Narrative CV as an experiment in convergent cultural evolution
NWO introduces a narrative CV, and I have some thoughts. Sounds like a convoluted cultural evolution experiment: a high stakes game in which applicants and reviewers independently construe models of good narratives, everything passes through a reductive score bottleneck, and next generations never have direct access to prior rounds. Selection dichotomises continuous scores and only […] ᐅ keep reading
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Een week @NL_Wetenschap
In voorjaar 2019 mocht ik een week twitteren in naam der wetenschap voor het wissel-account @NL_Wetenschap (10-17 februari 2019). Omdat het account steeds rouleert van wetenschapper naar wetenschapper en omdat Twitter natuurlijk altijd in beweging blijft is het moeilijk om achteraf een goede indruk te krijgen van zo’n week. Daarom hier een overzichtje in blog-vorm. […] ᐅ keep reading
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Micromoments in music
This post originated as a twitter thread. 1 One of my favourite micromoments in music: the creak at 1:15 in Old Folks by Miles Davis. Perfectly timed with an inbreath, I always imagine Davis leaning back in his chair, pure concentration building up for the next lyrical phrase. 2 Another musical #micromoment — the signature […] ᐅ keep reading
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Rethinking Marginality: panel on interjections & interaction at IPRA
We’re convening a panel at the 16th International Pragmatics Conference in Hong Kong next week. This doubles as the inaugural workshop of my VIDI project Elementary Particles of Conversation. The workshop ties into the overall theme of the conference, which is “Pragmatics at the Margins”. Have a look at the panel programme & abstracts (PDF), […] ᐅ keep reading
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The role of serendipity in shaping fundamental research
After much postponement, writing the final report for my NWO Veni grant (2015-2018) turned out to be an unexpected pleasure. It made me realise a couple of things — key among them the role of serendipity in shaping fundamental research. The project was called “Towards a science of linguistic depiction”. Looking at the publications that […] ᐅ keep reading
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Sign names and theories of naming
Every time I learn new name signs —e.g. during my UCL visit hosted by @gab_hodge— I’m struck by how they call into question Searle’s (spoken English-based) arguments about how proper names work. Many sign names appear to be descriptive (or at least originate as descriptions) Moreover, often one gets the ‘baptismal story’ along with learning […] ᐅ keep reading
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John Benjamins collective volumes linguistics CSL style
Linguists will know John Benjamins as one of the nicer academic publishing houses, not quite so terrible as Elsevier or other profiteering behemoths, and one with really good typography to boot. Iconicity afficionados will probably know the Iconicity in Language and Literature series published by Benjamins. One of my first articles on ideophones and iconicity appeared […] ᐅ keep reading
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Slides for a hands-on Zotero workshop
One of the key tasks scientists need to master is how to manage bibliographic information: collecting relevant literature, building a digital library, and handling citations and bibliographies during writing. This tutorial introduces Zotero (www.zotero.org), an easy to use reference management tool made by scholars for scholars. The tutorial covers the basics of using Zotero for […] ᐅ keep reading
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How often does Google Scholar update citation counts?
TL;DR: every other day. Read on for details. Many scientists use Google Scholar to find papers, get alerts about new work, and —if they have a profile— display a publication list which tracks citations. What is the Google Scholar update frequency? It occurred to me that we have a perfect way to check this in […] ᐅ keep reading
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Firth on the analysis of conversation (1935): sequence and social accountability
Here are some insights from J.R. Firth in 1935 that offer an interesting early outlook on language use in social interaction. Firth (1890-1960) was an expert in phonetics and prosody, but always stressed the importance of the larger context in which words and utterances occurred. In this piece, he turns to conversation as a source of […] ᐅ keep reading
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Two classic papers on ideophones and iconicity by Westermann (PDF)
Two duck-related ideophones exist in varieties of Ewe, spoken in Eastern Ghana: a simple kpakpa imitating the sound; and a form dabodabo that seems more mysterious at first sight. In an early paper on ideophones (available below), linguist Diedrich Westermann describes a discussion about these words with his Ewe consultant: Ewe has two dialectally separated words for duck, […] ᐅ keep reading
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Waarom ik mijn werk als wetenschapper zo leuk vind
Een hele eer: de redactie van New Scientist heeft me geselecteerd voor hun top 25 van talentvolle jonge wetenschappers. Er zit ook nog een populariteitswedstrijd aan vast waarin één ‘winnaar’ aangewezen wordt op grond van een vakjury en publieksstemmen (wat natuurlijk vooral een slimme manier is van New Scientist om aandacht te genereren voor hun merk). Geen […] ᐅ keep reading
Sounding out ideas on language, vivid sensory words, and iconicity
