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Making and breaking iconicity
Making and breaking iconicity was the theme of a plenary lecture I gave at the 6th conference of the Scandinavian Association for Language and Cognition (SALC VI) in Lund. Here’s the opening slide: Research on iconicity and sound symbolism has long focused on how iconic associations are made — finding universal crossmodal associations using pseudowords like bouba […] ᐅ keep reading
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Facts and and fiction about iconicity: the story of ideophones
Here’s the abstract for the keynote lecture I’ll be giving at the 11th Symposium on Iconicity in Language and Literature in Brighton, April 6-8, 2017 (site). The notion of iconicity has seen a remarkable increase in prominence in recent years. No longer the marginal phenomenon it once was, it has become a canvas upon which we […] ᐅ keep reading
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Ideophones, expressiveness and grammatical integration
Ideophones —vivid sensory words found in many of the world’s languages— are often described as having little or no morphosyntax. That simple statement conceals an interesting puzzle. It is not often that we can define a word class across languages in terms of its syntax (or lack thereof). After all, most major types of word […] ᐅ keep reading
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What do you really need on this earth?
Natural conversations are a great source of data for all sorts of linguistic research. Linguists and conversation analysts usually study them primarily for their structure, not their content. This is not out of disinterest, but out of empirical prudence. Talk tends to support a wide range of interpretations. It is empirically safest to stick to observable […] ᐅ keep reading
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How Academia.edu promotes poor metadata and plays to our vanity
A while back some low quality citations started showing up on Google Scholar. They had titles like “CHAPTER 2 draft — email xyz@ab.edu” and it was hard find actual bibliographic metadata. Google Scholar seemed to have scraped random PDFs uploaded on Academia.edu and decided it was worth counting the citations in them even in the absence of proper metadata. I […] ᐅ keep reading
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Sound symbolism boosts novel word learning: comparing ideophones and adjectives
We have a new paper out. It’s actually been available since February in an online-first version, but for those of us who love page numbers and dead trees, the journal has now printed it in its August issue on pages 1274-1281. Citation: Lockwood, G., Dingemanse, M., & Hagoort, P. (2016). Sound-symbolism boosts novel word learning […] ᐅ keep reading
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Why PLOS ONE needs page proofs
Note: I prepared this posting in August 2015, when PLOS ONE was due to publish a paper by us and I wanted to make sure they’d avoid the stupid typesetting errors they made in our 2013 paper. I used the numbers to convince them to show us proofs beforehand. To my surprise, they did, and I never got […] ᐅ keep reading
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Some things you need to know about Google Scholar
Summary: Google Scholar is great, but its inclusiveness and mix of automatically updated and hand-curated profiles means you should never take any of its numbers at face value. Case in point: the power couple Prof. Et Al and Dr. A. Author, whose profiles I created following Scholar’s recommended settings (and a bit of manual embellishment). If you have a […] ᐅ keep reading
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Folk Definitions in Linguistic Fieldwork
New paper out: Folk definitions in linguistic fieldwork. In which I discuss a procedure that is part of many field work routines, but seldomly appreciated as a method of its own. Abstract: Informal paraphrases by native speaker consultants are crucial tools in linguistic fieldwork. When recorded, archived, and analysed, they offer rich data that can […] ᐅ keep reading
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Bruner on language learning
Jerome Bruner (who turns 100 today!) writes in his 1983 autobiography (emphasis in original): “How puzzling that there should be so much emphasis … on the underlying genetic program that makes language acquisition possible and so little on the ways in which the culture, the parents and more “expert” speakers (including other, older children) help the genetic program […] ᐅ keep reading
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Pragmatic Typology: invited panel at IPrA 2015 in Antwerp
Together with Giovanni Rossi I’ve organised an invited panel at the 14th International Pragmatic Conference in Antwerp, July 2015. Contributors include Jörg Zinken & Arnulf Deppermann; Sandy Thompson & Yoshi Ono; Stef Spronck; Giovanni Rossi, Simeon Floyd, Julija Baranova, Joe Blythe, Mark Dingemanse, Kobin Kendrick & N.J. Enfield; Ilana Mushin; and Mark Dingemanse. More information […] ᐅ keep reading
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Hockett on open-mindedness in the language sciences
Charles F. Hockett (1916-2000) is well-known for his work on the design features of language. Many linguists will know his 1960 article in Scientific American1 in which thirteen design features are nicely illustrated (though Hockett himself preferred the more developed 1968 version co-authored with Altmann). Hockett worked in many areas of linguistics, from phonology to morphology and from linguistic anthropology to semantics. One of his […] ᐅ keep reading
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Conceptual Foundations of Language Science publishes its first book
Two months ago we started a new book series with the innovative open access publisher Language Science Press: Conceptual Foundations of Language Science. We’re proud to announce that the series published its first book this week. The book, Natural causes of language is introduced here by Nick Enfield: You can download your own copy of the book directly […] ᐅ keep reading
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Editorial Manager and password security for academics
Today, Nature published a news feature by Cat Ferguson, Adam Marcus and Ivan Oransky (Retraction Watch) in which I am quoted about some problems with Editorial Manager (EM). This post provides the background to what I say there. Disclaimer: I am not a security expert, though the basic problems should be obvious to anyone caring about security and privacy on the web. […] ᐅ keep reading
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Hockett on arbitrariness and iconicity
Charles Hockett had interesting views on the relation between iconicity and arbitrariness. Here is a key quote: The difference of dimensionality means that signages1 can be iconic to an extent to which languages cannot; and they are, even though, as Frishberg (1975) tells us, the trend in Ameslan for over a century has been towards more and more conventionalization. […] ᐅ keep reading
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African ideophones and their contribution to linguistics — workshop at WOCAL8 in Kyoto, Aug 2015
Organisers Dr. Mark Dingemanse (Max Planck Institute, Nijmegen) Prof. Sharon Rose (University of California, San Diego) African ideophones and their contribution to linguistics Africa’s linguistic diversity has impacted the study of language in many ways. The articulatory phonetics of the Khoi and San languages prompted methodological innovations in phonetics, the tonal systems of West-African languages spurred the […] ᐅ keep reading
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Universal Social Rules Underlie Languages
The September/October issue of Scientific American MIND features an article written by me and N.J. Enfield entitled “Universal Social Rules Underlie Languages”. We review recent research on conversation across cultures, including work on turn-taking, timing, and other-initiated repair. Scientific American MIND is a psychology/brain-themed offshoot of the well-known Scientific American magazine. We’re proud to publish in the pages of […] ᐅ keep reading
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Abercrombie on ‘paralanguage’
There is an urgent need for the comparative study, over as much of the world as possible, of the full range of paralinguistic phenomena — the kind of thing for which the linguistic field-worker is best fitted. Fact-finding, not theorising, is what is wanted at this present juncture. Abercrombie, David. 1968. “Paralanguage.” International Journal of […] ᐅ keep reading
Sounding out ideas on language, vivid sensory words, and iconicity
