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Evolving words — now on DLC
“A struggle for life is constantly going on among quotations in academic writings. The better, the shorter, the easier forms are constantly gaining the upper hand and they owe their success to their own inherent virtue.” Sounds familiar? Perhaps because it’s a variation on a bon mot attributed to Charles Darwin that you may have seen in… ᐅ keep reading
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*Grammatically judgements
I stumbled on a paper which is titled (according to the journal metadata and countless secondary sources) Grammatically Judgments and Second Language Acquisition. Read again if you didn’t spot the grammatically error in there. I was just about to add it to my Zotero collection of articles with recursive titles1 when I decided to check whether… ᐅ keep reading
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Preview: a 1913 map of the Togo Hills
With the help of the Radboud University and MPI Nijmegen librarians I’ve been tracking down an obscure but historically important map of the Togo Hills area in eastern Ghana. It’s a pretty large map, originally made available as an Appendix to a 1913 issue of the Mitteilungen aus den deutschen Schutzgebieten. I plan to make the whole… ᐅ keep reading
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Magritte on Words and Images (PDF)
Magritte’s best known work by far is of course his drawing of a pipe with the text Ceci n’est pas une pipe. He made several versions over the years, but the work originated in 1928 or 1929. The title Magritte gave to this painting is La trahison des images — the treachery of images. Less well known… ᐅ keep reading
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Description and depiction
Note to readers: A version of this argument has been written up and published as: Dingemanse, Mark. 2015. “Ideophones and reduplication: Depiction, description, and the interpretation of repeated talk in discourse.” Studies in Language 39 (4): 946–970. doi:10.1075/sl.39.4.05din (PDF). Depiction is a technical term used in psychology1, philosophy2, and art history3, but less so in linguistics4. One… ᐅ keep reading
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One-click Save as PDF from Word: two useful macros
One of the most common word-processing related task for academics is to generate PDF versions of documents — for sharing with colleagues, for submission to a journal, for uploading to a publication page, et cetera. In LaTex, creating PDFs is a question of one simple command (plus a bit of fiddling with settings). In recent… ᐅ keep reading
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A Mawu community in Sefwi, Western Region, Ghana
In Kawu on the very final day of my 2012 fieldtrip, I heard something unusual. Some people talked about a community of Mawu people, speakers of Siwu, living in Sefwi. Now Kawu, as you know, is in the east of Ghana, close to the border with Togo. Sefwi on the other hand is all the… ᐅ keep reading
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AVT/Anéla Dissertation Award 2012
This weekend, at the annual Taalgala ceremony in Utrecht, I was awarded the AVT/Anéla Dissertatieprijs 2012 for my dissertation The Meaning and Use of Ideophones in Siwu. For this prize, jointly presented by the Dutch Society for General Linguistics and the Dutch Association for Applied Linguistics, an independent jury selects the best dissertation in linguistics in The… ᐅ keep reading
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Quest
Welkom Quest-lezers! Je komt hier misschien via het stukje in de Quest van januari 2013. Als taalwetenschapper bestudeer ik het Siwu (spreek uit: “Siwoe”), gesproken in het zuidoosten van Ghana. Eén van de dingen die ik onderzocht heb zijn de vele klankwoorden van het Siwu. Wil je meer weten over mijn taalonderzoek in Ghana? Beluister… ᐅ keep reading
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Two recent studies of ideophones in the Americas
A quick heads up to note the publication of two nice studies of ideophones by Americanists Janis Nuckolls (BYU) and Elena Mihas (James Cook University). The first, by Janis Nuckolls, is “Ideophones in Bodily Experiences in Pastaza Quichua (Ecuador)“. It appeared in the proceedings of STLILLA 2011. The latest iteration in a long and fruitful… ᐅ keep reading
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Advances in the cross-linguistic study of ideophones
Just out: a review of ideophone research by yours truly, titled Advances in the cross-linguistic study of ideophones, published in Language and Linguistics Compass. This article focuses on some recent developments in ideophone research. Some of the things it offers include a cross-linguistically viable definition of ideophones; an argument for why ideophones are structurally marked; a… ᐅ keep reading
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Curse or blessing? Africa’s linguistic heritage in the 21st century
Slides for a plenary address delivered at the 2011 African Studies Day, organised by the Netherlands Association of African Studies. The theme of the day was “Africa’s cultural heritage”. ᐅ keep reading
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What’s wrong with “vivid”? The evolution of a definition
Ideophones, like so many things in life, are easy to identify but hard to define. Many researchers have grumbled about the shortcomings of Doke’s descriptive characterization of ideophones (see discussion here), but few have attempted to formulate an alternative. For better or worse, I did,1 but it took me a few iterations to arrive at… ᐅ keep reading
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New issue of SemiotiX
Just out: a new issue of SemiotiX, the e-journal on all things semiotic edited by prof. Paul Bouissac. Among other things, it features a guest column by yours truly. Ever felt sceptical about the supposed iconicity of ideophones like Siwu kananaa ‘silent’ or Japanese iya iya ‘with a heavy heart’? Isn’t it similar to the… ᐅ keep reading
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Bourdieu’s food space, updated
Food writer Molly Watson from Gastronomica provides us with an update of Bourdieu’s food space, where different types of food are arranged spatially along two dimensions: economic and cultural capital. The beautiful illustration is by Leigh Wells . Note the four versions of “homemade pickles” appearing in all four regions of the chart. Molly Watson… ᐅ keep reading
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Daniel Dor on grammaticality judgements
I’ve been reading Daniel Dor’s manuscript Language as a Communication Technology (available here), and found this observation on grammaticality judgements insightful: When a speaker follows the conventionalized rules to the letter, the endproduct (the actual fragment of speech) is judged by the other members of the community as grammatical. When making this judgment, the other… ᐅ keep reading
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Six sensible settings for ELAN
ELAN (lat-mpi.eu/tools/elan) is a widely used tool for the transcription, annotation, and analysis of audio and video data. This posting presents six simple tweaks of the ELAN interface that will be helpful to most ELAN users. ᐅ keep reading
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On the use of structural criteria in defining ideophones
Note to readers: Portions of this post have been revised and published in the following paper: Dingemanse, Mark. 2019. “Ideophone” as a comparative concept. In Akita, Kimi & Pardeshi, Prashant (eds.), Ideophones, Mimetics, Expressives, 13–33. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. (doi:10.1075/ill.16.02din) (PDF) Recently I’ve been having a conversation with Roger Blench about whether structural markedness should play… ᐅ keep reading
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Who will write a lightweight duplicate detection plugin for Zotero?
Duplicate detection is one of the things any serious reference manager should offer. Zotero users have been clamouring for it since the early days. There are basically two ways to implement it: as a preflight check, warning the user when they are about to add a potential duplicate; and as an after the fact scan,… ᐅ keep reading
Sounding out ideas on language, vivid sensory words, and iconicity
