The Ideophone

Sounding out ideas on language, vivid sensory words, and iconicity

Tag: iconicity

  • Consolidating iconicity research

    Consolidating iconicity research

    Readers of this blog know that I believe serendipity is a key element of fundamental research. There is something neatly paradoxical about this claim. We might like ‘key elements’ to be plannable so that we can account for them on budgets and balance sheets. But here is an element that I think can make a…

  • What sound symbolism can and cannot do: new paper in Language

    We have a new paper out in Language: Dingemanse, Mark, Will Schuerman, Eva Reinisch, Sylvia Tufvesson, and Holger Mitterer. 2016. “What Sound Symbolism Can and Cannot Do: Testing the Iconicity of Ideophones from Five Languages.” Language 92 (2): e117–33. doi:10.1353/lan.2016.0034 The basic finding is this: people are sensitive to the meaning of ideophones they’ve never heard,…

  • Arbitrariness, iconicity and systematicity in language

    Just out in Trends in Cognitive Sciences: a review paper by yours truly with Damián Blasi, Gary Lupyan, Morten Christiansen and Padraic Monaghan. It is titled “Arbitrariness, iconicity and systematicity in language”. You can download it here (PDF). Here is a simple summary: An important principle in linguistics is that words show no predictable relation between their form and…