Revised and published as:
- Dingemanse, M., & Majid, A. (2012). The semantic structure of sensory vocabulary in an African language. In N. Miyake, D. Peebles, & R. P. Cooper (Eds.), Proceedings of the 34th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 300–305). Cognitive Science Society.
The pile sort is a technique to discover how people conceptualize and classify items in a certain domain. Subjects sort a set of items into piles, and data from several subjects is then pooled for statistical analysis. In the task described in this chapter, 14 literate speakers of Siwu sorted 58 ideophone cards by similarity in meaning. The results of this pile sorting task provide us with a window on the semantic-conceptual structure of the domain of ideophones.
Figures
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- The pile-sorting task (1)
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- The pile-sorting task (2)
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- Figure 10.1. 3D MDS plot with some clusters labelled (stress .21)
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- Figure 10.2. Cluster dendrogram, with some branches labelled
