Last year Sabine Reiter defended an interesting PhD thesis on ideophones in Awetí, a Tupian language spoken in the Upper…
Slides for a presentation given at the ECSITE 2013 Annual Conference on science communication. I spoke in a session convened…
No matter how large or complex a PhD thesis, it should be possible to present an outline of the main…
Note to readers: A version of this argument has been written up and published as: Dingemanse, Mark. 2015. “Ideophones and…
This weekend, at the annual Taalgala ceremony in Utrecht, I was awarded the AVT/Anéla Dissertatieprijs 2012 for my dissertation The Meaning and…
Slides for a plenary I gave at the Total Reduplication workshop organised by Daniela Rossi. The other plenary speakers were…
A quick heads up to note the publication of two nice studies of ideophones by Americanists Janis Nuckolls (BYU) and…
Just out: a review of ideophone research by yours truly, titled Advances in the cross-linguistic study of ideophones, published in…
Ideophones, like so many things in life, are easy to identify but hard to define. Here I describe the process of iterating on a definition of this phenomenon in search of a formulation that is useful in cross-linguistic research.
Just out: a new issue of SemiotiX, the e-journal on all things semiotic edited by prof. Paul Bouissac. Among other…
Note to readers: Portions of this post have been revised and published in the following paper: Dingemanse, Mark. 2019. “Ideophone”…
Last week the Portland Review published a beautiful ideophone poem by Stacey Tran, titled From the World Encyclopedia of Ideophones.…
Update: SemiotiX issue XN-8 features a revised and expanded version of this essay. The linguistic blogosphere featured some posts recently…
This long overdue instalment of Ideophones around the web features ideophones in the names of snappy new mobile apps from…
I loved Daniel Tammet’s second book Embracing The Wide Sky (2009). In his own words, Embracing The Wide Sky is “a…
Lɛkɛrɛɛ and lukuruu are two Siwu ideophones depicting imagery of being well-rounded. But they differ in degree. One of them…
Just out: A new issue of the journal Senses & Society, featuring research by a dozen contributors to the Language…
Gérard Diffloth, writing about the paradox of catching ideophones in the wild, notes the following: Il faut donc guetter les…
This blog has been suffering from a bad case of thesis-writing neglect. But I’m getting there. I just launched thesis.ideophone.org,…
One of my projects here at The Ideophone has been to track down early sources on ideophonic phenomena. For example, I have suggested that we may call the 1850’s the decade of the discovery of ideophones in African linguistics. But we can push back the linguistic discovery of ideophones a little further by looking to other traditions. Today we look at Japanese, for which I have found some early 17th century grammatical treatises that offer information on ideophones.