The Ideophone

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

Category: Ideophones

  • Ideophones in Bakairi, Brasil, 1894

    Last year Sabine Reiter defended an interesting PhD thesis on ideophones in Awetí, a Tupian language spoken in the Upper Xingu area of central Brazil. In the introduction, she mentions an early source on ideophones in this area. It’s a vivid description of a native of Xingu felling a tree, and it’s full of ideophones…

  • Better science through listening to lay people

    Slides for a presentation given at the ECSITE 2013 Annual Conference on science communication. I spoke in a session convened by Alex Verkade (De Praktijk) and Jen Wong (Guerilla Science). The other speakers in the session were Bas Haring on ‘Ignorance is a virtue’, and Jen Wong on ‘Mixing science with art, music and play’. We…

  • A poster on ideophones

    No matter how large or complex a PhD thesis, it should be possible to present an outline of the main argument on a simple poster. On that note, here’s a 1-page summary of some of the key findings from my thesis on the meaning and use of ideophones. The occassion is a festive one: I’ve…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • Slides on ideophones and reduplication

    Slides for a plenary I gave at the Total Reduplication workshop organised by Daniela Rossi. The other plenary speakers were David Gil (MPI-EVA), Thomas Stolz (U. Bremen), and Silvia Kouwenberg (UWI, Mona).

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • An ideophone poem by Stacey Tran

    Last week the Portland Review published a beautiful ideophone poem by Stacey Tran, titled From the World Encyclopedia of Ideophones. It consists of ideophones from Navajo, Japanese, Vietnamese, Yoruba and Siwu juxtaposed with poetry lines that evoke the rich and textured meanings of these words. Read the piece here. I’m not sure I can quote it…

  • Phonosemantics, Chinese characters, and coerced iconicity

    Update: SemiotiX issue XN-8 features a revised and expanded version of this essay. The linguistic blogosphere featured some posts recently on the topic of phonosymbolism, phonosemantics, and Chinese characters. It started with a post by Victor Mair over at Language Log, outlining several approaches to “etymologizing” Chinese characters. A follow-up by David Branner highlighted some of…

  • Ideophones around the web: ideophones and product naming

    This long overdue instalment of Ideophones around the web features ideophones in the names of snappy new mobile apps from an Indian software startup.

  • Daniel Tammet invents his own Siwu ideophone

    I loved Daniel Tammet’s second book Embracing The Wide Sky (2009). In his own words, Embracing The Wide Sky is “a personal and scientific exploration of how the brain works and the differences and similarities between savant and non-savant minds”. It surveys work from psychology and linguistics and even indirectly (okay, very indirectly) features my work…

  • Can you tell the difference between lɛkɛrɛɛ and lukuruu?

    Lɛkɛrɛɛ and lukuruu are two Siwu ideophones depicting imagery of being well-rounded. But they differ in degree. One of them evokes an image of being seriously fat, the other depicts the state of being merely chubby. Can you guess which is which?

  • New publications on ideophones

    Just out: A new issue of the journal Senses & Society, featuring research by a dozen contributors to the Language of Perception project. This special issue, edited by Asifa Majid and Stephen C. Levinson, also features two articles on ideophones: one by Sylvia Tufvesson and one by yours truly.

  • Interrupting everybody

    Gérard Diffloth, writing about the paradox of catching ideophones in the wild, notes the following: Il faut donc guetter les expressifs et les attraper au vol ; mais dans le feu de l’action et de la discussion animée où ils naissent, qui aurait le culot d’interrompre tout le monde afin de pouvoir vérifier une voyelle,…

  • Update

    This blog has been suffering from a bad case of thesis-writing neglect. But I’m getting there. I just launched thesis.ideophone.org, a site that will be the home of online supplementary materials to go with my PhD thesis, The Meaning and Use of Ideophones in Siwu. There isn’t all that much to see yet, but I…

  • Aduerbia sonus: Ideophones in two 17th century grammars of Japanese

    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…