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Ideophones, expressiveness and grammatical integration
Ideophones —vivid sensory words found in many of the world’s languages— are often described as having little or no morphosyntax. That simple statement conceals an interesting puzzle. It is not often that we can define a word class across languages in terms of its syntax (or lack thereof). After all, most major types of word…
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Sound symbolism boosts novel word learning: comparing ideophones and adjectives
We have a new paper out. It’s actually been available since February in an online-first version, but for those of us who love page numbers and dead trees, the journal has now printed it in its August issue on pages 1274-1281. Citation: Lockwood, G., Dingemanse, M., & Hagoort, P. (2016). Sound-symbolism boosts novel word learning…
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Sound symbolism in language: Does nurunuru mean dry or slimy?
Guest posting by Gwilym Lockwood, PhD student in the Neurobiology of Language Department at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. Note: We have since published several papers showing that people can indeed guess and learn the meaning of ideophones at a level above chance: Dingemanse, Mark & Schuerman, Will & Reinisch, Eva & Tufvesson, Sylvia…
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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…
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Giggles and gargles
A 2005 study suggests that Japanese ideophones of laughter activate striatal reward centers in the brain, but I think the results should be treated with a pinch of salt. Speaking of salt, Japanese gargle with salt water regularly as a prevention against the common cold; they even have an ideophone for it (but so do…
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Waza waza
waza waza, Gomi 1989:193 · © 1989 I came across this lovely Japanese ideophone in my own copy of Gomi’s Illustrated Dictionary,1 and I’m sharing it waza waza just for you to enjoy. References Gomi, Taro. 1989. An Illustrated Dictionary of Japanese Onomatopoeic Expressions. Transl. by J. Turrent. Tokyo: Japan Times. Thanks to Mami Maruko…
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Do you know this feeling?
What better way to compensate for the overload of text in the previous posts than with some excellent illustrations of Japanese gitaigo? I have recently been looking at Taro Gomi’s delightful Illustrated Dictionary of Japanese Onomatopoeic Expressions, featuring cartoon-like depictions of almost 200 Japanese sound-symbolic words used to evoke certain sensations, feelings, and sensory perceptions.