We have a new paper out. It’s actually been available since February in an online-first version, but for those of…
We have a new paper out in Language: Dingemanse, Mark, Will Schuerman, Eva Reinisch, Sylvia Tufvesson, and Holger Mitterer. 2016.…
Just out in Trends in Cognitive Sciences: a review paper by yours truly with Damián Blasi, Gary Lupyan, Morten Christiansen and Padraic Monaghan. It…
New paper out: Folk definitions in linguistic fieldwork. In which I discuss a procedure that is part of many field…
Jerome Bruner (who turns 100 today!) writes in his 1983 autobiography (emphasis in original): “How puzzling that there should be…
Together with Giovanni Rossi I’ve organised an invited panel at the 14th International Pragmatic Conference in Antwerp, July 2015. Contributors…
Charles F. Hockett (1916-2000) is well-known for his work on the design features of language. Many linguists will know his 1960 article in Scientific…
Two months ago we started a new book series with the innovative open access publisher Language Science Press: Conceptual Foundations of Language…
Charles Hockett had interesting views on the relation between iconicity and arbitrariness. Here is a key quote: The difference of…
The September/October issue of Scientific American MIND features an article written by me and N.J. Enfield entitled “Universal Social Rules Underlie…
Abercrombie, David. 1968. “Paralanguage.” International Journal of Language & Communication Disorders 3 (1): 55–59. doi:10.3109/13682826809011441. That was almost half a…
Where moderation is not utterly overstepped, the wealth of sound in languages can be compared to coloration in painting. The…
There is no doubt, from all points of sociological, or psychological analysis, and in any question of theory, the manner…
Words evolve not as blobs of ink on paper but in face to face interaction. The nature of language as fundamentally interactive and multimodal is shown by the study of ideophones, vivid sensory words that thrive in conversations around the world. The ways in which these “Lautbilder” enable precise communication about sensory knowledge has now for the first time been studied in detail. It turns out that we can paint with language, and that the onomatopoeia we sometimes classify as childish may be a subset of a much richer toolkit for depiction in speech, available to us all and in common use around the globe.
Gek op cross-overs van kunst en wetenschap, muziek en experiment? Ik ook. Daarom organiseer ik met mijn collega’s Tessa Verhoef…
Just a heads-up to let interested readers know of a newish article on the morphosyntactic typology of ideophones by yours…
Voor het Kennislink Vragenboek beantwoordde ik de vraag: “Waarom roep je ‘au!’ bij plotselinge pijn?”. Dat is kennelijk een vraag…
The world’s many endangered languages are often characterized as “unwritten” and “oral” languages. Both of these terms reveal the language…
Slides for a presentation given at the ECSITE 2013 Annual Conference on science communication. I spoke in a session convened…
“A struggle for life is constantly going on among quotations in academic writings. The better, the shorter, the easier forms…