-
Now online: fieldmanuals.mpi.nl
We’ve been working on this for quite some time, and we’re excited to go live now: the L&C Field Manuals and Stimulus Materials. This is a website providing access to many of the field manuals produced over the years by the Language and Cognition Group at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. As the front…
-
Transcribing linguistic data: bottlenecks and one way to speed up
Transient Languages & Cultures published a nice post by Peter Austin last month on the question of how much time it takes to transcribe linguistic data. Working under tight time constraints during some recent fieldtrips, I found one way to speed the process up. It still takes an awful lot of time, but here goes.
-
But is it grammar?
Finally, some commentaries on the Evans & Levinson paper are trickling down the blogosphere. Nigel Duffield‘s “Roll up for the mystery tour” is one. Unfortunately, the comments on that post are closed. I have a question, so let me just post it here, where the comments are open.
-
The clay tablet tradition of African comparative linguistics
Found this gem in a review of Paul de Wolf’s (1971) The Noun Class System of Proto-Benue-Congo: This work falls within the ‘clay tablet’ tradition of African comparative linguistics, and, like other things in the same tradition (Meinhof, Greenberg), it has the properties of being inscrutable and yet at the same time, in broad outline,…
-
A short review of Talking Voices (2nd ed)
Language in Society just published a book note by me on the second edition of Deborah Tannen’s well-known book Talking Voices. Here is the pdf.
-
Basquekpafu
There you are, author of such groundbreaking works as The African Origins of Classical Civilisation, Maori: The African Evidence, and Who were the Minoans?: an African answer. You now want to solve the Basque enigma once and for all, and since the general thrust of your work is to link everything to Africa one way…
-
The Senses in Language and Culture
The Language & Cognition group at the MPI for Psycholinguistics will present a session on The Senses in Language and Culture at the 108th AAA meeting in Philadelphia, December 2-6. Come visit us on Friday morning from 8.00-11.45 in the Liberty Ballroom A, on the 3rd Floor of the Downtown Marriott.
-
Oh no! Ideophones are not response cries!
Looking for a published version of this? These observations about ideophones vs. interjections also appear in a 2021 OUP Handbook article: Dingemanse, M. (2021). Ideophones. In E. van Lier (Ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Word Classes. Oxford University Press. doi: 10.31234/osf.io/u96zt In their commentary on Evans & Levinson’s recent hotly debated Myth of Language Universals…
-
Subtitles in ELAN and beyond
ELAN is a tool for creating complex annotations on video and audio resources. It’s great for doing the hard work of annotation, but less ideal as a way of displaying the result, for example in a presentation. This brief tutorial covers a common use case: displaying a short stretch of video material with subtitles overlayed…
-
The body in Yoruba
When I finished my MA thesis back in 2006 I made it available online as a gesture to the Yoruba community. It used to be available from my site until I changed servers. Then some good soul uploaded it at Scribd, where it continued to draw visits from various Yoruba forums; however, this happened without…
-
No free ride for semiosis
There is no free ride for semiosis. Signs have a cost and a carbon footprint. Sign processes, in any form we can observe them, consume energy and produce heat. (…) Energetic and caloric constraints are generally overlooked in semiotic theorizing which is long on hot air and short on metrics. To the extent that we…
-
Unified Style Sheet for Linguistics Journals
Not all linguists may be aware of this, but since 2007 there has been a Unified Style Sheet for publications in our field, developed by the editors of a number of linguistic journals, including Language. (Oddly enough, just which journals besides Language joined in the effort remains unclear.) There is not much centralized information available…
-
Early sources on African ideophones, part IV: S.W. Koelle on Kanuri, 1854
It is high time for a continuation of our series honouring the ancestors of ideophone studies. Sigismund Wilhelm Koelle is one of the founding fathers of African linguistics, and 1854 was one of his more productive years. In the same year, besides his Kanuri grammar (from which the excerpt below is taken), he issued what…
-
Ideophones around the web
With another busy summer gone, here is a post highlighting some of the stuff that’s floated by in the ideophonic blogosphere. I haven’t seen anything like last year’s ideophonic earrings, but we do have more news on Sotho siks!, the introduction of ideophones in the Nyungwe Bible, and a postcard from Taiwan on ideophones in…
-
On literariness
Embedded in the Iconicity conference in Toronto is a pleasant surprise: a three-day workshop entitled Cognitive Poetics: A Multimodal Approach. Speakers include Reuven Tsur, David Herman, Margaret Freeman, David Miall, Zoltan Kövecses, Yeshayahu Shen, Mark Changizi, and of course the organizer, the colourful Paul Bouissac. (As an aside, I can’t resist quoting the latter on…
-
Upcoming talk: Ezra Pound among the Mawu
Up next week: the Seventh Biennial Symposium on Iconicity in Language and Literature (programme here), at Victoria College, University of Toronto, June 9-14, 2009. It looks like an interesting bunch of linguists and literary theorists. I will give a talk on Tuesday the 9th, the abstract for which can be found below. Ezra Pound among…
-
Two talks on ideophones at SOAS
If you’re in London and able to come to SOAS at short notice, there will be two talks on ideophones tomorrow afternoon: one by my colleague Sylvia Tufvesson and one by myself. The talks will be on Wednesday, 3 June, 3-5pm, in room 4418 in SOAS. Here are the titles and abstracts: Phonosemantics and perceptual…
-
Giggles follow-up: smiling verbs and happy adjectives show facial motor resonances
Just a quick follow-up on my earlier post. Foroni & Semin (in press, Psychological Science) do what I hoped somebody did: examining the bodily grounding of non-ideophonic vocabulary related to emotional states. Theirs is not an imaging study like Osaka & Osaka 2005, but a study of motor resonance in facial muscles. The terms tested…
-
The Enduring Spoken Word
Science has just published a comment by me on Oard’s “Unlocking the potention of the spoken word” (Oard 2008). It is a critique of the monomodal view of language adopted in that article. (If you haven’t read the original piece, check it out here, or see my brief summary.)