I stumbled on a paper which is titled (according to the journal metadata and countless secondary sources) Grammatically Judgments and Second…
Magritte’s best known work by far is of course his drawing of a pipe with the text Ceci n’est pas une…
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…
Slides for a plenary address delivered at the 2011 African Studies Day, organised by the Netherlands Association of African Studies.…
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.
I’ve been reading Daniel Dor’s manuscript Language as a Communication Technology (available here), and found this observation on grammaticality judgements…
Note to readers: Portions of this post have been revised and published in the following paper: Dingemanse, Mark. 2019. “Ideophone”…
Update: SemiotiX issue XN-8 features a revised and expanded version of this essay. The linguistic blogosphere featured some posts recently…
A new version of ELAN, the widely used tool for time-aligned annotation of linguistic data, was released today by the…
The LSA asks its members in a survey to choose the most important papers in Language, 1925-2000. Have you ever…
We’ve been working on this for quite some time, and we’re excited to go live now: the L&C Field Manuals…
Transient Languages & Cultures published a nice post by Peter Austin last month on the question of how much time…
Finally, some commentaries on the Evans & Levinson paper are trickling down the blogosphere. Nigel Duffield‘s “Roll up for the…
Found this gem in a review of Paul de Wolf’s (1971) The Noun Class System of Proto-Benue-Congo: This work falls…
Language in Society just published a book note by me on the second edition of Deborah Tannen’s well-known book Talking…
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 or another you set out to discover that Basque is in fact a Niger-Congo language. A look at the rich lexical material in Westermann (1927) provides ample inspiration. Let’s pick one of the Togo Remnant Languages, you think — after all, Basque is sort of remnant too. Akpafu. Euskara. Hey, why not. Let’s just see what we can do… no-one’s going to notice, right?