Natural conversations are a great source of data for all sorts of linguistic research. Linguists and conversation analysts usually study…
Magritte’s best known work by far is of course his drawing of a pipe with the text Ceci n’est pas une…
Last week the Portland Review published a beautiful ideophone poem by Stacey Tran, titled From the World Encyclopedia of Ideophones.…
“The trouble with intellectuals,” Manny, my boss, once told me, “is that they don’t know nothing till they can explain…
Intangible and abstruse the bright silk of the sunlight Pours down in manifest splendor, You can neither stroke the…
Embedded in the Iconicity conference in Toronto is a pleasant surprise: a three-day workshop entitled Cognitive Poetics: A Multimodal Approach.…
Up next week: the Seventh Biennial Symposium on Iconicity in Language and Literature (programme here), at Victoria College, University of…
The closing paragraphs of my previous post were cited in several places as evidence of a cultural revival. Although it is too soon to say whether this is the case, I’m glad to report that the dirges that we recorded in Akpafu-Todzi are in wide circulation now. Here i share an example with analysis.
Funeral dirges (sìnɔ in Siwu) are sung during the period of public mourning preceding a burial. The musical structures of these dirges, the performances, and their place in the larger context of the funeral have been described in some detail by Agawu (1988) and before him by the German missionary Friedrich Kruse (1911); however, the linguistic aspects of the genre have not received any attention so far. Dirges are rarely heard in Kawu nowadays, but there are signs of a renewed interest in the genre.
If one had to sum up their character in a short phrase one might say that they are poetry in…
Reading about the two translations of the Confucian Ta Hio by Ezra Pound, the earlier one first published in 1928…