My colleague Asifa Majid (who recently was awarded a VICI grant) was interviewed about the broader Language of Perception research project as well as her research on smell among the Jahai of Malaysia. I was interviewed about my field research on perception and ideophones in Siwu. (The documentary was viewed by 332.000 viewers on the evening of the broadcast and streamed online over 7.000 times so far.)

The first half of the episode features the work of Deb Roy, Simon Kirby, and several others in a shortened form of the BBC Horizons documentary “Why do we talk?” The second half is devoted to our research at the MPI. If you’re in The Netherlands, you can watch the whole episode below (or skip to 13:00 in the player below for the second half).

• Watch the episode online (unfortunately, viewing is restricted to IP addresses from the Netherlands)
• View the “napraatsessie” that followed the broadcast, in which we were live in the studio to answer questions from Twitter
• Read the mpi.nl news item about the show
• Read the Radboud University press release

This means that I can now make the thesis officially available to anyone interested. You can find it on the home page. Or just download the PDF directly. Thank you for your interest, and enjoy!

Also check out these press releases related to the thesis and the defense:

• MPI for Psycholinguistics news item
• Runieuws.nl: Schilderen met woorden: in het Siwu kan het wél
• RU/Kennislink: Ideofonen openen je ogen voor compleet andere taal

This task is one of the methods I developed to investigate the meanings of ideophones in Siwu. Chapter 8 has all the details; the supplementary materials page for that chapter has video clips of folk definitions by different speakers.

Senses & Society has a strict word limit, so the article only touches on some key topics of the thesis: the highly specific sensory meanings of ideophones and their uses in naturally occurring speech. If you’re interested in ideophones as aesthetic words, you might find the article useful. If you want all the juicy details, wait for the thesis.

You can find an electronic version of the article via the DOI, or you can download the PDF directly. Abstract:

This article explores language, culture, and the perceptual world as reflected in a particular linguistic device: ideophones, marked words that depict sensory imagery. Data from a range of elicitation tasks shows that ideophones are a key resource in talking about sensory perception in Siwu. Their use in everyday conversations underlines their communicative versatility while at the same time showing that people delight in their expressiveness. In ideophones, we have an expressive resource that combines sheer playfulness with extraordinary precision

1. Dingemanse, Mark. 2011. Ideophones and the aesthetics of everyday language in a West-African society. The Senses and Society 6(1). 77-85. doi:10.2752/174589311X12893982233830.  

List of papers

Here are some papers that relate to material from the thesis:

1. Dingemanse, Mark. 2011. Ezra Pound among the Mawu: Ideophones and Iconicity in Siwu. In Pascal Michelucci, Olga Fischer, & Christina Ljungberg (eds.), Semblance and Signification, 39-54. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
2. Dingemanse, Mark. 2011. Ideophones and the aesthetics of everyday language in a West-African society. The Senses and Society 6(1). 77-85.
3. Dingemanse, Mark. 2010. Folk definitions of ideophones. In Elisabeth Norcliffe & N.J. Enfield (eds.), Field Manual Volume 13, 24-29. Nijmegen: Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics.
4. Dingemanse, Mark. 2009. Ideophones in unexpected places. In Peter K. Austin, Oliver Bond, Monik Charette, David Nathan, & Peter Sells (eds.), Proceedings of Conference on Language Documentation and Linguistic Theory 2, 83-94. London: SOAS.

I brought some sound samples of everyday conversations in Siwu. Dolf effortlessly identified the ideophones. I particularly loved his spontaneous observation of the special mode of speaking that people enter when they use ideophones:

Je hoort aan de toon dat ze in die- in die klank gaan. Ze klinken anders dan als ze normaal spreken.

(You hear from the intonation that they’re going into that- into that sound. They sound different from when they speak normally.)

The interview was repeated in the August 2010 show as one of the highlights of the season.