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.

In the review I am slightly critical of this classic for three reasons. First of all, for a second edition of a work that appeared two decades ago, it is very thin on updates and revisions. Secondly, it still focuses on the acoustic signal only (thereby overlooking a wealth of work on gesture and multimodal interaction that appeared since the first edition). Third, despite its general claims, Talking Voices limits itself mainly to various Anglophone ways of speaking (excepting some Greek examples). The Greek examples (which derive from an interesting 1983 paper) actually point to the relevance of a widespread linguistic resource that happens not to be very common in either the Greek or the Anglophone cultures discussed: ideophony. I argue that ideophones are immediately relevant to 'repetition, dialogue, and imagery' (the subtitle of TV), and thus to core themes of Tannen's work (see also Nuckolls 1992, 1996).

Here is the conclusion:

The strength of Tannen’s book lies in its insightful analysis of the auditory side of conversation. Yet talking voices have always been embedded in richly contextualized multimodal speech events. As spontaneous and pervasive involvement strategies, both iconic gestures and ideophones should be of central importance to the analysis of conversational discourse. Unfortunately, someone who picks up this second edition is pretty much left in the dark about the prevalence of these phenomena in everyday face-to-face interaction all over the world.

Should Tannen have looked at gesture and ideophones? Of course every researcher has to make general choices and every published piece of scientific work is by definition incomplete. So I don't think there's an issue of 'should have' — but I do think it is unfortunate for the 2nd edition to miss out on these phenomena, because they would have offered many interesting and helpful illustrations of the book's themes.

References

1. Dingemanse, Mark. 2010. Review of on Tannen, Deborah, Talking Voices: Repetition, Dialogue, and Imagery in Conversational Discourse (2nd ed.). Language in Society, 39, 1, 139-140.
2. Nuckolls, Janis B. 1992. Sound Symbolic Involvement. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 2, no. 1: 51-80.
3. Nuckolls, Janis B. 1996. Sounds Like Life: Sound-Symbolic Grammar, Performance, and Cognition in Pastaza Quechua. New York: Oxford University Press.
4. Tannen, Deborah. 1983. "I Take Out the Rock-Dok!": How Greek Women Tell about Being Molested (and Create Involvement). Anthropological Linguistics 25, no. 3: 359-374.
5. Tannen, Deborah. 2007. Talking Voices: Repetition, Dialogue, and Imagery in Conversational Discourse. 2nd ed. Studies in Interactional Sociolinguistics 25. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

The Basque word for their language is Euskara or Euskera, earlier Heuskara. The first part of this word is the Togo R. word for "Akpafu", Likpe be-fu "Akpafu", Bowili o-vu-ne "Akpafumann", Santrokofi o-fu "Akpafumann", Akpafu ka-wu, ka-'u "Akpafu". The early initial Basque h is from k, as can be seen from ka-wu, ka'u. The a has changed to e in this lexeme. The consonant between e and u has been lost. Basque lacks the semivowel w, which drops out here in Akpafu ka'u. See Lafon (1960 : 92) for confirmation from placenames etc.: Ausci, Aoiz, Auch.

The second part of the word, ka or ke is a word for "speak", Niger-Congo gue "voice, language", Ewe, Ga gbe "voice", Agni guere "language, speech", Yoruba i-gbe "loud cry", Gbari e-gwe, e-gbe "mouth". The e is for original a in this word. Niger-Congo e is secondary. Compare Niger-Congo ka, ke, k'e "to speak", which is related. The final sylable -ra is the Niger-Congo article. No clearer proof could be found that the Basques were originally the Akpafu!

Thus says mr. GJK Campbell-Dunn "M.A. (NZ), M.A. (Camb.) Ph.D." in a most interesting document titled "Basque as Niger-Congo". (Just to remind you, Akpafu is another name for Siwu, the language I've been doing fieldwork on over the last three years.) I mentioned this story over a year ago in the comments of an excellent post over at Glossographia titled Debunking and de-Basque-ing, but I never got around to posting about it here. In his post, Stephen Chrisomalis notes that "There is probably no culture or language that has attracted more pseudoscientific attention than Basque."

I'm not intent on debunking Campbell-Dunn's story here; I think the quotation above stands just fine on its own. But I do want to draw attention to the irony of this particular case. 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?

Well, I noticed. And I just want to say it loud and clear: Graham Campbell-Dunn's work is crackpot science. Don't believe it; don't even read it. Siwu and Euskara are fascinating languages that deserve of serious research. But they are most certainly not related. Although... come closer, I have to tell you a secret...

[[Visit blog to check out this spoiler]]

References

1. Ibarretxe-Antuñano, Iraide. 2006. Sound Symbolism and Motion in Basque. Lincom Europa.
2. Westermann, Diedrich. 1927. Die Westlichen Sudansprachen Und Ihre Beziehungen Zum Bantu. Berlin: In kommission bei W. de Gruyter & co.

Dutch national quality newspaper NRC Handelsblad featured an extensive interview on ideophones and my research this weekend in their Science section, written by Berthold van Maris. There's no online version of the article, but here is a PDF version if you read Dutch (or even if you just want to appreciate the look of Siwu ideophones in Dutch orthography!).

Klankschilderen: NRC, January 23, 2010, Science section, pp. 4-5

Nog meer goede pers! (30 januari)

Nog meer goede pers! Ik ben geïnterviewd door Dolf Jansen in de Radio 2 show Spijkers met Koppen (zie ook twitter). Met minder dan 10 minuten was het een kort interview, maar ik ben erg trots dat het Siwu het nu zelfs tot op de nationale radio geschopt heeft! Ik ben ook best tevreden met het verloop van het gesprek, hoewel er natuurlijk te weinig tijd is voor nuance. Maar oordeelt u zelf — klik op de speler hieronder om het fragment af te spelen.

[See post to listen to audio]

O, en voor de goede orde: (1) ik werk natuurlijk bij het Max Planck Instituut voor Psycholinguistiek, niet bij de 'Universiteit van Nijmegen' zoals Felix Meurders zegt in de aankondiging; en (2) ideofonen zijn dus woorden (ik heb dit een paar keer gezegd maar het is kennelijk toch niet triviaal). Woorden die iedereen die Siwu spreekt kent en die je in een woordenboek kunt opnemen. Het zijn dus geen spontane geluidseffecten, het zijn ook geen tussenwerpsels, maar 'gewoon' woorden die eruit springen vanwege hun opvallende klanken en kleurrijke betekenissen.

Bulbul posted an interesting anecdote in a comment on one of my earlier posts:

On my way home today, I took the scenic route, through the old town, where the Weinachtsmarkt is in full swing with Christmas lights glowing, Glühwein flowing and all that jazz. As I was trying to get through the crowds, I noticed a black gentleman standing next to one of the stalls obviously admiring something and talking on the phone in a language I could not immediately identify.

And just as I passed him, he said “You know” and then something I would transcribe as “ŋɛrɛrɛrɛ” followed by a laugh. “I bet this ŋɛrɛrɛrɛ is an ideophone” I said to myself and immediately started wondering whether the person on the other end truly understood what was being conveyed – in other words, whether that “ŋɛrɛrɛrɛ” was a word with a shared meaning. Now I know better – assuming I was right in identifying the word as an ideophone, of course.

I still don’t know what language that was (I’m guessing Yoruba based on a few words I might have heard), so do ideophones really stand out that much that even a non-speaker can identify them as such?

Decide for yourself

So that's today's question: do ideophones really stand out that much? This is something you can only decide for yourself. Here are three examples from Siwu. They come from my corpus of everyday discourse and represent the three most common ideophone constructions. These three constructions account for 88% of 230 ideophone tokens in the corpus; the examples thus can be said to be typical of ideophone usage in day to day conversations in Siwu.

I will not transcribe them at this point; I just want you to listen.

Example 1

[See post to listen to audio]

Example 2

[See post to listen to audio]

Example 3

[See post to listen to audio]

Well do they?

Now you're in the position to answer bulbul's question: do ideophones really stand out that much that even a non-speaker can identify them? The answer —mine at least— is yes. If you are a hearing person, I'm willing to bet you had no trouble at all identifying the ideophones in the above three sound samples.

Before I give you the transcriptions, it is worthwile to ponder for a moment why ideophones stand out like this. I've hinted at this on other occasions, for example yesterday's ditty on vivid suggestion, a post on Feedburner's Zap! Pow! Kraaakkkk!, and the last ideophone proeverij; and also in a recent paper, where I wrote:

As marked words, ideophones set themselves apart from the surrounding linguistic material; as a likely locus of performative foregrounding, they stimulate emotional engagement; as depictions, they supply vivid imagery and recreate sensory events in sound, inviting the listener onto the scene as it were.

So ideophones stand out for a reason: to attract attention to themselves as words qua words, to mark themselves as depictions in a stream of descriptive material. Let's suppose the gentleman overheard by Bulbul was indeed using an ideophone. Standing at the Weinachtsmarkt, he was attempting to share a vivid image of something he had in mind with the person on the other end; to do so, he needed to signal that what followed 'You know' was different somehow from bland referential prose; and this he did (unwittingly for sure) by performatively foregrounding 'ŋɛrɛrɛrɛ'.

Of course it's a bit flaky to draw conclusions on the basis of a couple of syllables overheard on a Weinachtsmarkt. Was it Nigerian Pidgin, which we know has lots of ideophones (Faraclas 1996)? Was he codeswitching? Was he perhaps simply stuttering? There's no way of knowing. That's why I gave the Siwu examples, which come from an extensive corpus of everyday social interaction. Want to know what those mean? Click 'Show' below to check it out.

[[Visit blog to check out this spoiler]]

References

1. Dingemanse, Mark. 2009. Ideophones in unexpected places. In Proceedings of Conference on Language Documentation and Linguistic Theory 2, ed. Peter K. Austin, Oliver Bond, Monik Charette, David Nathan, and Peter Sells, 83-97. London: SOAS, November 14.
2. Faraclas, Nicholas. 1996. Nigerian Pidgin. New York: Routledge.

On the whole, however, it is safer to see ideophones and similar sounds as proof of their users' sensitive feeling for language, a deep sensitive attachment to sounds and their power of vivid suggestion or representation. In many cases, a speaker or oral artist can avoid an ideophone by simply duplicating a word of action: for jegidezie tiii, for instance, the narrator could have said jegide jegide, which would translate into something like 'walked on and on.' But tiii has a special appeal both as a sound and as a more dramatic way of capturing the idea of extent.

Isidore Okpewho, African Oral Literature, 1992 p. 96. (The example is from Ijo.)

Okpewho's remarks highlight the importance of the material properties of the ideophonic word. It is not a simple case of having words for things that some other languages may not have lexicalized words for; it is the nature of the ideophonic word —the fact that meaning is suggested by the material properties of the sign— that makes it such a significant linguistic device. What Okpewho calls 'vivid suggestion' I have tried to capture with the phrase 'vivid depiction' in my working definition of ideophones ("marked words that vividly depict sensory events").

References

1. Okpewho, Isidore. 1992. African Oral Literature: Backgrounds, Character, and Continuity. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

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.

What? The Senses in Language and Culture, an SLA-sponsored session
When? Friday December 4th, 8.00-11.45
Where? Downtown Marriott, Liberty Ballroom A, 3rd Floor
Who? Stephen C. Levinson & Asifa Majid (organizers); Asifa Majid, N.J. Enfield, Niclas Burenhult, Gunter Senft, Clair E. Hill, Hilário de Sousa, Connie de Vos, Shakila Shayan, Ozge Ozturk, Mark Sicoli, Sylvia Tufvesson, Mark Dingemanse, Olivier Le Guen, Penelope Brown (participants); Lawrence Hirschfeld, William F. Hanks (discussants)

Session Abstract

(See also the program and abstracts for individual talks below.)

How are the senses structured by the languages we speak, the cultures we inhabit? To what extent is the encoding of perceptual experiences in languages a matter of how the mind/brain is “wired-up” and to what extent is it a question of local cultural preoccupation? This symposium brings together the results of a large-scale cross-linguistic project focused on the encoding of the senses in language and culture, organized by the Language and Cognition group, at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen.

The “Language of Perception” project tests the hypothesis that some perceptual domains may be more “ineffable” – i.e. difficult or impossible to put into words – than others. While cognitive scientists have assumed that proximate senses (olfaction, taste, touch) are more ineffable than distal senses (vision, hearing), anthropologists have illustrated the exquisite variation and elaboration the senses achieve in different cultural milieus. The project is designed to test whether the proximate senses are universally ineffable – suggesting an architectural constraint on cognition – or whether they are just accidentally so in Indo-European languages, so expanding the role of cultural interests and preoccupations.

To address this question, a standardized set of stimuli of color patches, geometric shapes, simple sounds, tactile textures, smells and tastes have been used to elicit descriptions from speakers of more than a dozen languages. The results of this investigation will be presented in the first presentation of the symposium. The stimulus materials also serve as a jumping-off point for more detailed analysis of the relations between the senses and language and culture provided by the remaining talks. The talks in the first half of the symposium explore “variation in space and time”. Speakers explore how semantic categories for the senses are influenced by individual variation, cultural expertise, and by the influences of contact histories with other social groups, languages and the forces of globalization.

The second half of the symposium explores “iconicity” in how the senses are expressed. Speakers explore how iconicity in signed and spoken languages is utilized to convey sensory experiences. Particularly revealing are ideophones (also known as “expressives”), a special class of words used to convey a vivid impression of certain sensations or sensory perceptions. These are found abundantly in Asian and African languages, as well as in some South American languages but are rare in Indo-European languages, and provide a unique window into the senses, language and culture. Straddling boundaries that have long been considered self-evident in Western thought (such as perception vs. emotion, or the traditional five-senses model), ideophones provide a unique view of cultural meaning systems relating to perception and sensation. Some languages such as the Mayan ones make use of structural iconicity to achieve similar cross-modal effects, compounding roots from different domains or using special derivations to signal affective overlays. These linguistic systems challenge preconceptions of limits to the expressive power of language.

Program

Individual talks are linked to abstracts. Times can be found on the AAA program.

Abstracts of individual talks

These abstracts are also available on the AAA Program for registered participants.

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Asifa Majid & Stephen C. Levinson: An overview of the senses across languages and cultures

Why is it that language is good at describing certain states of affairs (e.g., the kinship relation between me and my grandfather), but very limited in others (e.g., describing smells)? Ineffability – the difficulty or impossibility of putting certain experiences into words – is a topic that has been relatively neglected within the cognitive sciences. But limits on the ability to express sensorial experiences in words can tell us important things about how the mind works, how different modalities do or do not talk to one another, and how language does, or does not, interact with other mental faculties. This talk presents the results of a large-scale cross-linguistic investigation of how different perceptual domains are coded across languages and cultures. Speakers from more than a dozen languages – including three sign-languages – were asked to describe a standardized set of stimuli of color patches, geometric shapes, simple sounds, tactile textures, smells and tastes. The languages are typologically, genetically and geographically diverse, representing a wide-range of cultures. We examine how codable the different sensory modalities are by comparing how consistent speakers are in how they describe the materials in each modality. The results suggest that differential codability may be at least partly the result of cultural preoccupation. This shows that the senses are not just physiological phenomena but are constructed through linguistic, cultural and social practices.

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Nick J. Enfield: The senses in contact: A study of Mainland Southeast Asian languages

Historical contact between social groups is well known to cause convergence not only in patterns of cultural practice, but also in the structure of unrelated languages. While a fair amount is known about convergence in grammatical form, less is known about convergence in the semantic distinctions made in the lexicon. Research on the linguistic effects of culture contact often cites isolated examples (e.g., Matisoff has noted that Southeast Asian lexical semantic systems include ‘many verbs for different kinds of carrying’, and lexical idioms like ‘insects in the teeth’ for dental decay, or ‘pig crazy’ for epileptic), but little systematic work has been done. To make a move in this direction, in this talk I compare lexical semantic distinctions in the semantics of the senses in several languages of mainland Southeast Asia, focusing on some of the perceptual categories under investigation in a large-scale comparative project being undertaken by researchers in the Language and Cognition group at the Max Planck Institute, Nijmegen. Special attention is paid to data from Lao (Tai), Kri (Vietic), and Cantonese, within the domains of taste, smell, and color.

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Niclas Burenhult & Asifa Majid: Smell across space, time, and culture: The case of Aslian (Austroasiatic, Malay Peninsula)

It has been claimed that odor is relatively less codable in languages than vision, audition or other sensory modalities. On this basis, researchers have attempted to draw conclusions about how representational systems in the mind/brain are organized. Aslian-speaking communities (Austroasiatic, Malay Peninsula) are a counter-example to this claim. This talk provides evidence that Aslian communities are “smell cultures” with an elaborated set of smell distinctions in their lexica. Comparison of smell vocabularies across the diverse Aslian cultures suggests these distinctions do not have any relation to particular cultural practices but are linguistically motivated and remarkably stable across space, time and ecologies.

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Gunter Senft: Talking about color and taste on the Trobriand Islands: A diachronic comparative study

How stable is the lexicon for perceptual experiences? This talk presents results on how the Trobrianders talk about taste and color, and how these have changed over the years. In 1904 Charles S. Myers published a paper on the taste vocabulary of the Torres Strait Islanders. In 2008 I continued fieldwork on the Trobriand Islands in Papua New Guinea with the aim of researching the Trobriand Islanders’ language of perception. Contrasting my findings on taste categories in Kilivila with Myers’ work reveals that many of his original results can still be verified. The Trobriand Islanders have never developed a sophisticated cuisine - and their simple ways of preparing their food is mirrored in their vocabulary on taste. However, some effects of globalization have reached the Trobrianders and get reflected in their taste vocabulary. In 1983 I collected data on Kilivila color terms. The second part of my talk compares these data with the data I collected 2008. Many of the predictions I made about the development of color categories in 1983 were right. However, although the strategy to use color terms that refer to the plants, fruits and soils used to make colors for dyeing grass-skirts does not play an important role any more because women use chemical colors for dying their skirts these days, these color terms are still used. Kilivila provides evidence that terms used for talking about color and taste are relatively stable over time, with only a few effects of language change induced by language contact.

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Clair Hill: Ineffability and ‘gaps’ in the linguistic encoding of Umpila visual perception

In what ways do language systems manage areas of ineffability and semantic gaps? This paper considers this issue with regard to the linguistic encoding of visual perceptual modalities in Umpila, a Paman Australian language. In Umpila, areas of ineffability in the visual domain are supported by salient domains outside the perceptual realm and by other communicative resources. For example, kin categories are put to work by speakers to fill ‘gaps’ in the color spectrum, and simultaneous co-speech gesture is employed to add shape specificity to a simple two term ‘big-small’ lexical distinction.

This paper compares data from three contexts - responses to MPI ‘Language of Perception’ stimuli, supplementary tasks, and conversational narratives. Based on these comparative datasets, two broad types of relative perceptual ineffability can be posited: (1) domains with established systems of domain-specific lexicon - the ineffability here, is that such systems do not consistently map across an entire domain’s perceptual space; and (2) domains which employ all-purpose vocabulary (e.g. antonym pairs like good-bad, big-small) that can be readily applied across an entire perceptual domain, but lack the codable precision that domain-specific lexicon affords a speaker.

A comparison of types of ineffability and ‘gap’ filling strategies will be used to address a number of wider questions, such as: What is the relative resilience of perceptual categories in the midst of language obsolescence and cultural innovation given the current rapid language/cultural change situation in Aboriginal Australia? What is the relationship between areas of poor and rich linguistic and cultural elaboration?

Hilário de Sousa: Changes in the society and perception in Cantonese

Enormous changes happened in the Cantonese society in the last fifty years, from a relatively third world and illiterate society, to a relatively first world and highly literate society. Western-style education created a shift in the categorisation of perceptual categories; while some are enriched, especially in the distal senses, others are suppressed, especially in the proximal senses. As part of the ‘Categories across language and cognition’ project, I conduced a set of perceptual experiments on Cantonese. The Cantonese data that I collected reveal noticeable differences in the language of perception between older and younger speakers. With colours, older speakers uniformly provided the six basic colour terms of hung4 ‘red’, caang2 ‘orange’, wong4 ‘yellow’, luk6 ‘green’, laam4 ‘blue’ and zi2 ‘purple’, whereas many younger speakers provided two extra basic colour terms: ceng1 ‘light green’ and juk6 ‘peach’. With shapes, younger speakers tended to use terms which explicitly express the 3D-ness of 3D shapes (e.g. kau4tai2 ‘sphere’), whereas older speakers tend to use terms which do not explicitly distinguish the 2D-ness versus 3D-ness of the shapes (e.g. jyun4jing4 ‘round shape’/ ‘circle’ for a sphere). On the other hand, older speakers outperform younger speakers with gustational and olfactional terms. For instance, younger speakers do not distinguish the umami taste (the glutamate taste) from the salty taste, and tend to be less certain about the meanings of the numerous bad-smell terms in Cantonese.

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Connie de Vos: Iconicity and Variation: Conventionalisation of Color Terms in Small versus Large Signing Communities

Studies on color terms in signed languages have suggested that color term systems are not only affected by language mode, but also by characteristics of the language community (Washabaugh, Woodward, & DeSatis, 1978; Woodward, 1989; Nonaka, 2004). In this talk I present data from Kata Kolok, a signed language used in a small community of North Bali. In Kata Kolok, all indications of color are based on visual iconicity, which allows for contextual flexibility and high variability among signers. First of all, pointing to indicate color is conventionalized for white, red, and black which are referred to by touching teeth, lips, and hair respectively. Second, in spontaneous conversations signers often point towards objects in the vicinity which have the color which they would like to express. For example, one might point to a color on one’s sarong. A third strategy is to produce signs for objects which prototypically have that color. There is a high degree of variation between signers in the choice of objects. For example, one might choose either banana or turmeric to indicate the color yellow. One possibility is that this variation is due to the limited time depth of the language and the relatively small size of the signing community. A comparison between young and small sign languages like Kata Kolok to larger and more established signed languages, such as American Sign Language, suggests that conventionalization of color is a function of expressive mode, cognition, context, critical mass, and time.

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Shakila Shayan & Ozge Ozturk & Mark Sicoli: The thickness of pitch: Crossmodal iconicity in three unrelated languages; Farsi, Turkish and Zapotec

This paper considers parallels in the poetics of everyday life in both the Middle East and Meso-America. Sound is difficult to describe. While certain professionals (like linguists) may have expert vocabularies dedicated to sound description, speakers of many languages around the world rely on the vocabulary of more tangible domains, like space and size, extending them to talk about the intangible domain of sound. English is an example of a split system where one dimension has a dedicated vocabulary, like “quiet” vs “loud”, but the dimension of pitch uses spatial metaphors “high” and “low”. We present the language of sound in three unrelated languages—Farsi, Turkish, and Zapotec—whose speakers use metaphors of spatial dimension to talk about sound. All three refer to high frequency sounds as “thin” and low frequency sounds as “thick”. While it may be possible to explain similar patterns of Farsi and Turkish due to the extensive history of language contact in central Asia, our inclusion of the out-of-contact Meso-American language Zapotec suggests more is going on regarding the natural iconicity between dimensions of size and the perception of sounds. We discuss how vocabulary that discretely break up continua of size dimensions lend themselves to less-tangible sound continua like pitch, loudness, and tempo. "Thin" always entails a comparison with "thick" like "high" entails a comparison with "low". An iconic relationship is set up between dimension and sound, which are domains that are both ontologically continuous but made phenomenologically discontinuous through their categorical representation in language

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Sylvia Tufvesson: Analogy making in the Semai sensory world

How are related sensory perceptions expressed linguistically? What drives similarity judgments between sensory experiences in, and across, sensory modalities? This paper examines analogy making in sensory perception in an Aslian speaking community on the Malay Peninsula. The language of focus is Semai (Austroasiatic, Mon-Khmer), in which the main class of words for sensory encoding, is that of ideophones. Semai ideophones convey speakers’ perceptual experiences in semantically detailed ways, with multiple perceptions encoded in one word. This ideophonic vocabulary displays a rich inventory of linguistic iconicity, where related meanings map on to related forms by means of sound symbolic templates. Through motivated form-meaning mappings, speakers make use of analogy to capture parallels across perceptual experiences. Such structural mapping is done both within and across sensory modalities. Focus is given to the sensory domains of color and smell, domains particularly rich in lexical distinctions and in sound symbolic templates to express fine-grained sensory differences. This high level of elaboration within color and smell lexical domains, correlates with speakers salient reference to colour and smell when characterizing and interacting with the environmental world. The last part of this talk will focus on the cross-modal usage of sensory terms. A large portion of the Semai sensory vocabulary can be used to refer to sensory perceptions in multiple modalities, capturing complex sensory events. An overview of the more common modality overlaps and speakers’ similarity judgments of cross-modal perceptions is discussed.

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Mark Dingemanse: Ideophones and the senses: The interplay of language, culture, and the perceptual world in a West-African society

In this talk I look at the language of perception through the prism of ideophones in Siwu, an underdescribed Kwa language spoken in Ghana’s mountainous Volta Region. Data from standardized elicitation tasks will be coupled with an analysis of speech during joint activities (e.g. making gunpowder, producing palm oil) to show that ideophones are a key expressive resource in talking about perception and sensation in Siwu.

In the first part of the talk I will discuss data elicited with the help of perceptual stimuli designed to study the comparative codability of different sensory experiences. Some domains (e.g. touch, taste) are almost exclusively covered by ideophonic vocabulary, while in others (e.g. colour, shape) ideophones are supplemented by other linguistic constructions.

The second part focuses on the ubiquity of ideophones across a wide variety of speech genres, which reflects a concern of Siwu speakers with their perceptions. A video recording of conversations during the making of gunpowder shows that the collaborators calibrate their understanding of processes and technologies not with cold technical terms, but with vivid sensory language. Ideophones evoking visual and tactile perceptions abound in this environment. A contrastive analysis of the use of ideophones in both natural discourse and elicitation tasks throws light on the interplay of language, culture and the perceptual world in Mawu society.

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Olivier le Guen: The Hidden Grammar of Yucatec Maya: Senses, Language and Perception

Despite that fact that all humans potentially have perceptual access to the world and have ways of linguistically expressing these perceptions, the question remains how sensory domains are carved in each language. What are the specific linguistic resources available such that some percepts are ineffable? This paper argues that the productive morphology of Yucatec Maya, a language spoken in Southern Mexico, provides speakers with linguistic resources to talk about specific sensory perceptions. In Yucatec Maya, the lexicon is divided into two classes: a noun class and a verbo-nominal root class. A large portion of verbo-nominal roots can be derived (using reduplication and special suffixes) according to a common template that encodes particular perceptual features of the world (e.g. tak’, ‘adhere(nce)’ becomes tak’-lemak ‘sticky’, chak-tak’-e’en, ‘dirty red’, etc.). Some derivations fit some roots more readily than others according to their semantics, nonetheless these derivations provide a default pattern for speakers to express particular perceptual modalities (namely sight and touch) and specific properties of percepts (mainly agency, completeness, texture, color and spatial distribution). These derivational processes raise questions about the core meaning of the verbo-nominal roots that seem to encode a skeletal concept (e.g. roundedness, piled-upedness), rather than concrete properties (a ball or bulge, a stack or to pile up). This linguistic system has consequences for language-culture interface. Contrary to previous claims, Yucatec Maya suggests that there is no causal relationship between the size of the color or texture lexicon and the specifics of the environment or the material culture.

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Penelope Brown: 'It tastes cold-soft-soft': Cross-modal compounding in Tzeltal perception terms

Although the human perceptual apparatus is biologically given and hence universal, languages differ in how they lexicalize aspects of sensory experience. Within a given language and culture, the distinct sensory modalities are often given differential treatment in ways reflecting culturally-specific ideas about, and uses for, the different senses. This paper reports on the Mayan language Tzeltal, as spoken in Tenejapa in southern Mexico. Drawing on data derived from the responses of 13 Tzeltal consultants to a standardized set of elicitation stimuli for different sensory modalities, and from talk about perceptions in naturally-occurring Tzeltal conversations, I provide an overview of the words and constructions used for describing perceptual qualities in six domains: color, shape, sound, touch, smell, and taste. I then focus on color and taste, two domains where, despite limited sets of basic terms, productive reduplication and compounding processes are used in analogous ways to more finely discriminate sensations. For example, although Tzeltal has only five basic color terms, a number of derived forms specific to color modulate the meanings of the basic terms (e.g., ‘grue’-el-el-tik, ‘white’-lik-an-tik, ‘black’-som-som). Similarly, in the domain of taste there are six basic terms and a more limited set of compounded forms for tastes (e.g., ‘sweet’-pik-pik-tik , ‘cold’-lo’-lo’-tik). In the domains of color and taste, these reduplicated endings are formed from roots with meanings based in other sensory domains; these are cross-modal modifiers. I suggest some ways in which these properties of the Tzeltal language of perception provide insights into Tenejapans’ construction of sensory experience.

Slides for my recent paper 'Ideophones in unexpected places', presented at LDLT2 in London, November 13-14. Though the inquisitive rooster in the title slide may not be looking for them, there are ideophones for just about any salient feature depicted in this scene. But what are people using them for? And what specialized uses may arise out of the core interactional functions of ideophones? Those are the questions addressed in this paper.

Supplementary material can be found on another page. A slightly updated version of the full paper is available here (PDF). Here is how to cite it:

1. Dingemanse, Mark. 2009. 'Ideophones in unexpected places'. In Proceedings of Conference on Language Documentation and Linguistic Theory 2, ed. Peter K. Austin, Oliver Bond, Monik Charette, David Nathan, and Peter Sells, 83-94. London: SOAS.

In their commentary on Evans & Levinson's recent hotly debated Myth of Language Universals paper, Pinker & Jackendoff briefly mention ideophones — and erroneously shelve them away as 'response cries':¹

English, for example, has phenomena similar to Chinese classifiers (e.g., a piece of paper, a stick of wood), Athabaskan verb distinctions (among locative verbs; Levin 1993; Pinker 1989; 2007), ideophones (response cries such as yum, splat, hubba-hubba, pow!; Goffman 1978), and geocentric spatial terms (e.g., north, upstream, crosstown; Li & Gleitman 2002)

It is about time I wrote another installment of misconceptions about ideophones. It seems this error is a particularly easy one to make for speakers of SAE languages. In this post I want to flesh out why this might be so, and explain what's the difference.

Goffman on response cries

So why are ideophones not response cries? Let's have a look at Goffman (1978) first:

We see such 'expression' [i.e. response cries, MD] as a natural overflowing, a flooding up of previously contained feeling, a bursting of normal restraints, a case of being caught off-guard. (p. 800)

A response cry is (if anything is) a ritualized act in the ethological sense of that term. Unable to shape the world the way we want to, we displace our manipulation of it to the verbal channel, displaying evidence of our alignment to the on-going events; the display takes the condensed, truncated form of a discretely-articulated, non-lexicalized expression. (p. 801)

Now Goffman is a little too simplistic here about response cries (also known as interjections) — for they may well be lexicalized expressions and they may well have a communicative function beyond a 'natural overflowing' (Ameka 1992, Kockelman 2003). But that's another issue; my worry here is with the common confusion of ideophones and interjections. Pinker and Jackendoff are not the first to confuse the two. And the two classes are indeed superficially similar in a number of ways: both often have marked phonotactics and both seem somehow tied to the here and now (Ameka 1992:112-113). But the main reason for the confusion lies, I think, in the fact that both are perceived to be 'about' emotions and sensations in one way or another.

Ideophones are not responses

It is in the nature of this 'aboutness' that the distinction between ideophones and interjections can be seen most clearly. Interjections index speaker’s stances to events in the immediate context of the speech event, very much like direct reactions (cf. Goffman's description). I drop a vase and say, 'Oops!'; you pick up the pieces, cut yourself and say, 'Ouch!' Those are prototypical examples of response cries.

Now imagine ideophones being like that. This evokes visions of speakers of ideophonic languages looking at the world in utter bewilderment, emitting response cries at trees shaking in the wind, a closely woven basket, ants swarming on their anthill, a smooth river stone, turtles lumbering across the road, a rough mud wall, flour finely ground, a person sitting timidly. Kpakpakpakpakpa! Sinisinisini! Ɣeee! Pɔlɔpɔlɔpɔlɔ! Kpokolo-kpokolo! Wòsòròò! Dɛkpɛrɛɛɛɛ! Kpììì! (All of these, incidentally, are proper Siwu ideophones.) What a rich mental life must these natives have!²

Do I need to spell it out? That is not what speakers do with ideophones. I need scarcely remind you that some languages have ideophone inventories going into the thousands . What on earth would people need so many response cries for?

Perhaps the difference between interjections and ideophones is best explained in semiotic terms. In a Peircean framework, interjections have a strong indexical component; they are literally rooted in the here and now, associated to it by contiguity (Kockelman 2003). Ideophones do not index events so much as recreate them through depiction (various types of form-meaning mappings); so their mode of signification is more iconic.

Interactional functions of ideophones

Fine, you say, so they are different. But what do speakers do with these words, if they're not response cries? A core interactional function of ideophones is the creation of heightened interlocutory involvement (Nuckolls 1992; Kunene 2001; Dingemanse 2009). As marked words, ideophones set themselves apart from the surrounding linguistic material; as a likely locus of performative foregrounding, they stimulate emotional engagement; as depictions, they supply vivid imagery and recreate sensory events in sound, inviting the listener onto the scene as it were. (Compare the use of iconic gestures by a good narrator.) As Siwu speakers themselves put it, ‘you use these words to capture the attention’, ‘we use them to guide the mind to more understanding’, and ‘they make stories more interesting.’

Moreover, ideophones are also used during joint activities (e.g. the making of gunpowder, pressing palm oil, building mud houses), where their highly specific, sensory semantics allows collaborators to quickly and precisely converge on a shared understanding of the processes and of the state of the materials they are handling. In this context, ideophones are used as a 'precision tool' as it were. (Imagine using response cries for this. 'Ouch! Now you hit my hand. Move back. Yuck! You made it all pulpy! Oops! I dropped the hammer' — Nah, it wouldn't work.) Ideophones, in short, are a vivid and versatile communicative workhorse, well integrated in everyday social interaction and in the linguistic system.

If you're interested to learn more about how ideophones are actually used in everyday discourse, feel free to check out my paper on 'ideophones in unexpected places' or come and hear me talk about the use of ideophones in joint activities at the AAA meeting in Philadelphia in a couple of weeks.

References

1. Ameka, Felix K. 1992. Interjections: The Universal Yet Neglected Part of Speech. Journal of Pragmatics 18, no. 2-3: 101-118.
2. Dingemanse, Mark. 2009. Ideophones in unexpected places. In Proceedings of Conference on Language Documentation and Linguistic Theory 2, ed. Peter K. Austin, Oliver Bond, Monik Charette, David Nathan, and Peter Sells, 83-97. London: SOAS, November 14.   (PDF)
3. Evans, Nicholas, and Stephen C. Levinson. 2009. The Myth of Language Universals: Language diversity and its importance for cognitive science. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 32: 429-492.
4. Goffman, Erving. 1978. Response Cries. Language 54, no. 4 (December): 787-815.
5. Kockelman, Paul. 2003. The Meanings of Interjections in Q’eqchi’ Maya: From Emotive Reaction to Social and Discursive Action. Current Anthropology 44, no. 4: 467-497.
6. Kunene, Daniel P. 2001. Speaking the Act: The Ideophone as a Linguistic Rebel. In Ideophones, ed. F. K. Erhard Voeltz and Christa Kilian-Hatz, 183-191. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
7. Lévy-Bruhl, Lucien. 1910. Les Fonctions Mentales dans les Sociétés Inférieures. Paris.
8. Nuckolls, Janis B. 1992. Sound Symbolic Involvement. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 2, no. 1: 51-80.
9. Pinker, Steven, and Ray Jackendoff. 2009. The reality of a universal language faculty. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 32: 465-466. doi:10.1017/S0140525X09990720.  
10. Samarin, William J. 1971. Survey of Bantu ideophones. African Language Studies 12: 130-168.

Footnotes

1. N.B. This is not intended as a response to Pinker & Jackendoff's actual point; I'm just taking the opportunity to rectify a common mistake. They would no doubt say that whatever you want to call them, English also has a couple of such words (and I would largely agree, but see point 2 here). As to their actual point on the need to recognize 'universal grammar' (UG), I find it not more convincing than two years ago, when I made some observations on the "grammar of the gaps".
2. Actually, this approximates the ideas of Lévy-Bruhl about ideophones. Just check the title of his 1910 work to see why that it is not exactly a good thing.

LDLT2, the 2nd conference on Language Documentation and Linguistic Theory, will be held in London this weekend. I'm looking forward to plenaries by Larry Hyman and Tania Kuteva, and to many other interesting talks.

The very last slot on Saturday (17:00-17:30) is reserved for a paper titled 'Ideophones in unexpected places' by yours truly. I am still considering my options for keeping the audience awake, but meanwhile, you can download a short version of the paper or have a peek at the accompanying multimedia (audio samples of two dirges).

In a nutshell, the argument I'm going to make is that ideophones occur across a wide range of discourse genres, some of them well beyond narrative contexts of use. Taking two ‘unexpected’ genres, funeral dirges and greetings, I show that the use of ideophones in each of them is distinctive while at the same time building on core interactional functions of ideophones in everyday conversational discourse.

1. Dingemanse, Mark. 2009. 'Ideophones in unexpected places'. Paper for LDLT2, SOAS, London, November.

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 on the image. The instructions below are geared towards Windows users, although Mac users can also benefit from ELAN-exported .srt subtitles using VLC Media Player or Quicktime + Perian.

What you need

1. The latest version of ELAN, which has improved support for subtitles
2. Vobsub, a tool that overlays subtitles on videos. (I'm told Perian does the same for Quicktime on Mac.)
3. SubResync (included in Vobsub) for editing subtitle settings (changing fonts, editing size and placement).¹

In what follows I am presuming that you have installed these three tools. Not strictly necessary, but recommended for testing is VLC Media Player, an open source multimedia player that handles subtitles quite well.

Extract media clip

First we'll want to extract a media clip. Select the stretch of video you want and make a new annotation (I always have a tier 'selections' for this kind of annotations). Note down the begin and end timecodes and extract the clip with your favourite video editing application. If you have M2-edit-cl, ELAN can do the job for you: choose File > Export as > Media Clip. (If you don't have M2-edit-cl or there is a configuration error, this option will be greyed out.) Save the clip in a place where you can easily find it. Let's say it's called gunpowder.mpeg.

Export the subtitles

Then we want the subtitles. Maintain the selection of your annotation and take the following steps:

1. Choose File > Export as > Subtitles text...
2. In the 'select tiers' box, check the tiers you want to use as subtitles.
3. Under 'Output options', check the box 'Restrict to selected time interval'.
4. Uncheck 'add master media time offset to annotation times'.
5. Click OK.
6. In the following window, navigate to the folder where you saved the media clip. Give the subtitle file the same filename as your media clip, except for the extension. In my example, this would be gunpowder.srt.
   N.B. It is essential that your subtitles and your media clip reside in the same folder and have the same filename.
7. Last step: select the encoding. UTF-8 will do in most cases, but for special characters you'll have to change this later. If your annotations have no special characters you may also choose ISO-8859-1.
8. Now click 'Save'.

That's it, you're done.

Okay, now you have a media clip and a subtitles file. If Vobsub is installed correctly, it will automatically display the subtitles in any application that uses the Windows Media framework. This means you'll see subtitles overlayed on your video image in ELAN and in multimedia players like VLC, Winamp, and Windows Media Player. That's a good start and it may be enough for most of you.

But what about special characters?

If you use special characters in your annotations (e.g. IPA symbols), you may find that they go awry. There are two reasons for this. First of all, Vobsub expects a slightly different encoding, namely the Windows version of UTF-16. Secondly, Vobsub uses Arial as its default font, and that font doesn't include all special characters.

Fixing the first one is easy.² Go to your subtitles file in Windows Explorer, right-click and select 'Open with...'. In the list, select 'Notepad'. Now Notepad, a simple text editor, has opened your .srt file and you can see how simple it is (just timecodes and text, really). In Notepad, go to File > Save as... . Don't change the filename, but do change the Encoding. It probably says 'UTF-8' (since that's what we chose when we exported the subtitles in ELAN). Change the encoding to 'Unicode' and save the file. Yes, you want to overwrite it.

Change to a Unicode-compliant font

For the second problem, there are multiple solutions. One is to change the font online in Vobsub. In your system tray (near the clock) you will see a green arrow indicating Vobsub activity while playing subtitled video files. Right-click this and select 'Direct Vobsub'. This will bring up a window where you can change the font (under 'Text Settings'). Change it to Arial Unicode MS, Lucida Sans Unicode, or any other Unicode compliant font of your choice. If the characters still don't display correctly, Note that you still need the first step (changing the encoding).

A second, more permanent way around it is to change the font in the subtitle file. This can be done with SubResync, the small tool that's installed with Vobsub. The nice thing about this tool is that it gives you a preview of the subtitles as they will be rendered. Open your .srt file in SubResync. You'll see a list of the subtitles and their timing. Double-click the first line to bring up the 'Subtitle Style Editor'. Here, you can select another font and even change the styling (outline, shadow) and placement of the text. Click 'Save as...' to save your changes. This will generate a .srt.style file (in our example, gunpowder.srt.style) which is used by Vobsub to read the settings. And presto! you've got your styled subtitles including special characters.³

Bonus tip: You only need to make these customizations once. If you like them, save a copy of the .srt.style file someplace you can easily find it. Whenever you need that style, you can just make another copy and change its name to that of the video clip you want to use it with (e.g. palmoil.srt.style instead of gunpowder.srt.style).

Questions?

Feel free to leave a comment if you have any questions. If you want to know how to embed subtitles in your actual video file ('hardcoded subtitles'), here is an excellent tutorial by Robin Dittwald.

Footnotes

1. If you have Internet Explorer 8 on your system, this unaccountably breaks SubResync. Here is a fix.
2. I suppose it can even be fixed on the ELAN side by providing another encoding option.
3. More advanced users may want to use SSA instead of SRT to format their subtitles. SubResync can easily save SRT as SSA and Vobsub plays with both. It seems you can do more advanced formatting with SSA.