These two types of motivation in language are easily confused and conflated, but they are fundamentally very different. This post explains why.
It will come as no surprise to semioticians that the first word my son showed some degree of understanding was an index, and the second an icon. And it was no surprise to me that his understanding of the icon, although coming second, was much more impressive and exciting.
Our new paper on unpicking the iconicity of ideophones is out in Open Mind!
You can find and cite the paper here:
Punselie, S., McLean, B., & Dingemanse, M. (2024). The Anatomy of Iconicity: Cumulative Structural Analogies Underlie Objective and Subjective Measures of Iconicity. Open Mind, 8, 1191-1212.
2024 was wonderful as it was the year I became a mum, but in 2025 I’m looking forward to getting some of the old me back!
Our new paper on phonosemantic maps for exploring iconic associations is out in the JASA special issue on Iconicity and Sound Symbolism 🎉
This paper is the culmination of a longstanding collaborative effort led by Kimi Akita from Nagoya University. We started the phonosemantic maps with data from Japanese and English (see here), then teamed up with Jiyeon Park and Arthur Lewis Thompson to add data from Korean and Mandarin Chinese respectively😄 It was a really fun collaborative project and it’s great to see the results finally come to fruition!
Easily the best train journey I have ever taken in my life.
Norway has been on my travel list since we moved to Sweden in 2020, especially since Oslo is only a 5 hour train journey away from Stockholm! So so glad we finally got the chance to do it on our babymoon, as this is likely the last longer trip we’ll be taking for a little while!
A quick blog post about my experiences using R Shiny and Google Sheets (free) to conduct online linguistic research.
Back in 2021, I taught a course on ‘Doing Linguistic Research with R’. As part of the course the students had to conduct their own linguistic research and analyse the results in R, and I figured out a way that they could use R Shiny to design simple linguistic surveys and collect linguistic data from online participants.
Mark Dingemanse and I just released a preprint on methods for studying my favourite type of words, ideophones!
Releasing a preprint of mine and Mark’s upcoming chapter in the book Capturing Expressivity by Oxford University Press, which should be out sometime later this year hopefully. We talk about methods for conducting documentary linguistic research on ideophones, one of the absolute best things you could be doing with your life!
A cool new phenomenon in the land of Japanese ideophones!
Today I wanted to write about this cool new phenomenon that is becoming increasingly common in Japanese, which involves the compounding of pairs of ideophones, or of single ideophones with words from other classes. (Ideophones are like onomatopoeia on crack, see Dingemanse 2021 for a full definition)
Kimi Akita and Keiko Murasagi have written a very interesting paper on it in the journal Morphology, see the citation below:
Akita, K., Murasugi, K. Binomial adjective doublets in Japanese: A Relational Morphology account. Morphology 32, 281–297 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11525-022-09395-z
Writing this because hormones are evil, biology doesn’t care about you, and I want an objective record of the pros and cons of this in case I ever think about trying it again!
If you’re a human with hormones, at some point in your life you may find yourself wanting babies, which may also lead to you wanting to get pregnant. One thing you have to remember here is that your body and biology don’t give a shit about you! They are just trying to repopulate! So if you’re thinking about getting pregnant, and you care about you, read this first so you know what you’re getting yourself into (speaking to my future self here)! Also good reading/warning for partners of people who want to get pregnant.
Some thoughts on mechanisms of iconicity, inspired by Jarkko Keränen’s excellent recent article in Cognitive Linguistics!
Starting with the article inspiring this post, you can find (and cite) it below:
Keränen, J. (2023). Cross-modal iconicity and indexicality in the production of lexical sensory and emotional signs in Finnish Sign Language. Cognitive Linguistics 34(3-4): 333-369. doi.org/10.1515/cog-2022-0070