✨New Preprint - a multi-methods toolkit for documentary research on ideophones!

✨New Preprint - a multi-methods toolkit for documentary research on ideophones!

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, 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!

So you're thinking about getting pregnant...

So you're thinking about getting pregnant...

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.

Binomial ideophones in Japanese

Binomial ideophones in Japanese

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

Rethinking mechanisms of iconicity - proprioception

Rethinking mechanisms of iconicity - proprioception

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

Poster presentation in Birmingham, From icon to abstraction

Poster presentation in Birmingham, From icon to abstraction

Just finished presenting a poster in the ‘From icon to abstraction, how iconicity shapes the lexicon’ workshop in Birmingham. Had a great time talking about iconicity with likeminded people!

You can read more about the fantastic workshop here, and find the abstract for my poster, which I worked on together with John Huisman, Arthur Thompson, and Youngah Do, below:

✨New paper - What do we really measure when we measure iconicity?

✨New paper - What do we really measure when we measure iconicity?

The first paper from my thesis is now out in Language & Cognition!🎉

You can find (and cite) it below:

McLean, B., Dunn, M., & Dingemanse, M. (2023). Two measures are better than one: Combining iconicity ratings and guessing experiments for a more nuanced picture of iconicity in the lexicon. Language and Cognition, 1-24. doi:10.1017/langcog.2023.9

A day on the Jacobite, aka the Hogwarts train!

A day on the Jacobite, aka the Hogwarts train!

Dreamed of taking this train trip since I was a kid, and what could be more romantic than taking it on our honeymoon 💕 Only thing I didn’t plan for was the Scottish weather…

Since taking this trip, I’ve read in the news that the Jacobite train service is now suspended (as of March 2024). So I’m feeling very grateful that we did it already in 2022! Read below for tips and a summary of our trip, fingers crossed the train will run again someday soon! 🤞🤞🤞

Pagination