Welcome to my home page. I do fieldwork-based research in Ghana, West-Africa, contributing to the Human Sociality and System of Language Use project affiliated with the Language and Cognition group.

My PhD project has been on the meaning and use of ideophones in Siwu. Ideophones are marked words that vividly depict sensory events, like English kerplop or Siwu mukumuku 'mouth movements of a toothless person eating', nyɛnɛnɛ 'sensation of shivering' , and wiriwiri 'small things dispersed in great numbers'. Siwu (Akpafu-Lolobi) is an underdocumented Ghana-Togo Mountain language spoken by approximately ten thousand Mawu people in Kawu, north of Hohoe in Ghana's Volta Region. (More information on the fieldsite.)

My research interests include the interplay of language, culture, cognition, and the perceptual world. I'm also interested in evolutionary approaches to language in its broader context. Apart from the HSSLU project I'm currently involved in the following projects: Language of Perception; Ideophones and Sound-Symbolism; and Synaesthesia across cultures.

Head over to my weblog The Ideophone for some light reading on African languages, sound symbolism, and anthropological linguistics.