Publications

Abstract

As lexicalized depictions, ideophones (also known as expressives or mimetics) differ fundamentally from other words both in the kinds of meanings they represent and the ways in which they represent them. This can make them difficult to capture using traditional methods for language description and documentation. We review some of the new and experimental techniques that have been used to elicit, describe, and analyse ideophones, and discuss how these can be used to address some of the unique challenges ideophones pose. They include stimulus-based elicitation; multimodal folk definitions; hybrid modes of analysis (combining images and text); and new ways of compiling and presenting multimodal ideophone corpora. We also review psycholinguistic methods for exploring the sensory properties of words and the organisation of the lexicon, such as sensory ratings and similarity judgment tasks, and discuss how these can contribute to our understanding of ideophone lexicons. Crucial to our approach is the combination of insights from multiple sources, the exploitation of polysemiotic resources (combining multiple modes of meaning making), and the integration of etic and emic perspectives. The discussion is structured around three key challenges: collecting ideophones, unravelling their slippery semantics, and representing them in ways that do justice to their special semiotic properties. The days when ideophones were just footnotes in grammars are long past. With more and more researchers working to document ideophones in languages around the world, and increasing interest in iconicity from across the language sciences, now is an excellent time to rethink the toolkit of documentary linguistics to make sure it can optimally deal with language in all its semiotic diversity.

Abstract

Interest in iconicity (the resemblance-based mapping between aspects of form and meaning) is in the midst of a resurgence, and a prominent focus in the field has been the possible role of iconicity in language learning. Here we critically review theory and empirical findings in this domain. We distinguish local learning enhancement (where the iconicity of certain lexical items influences the learning of those items) and general learning enhancement (where the iconicity of certain lexical items influences the later learning of non-iconic items or systems). We find that evidence for local learning enhancement is quite strong, though not as clear cut as it is often described and based on a limited sample of languages. Despite common claims about broader facilitatory effects of iconicity on learning, we find that current evidence for general learning enhancement is lacking. We suggest a number of productive avenues for future research and specify what types of evidence would be required to show a role for iconicity in general learning enhancement. We also review evidence for functions of iconicity beyond word learning: iconicity enhances comprehension by providing complementary representations, supports communication about sensory imagery, and expresses affective meanings. Even if learning benefits may be modest or cross-linguistically varied, on balance, iconicity emerges as a vital aspect of language.

Abstract

Silent gestures consist of complex multi-articulatory movements but are now primarily studied through categorical coding of the referential gesture content. The relation of categorical linguistic content with continuous kinematics is therefore poorly understood. Here, we reanalyzed the video data from a gestural evolution experiment (Motamedi, Schouwstra, Smith, Culbertson, & Kirby, 2019), which showed increases in the systematicity of gesture content over time. We applied computer vision techniques to quantify the kinematics of the original data. Our kinematic analyses demonstrated that gestures become more efficient and less complex in their kinematics over generations of learners. We further detect the systematicity of gesture form on the level of thegesture kinematic interrelations, which directly scales with the systematicity obtained on semantic coding of the gestures. Thus, from continuous kinematics alone, we can tap into linguistic aspects that were previously only approachable through categorical coding of meaning. Finally, going beyond issues of systematicity, we show how unique gesture kinematic dialects emerged over generations as isolated chains of participants gradually diverged over iterations from other chains. We, thereby, conclude that gestures can come to embody the linguistic system at the level of interrelationships between communicative tokens, which should calibrate our theories about form and linguistic content.