Sounding out ideas on language, interaction, and iconicity

Mark Dingemanse

Ideophones, like so many things in life, are easy to identify but hard to define. Many researchers have grumbled about the shortcomings of Doke’s descriptive characterization of ideophones (see discussion here), but few have attempted to formulate an alternative. For better or worse, I did,

 1

but it took me a few iterations to arrive at something that I felt worked well enough to be useful in cross-linguistic research.

What’s wrong with “vivid”? The evolution of a definition

One of the benefits of today’s preprint culture is that it is possible to provide constructive critique of pending work before it is out, thereby enabling a rapid cycle of revision before things are committed to print. I have myself benefited from comments on preprints, and have acknowledged such public pre-publication reviews in several of my papers. The below remarks are shared in that spirit.

Pitfalls of fossil-thinking I

Over two years ago I wrote about the unstoppable tide of uninformation that follows the rise of large language models. With ChatGPT and other models bringing large-scale text generation to the masses, I want to register a dystopian prediction.

Monetizing uninformation: a prediction

Writing is thinking. The writing process is the most neglected part of our job. We spend millions on fancy equipment and uncountable hours on training for using this or that toolkit. Yet we assume the BA-level academic writing course we once followed is sufficient; the rest we’ll just learn on the job and hopefully soon we’ll automate away with LLMs. It is all formulaic anyway.

Like anyone active in the space of LLMs and generative AI, I get a growing amount of invitations to speak at conferences and colloquia on something or other LLM-related. A subset of these invites is about the relation between LLMs and academic writing. Recently I had the occasion to respond to such an invite.

Find your own voice: against LLM slop in academic writing

With Times Higher Education writing about citation gaming and hyperprolific authors (surely not unrelated) I hope we can save some of our attention for what Uta Frith and others have called slow science.

Team science is slow science

The closing paragraphs of my previous post were cited in several places (e.g. Culture Making, Far Outliers) as evidence of a cultural revival. Although I feel it is really too soon to say whether this is the case, I’m glad to report that the dirges that we recorded in Akpafu-Todzi are in wide circulation now and are even being played during funerals, to great acclaim.

A cultural revival?

The last time I blindly accepted an invitation to speak was in 2012, when I was invited to an exclusive round table on the future of linguistics at a renowned research institute. As a fresh postdoc I was honoured and bedazzled. When the programme was circulated, I got a friendly email from a colleague asking me how I’d ended up there, and whether I thought the future of linguistics was to be all male.

How to avoid all-male panels (manels)

Today’s dish of expressive vocabulary is particularly tasty. It comes from G|ui, a Khoisan language of Botswana.

 1

To Africanists, expressive words from Khoisan languages are of special interest because Khoisan has been claimed on various occasions to lack ideophones, otherwise thought to be one of those linguistic traits that characterize Africa as a linguistic area (Meeussen 1975:3,

 2

Heine &amp;

Fresh wild melon and meat full of gravy: food texture verbs in G|ui (Khoisan)

The most common use of the term ‘ideophone’ today is as a term for a lexical or grammatical category of words. This use goes back to C.M. Doke, who introduced the term in this sense for the description of Bantu languages. However, Doke did not coin the term. Who did, and how was it used before Doke?

(

 Note:

Looking for a modern definition of the term? Check out “

 ‘Ideophone’ as a comparative concept

” (2019). That chapter supplies the following:

 Ideophone

*. Member of an open lexical class of marked words that depict sensory imagery.* It provides evidence and arguments for the cross-linguistic utility of this definition.) A common term for expressive vocabulary in African linguistics is ‘ideophone’.

On the history of the term ‘ideophone’

Interjections are, in Felix Ameka’s memorable formulation, “the universal yet neglected part of speech” (1992). They are rarely the subject of historical, typological or comparative research in linguistics, and as Aimée Lahaussois has shown (2016), they are notably underrepresented in descriptive grammars. As grammars are the main source of data for typologists, this is of course a perfect example of a self-reinforcing feedback loop.

How should descriptive grammars cover interjections?

A lot of our recent work revolves around working with conversational data, and one thing that’s struck me is that there are no easy ways to create compelling visualizations of conversation as it unfolds over time. The most common form seems to be pixelated screenshots of transcription software not made for this purpose.

Playing with R: unrolling conversation

After much postponement, writing the final report for my NWO Veni grant (2015-2018) turned out to be an unexpected pleasure. It made me realise a couple of things — key among them the role of serendipity in shaping fundamental research. The project was called “Towards a science of linguistic depiction”. Looking at the publications that came out of it and at imperfect indicators like citations, it’s made some useful contributions.

The role of serendipity in shaping fundamental research

DALL-E, a new image generation system by OpenAI, does impressive visualizations of biased datasets. I like how the first example that OpenAI used to present DALL-E to the world is a meme-like koala dunking a baseball leading into an array of old white men — representing at one blow the past and future of representation and generation.

Deep learning, image generation, and the rise of bias automation machines

Some years ago I was following a course by Maarten Kossmann on Tuareg (Tamasheq, Tamajeq, Tamahaq). It was thoroughly enjoyable. After the first lecture we were all alotted a letter of the great

 Dictionnaire Touareg — Français


 1

(a consonant, obviously), and for the remainder of the course these 15 to 40 dictionary pages would form the basis for a number of excercises in the weeks to follow. It was an interesting method;

Expressive verbs in Tuareg

I have been blogging at

 The Ideophone

since 2007, and not all of it has been as ephemeral as my PhD promotor once feared. My short post documenting the etymology of Zotero is apparently the only scientific documentation of where Zotero’s name comes from; it has served as a source in Wikipedia for ages and has received over 15 scholarly citations.

Scholarly blogging, now with DOIs

Large language models make it entirely trivial to generate endless amounts of seemingly plausible text. There’s no need to be cynical to see the virtual inevitability of unending waves of algorithmically tuned AI-generated uninformation: the market forces are in place and they will be relentless.

Large language models and the unstoppable tide of uninformation

PLOS ONE notoriously and astonishingly does not have a proofs stage: authors do not get to see how their work is typeset until the very day it appears. Worse, they have a policy of only correcting formatting errors that they themselves introduce by issuing a formal correction notice — a heavyhanded method that most other journals use only for serious errors of fact or process. Unnecessary corrections hurt authors.

Note: I prepared this posting in August 2015, when PLOS ONE was due to publish a paper by us and I wanted to make sure they’d avoid the stupid typesetting errors they made in our 2013 paper. I used the numbers to convince them to show us proofs beforehand.

Why PLOS ONE needs page proofs

Travel journals provide some of the first written sources on Akpafu. I have previously posted an excerpt from a 1887 journal by David Asante. This here is an excerpt from a similar journey two years later. The whole journey took three months, but this excerpt relates only a trip to two Akpafu towns on 17-18 December 1889.

A visit to Akpafu by Nicolas Clerk, 1889

Sketches, visualizations and other forms of externalizing cognition play a prominent role in the work of just about any scientist. It’s why we love using blackboards, whiteboards, notebooks and scraps of paper. Many folks who had the privilege of working the late Pieter Muysken fondly remember his habit of grabbing any old piece of paper that came to hand, scribbling while talking, then handing it over to you.

Thinking visually with Remarkable

The oldest written fragments of Siwu found so far come from Rudolph Plehn (1898).

 1

Besides some words and phrases (edited and published in 1899 by his friend Seidel), Plehn took down two lines of songs. To one of them I devoted a post some time ago.

Bingo! Refinding the oldest specimen of Siwu

There is a minor industry in speech science and NLP devoted to detecting and removing disfluencies. In some of our recent work we’re showing that treating talk as sanitised text can adversely impact voice user interfaces. However, this is still a minority position. Googlers Dan Walker and Dan Liebling represent the mainstream view well in this blog post:  Fair enough, you might say.

Sawing off the branch you’re sitting on

Language makes us human. But there is an interesting asymmetry in our willingness to ascribe linguistic capacities to non-humans: animals are seen as having none, whereas computers may well master it according to many. What curious conception of language makes this asymmetry possible? And what do Descartes and Turing have to do with it? Notes from a new essay about language between animals and computers.

Language is what makes us human: one of those things, perhaps

 the

one thing, that sets us apart. But there is an interesting asymmetry in our willingness to ascribe linguistic capacities to non-humans: animals tend to be seen as having none, whereas computers are increasingly thought to have mastered language. This asymmetry is the focus of a recent essay I co-authored with a range of people, led by Marlou Rasenberg.

Language between animals and computers

Few historical maps of Ghana’s Volta and Oti regions have been invested with so much political and sociohistorical meaning as Hans Gruner’s 1913 map of the Togo Plateau. Gruner, stationed for over twenty years at Misahöhe in present-day Togo, was a long-time colonial administrator known for his ethnographical and historical knowledge of the area.

The Gruner Map: a 1913 map of the Togo Plateau in present-day Ghana

This is a the second part in a two part series of peer commentary on a recent preprint. The first part is here. I ended that post by noting I wasn’t sure all preprint authors were aware of the public nature of the preprint. I am now assured they are, and have heard from the senior author that they are working on a revised version.

Pitfalls of fossil-thinking part II

Clark &amp; Fischer propose that people see social robots as interactive depictions and that this explains some aspects of people’s behaviour towards them. We agree with C&amp;F’s conclusion that we don’t need a novel ontological category for these social artefacts and that they can be seen as intersecting with a lineage of depictions from Michelangelo’s David to Mattel’s talking barbie doll. We have two constructive contributions to make.

How robots become social: A comment on Clark &amp; Fischer

The construction of gothic cathedrals like Chartres was governed not by blueprints but by “talk, tradition, and templates” — at least that is what Turnbull has compellingly argued. When you come across such a neatly alliterative triad, there are two ways you can go. You can adopt the terms in an unexamined way and rely on their alliterative power.

Reading Suchman’s classic

 Human-machine reconfigurations: plans and situated actions

, I am impressed by her description David Turnbull’s work on the construction of gothic cathedrals. In brief, the intriguing point is that no blueprints or technical drawings or even sketches are known to have existed for any of the early modern gothic cathedrals, like that of Chartres.

Talk, tradition, templates: a meta-note on building scientific arguments

One of the key tasks scientists need to master is how to manage bibliographic information: collecting relevant literature, building a digital library, and handling citations and bibliographies during writing. This tutorial introduces Zotero (www.zotero.org), an easy to use reference management tool made by scholars for scholars. The tutorial covers the basics of using Zotero for collecting, organizing, citing and sharing research.

Slides for a hands-on Zotero workshop

A preprint claims that “ideas from theoretical linguistics have played no role in [NLP]”. Outside the confines of Chomskyan linguistics folks have long been working on  incorporating storage, retrieval, gating and attention in theories of language, with direct relevance to computational models. The only way to give any content to the claim is by giving the notion “theoretical linguistics” the narrowest conceivable reading.

This Lingbuzz preprint by Baroni is a nice read if you’re interested in linguistically oriented deep net analysis. I did feel it’s a bit hampered by the near-exclusive equation of linguistic theory with generative/Chomskyan aps.

Linguistic roots of connectionism

There is a considerable halo-effect attached to JIFs, whereby an article that ends up in a high IF journal (whether by sheer brilliance or simply knowing the right editor, or both) is treated, unread, with a level of veneration normally reserved for Wunderkinder. Usually this is done by people totally oblivious to network effects, gatekeeping and institutional biases.

I’ve been caught up in a few debates recently about

 Recognition and Rewards

, a series of initiatives in the Netherlands to diversify the ways in which we recognize and reward talent in academia. One flashpoint was the publication of an open letter signed by ~170 senior scientists (mostly from medical and engineering professions), itself written in response to two developments.

Why article-level metrics are better than JIF if you value talent over privilege

Wikidata is an ambitious enterprise, but social ontologies are never language-agnostic — so the project risks perpetuating rather than transcending the worldviews most prevalent in current Wikipedia databases, which means broadly speaking global north, Anglo, western, white cishet male worldviews. I think Wikidata is perhaps promising for brute physical facts like the periodic table and biochemistry.

TL;DR

Wikidata is an ambitious enterprise, but social ontologies are never language-agnostic — so the project risks perpetuating rather than transcending the worldviews most prevalent in current Wikipedia databases, which means broadly speaking global north, Anglo, western, white cishet male worldviews. I think Wikidata is perhaps promising for brute physical facts like the periodic table and biochemistry.

Concrete reasons to be skeptical about an ‘Abstract Wikipedia’

I note with sadness that William J. Samarin has passed away in Toronto on January 16, 2020 at the age of 93. An all too short obituary notes that he was “known for his work on the language of religion and on two Central African languages: Sango and Gbeya”.  In linguistics, Samarin was of course also known for his extensive work on ideophones, playful and evocative words with sensory meanings.

Farewell, Mr. Ideophone: William J. Samarin (1926-2020)

Academia.edu takes your academic work and puts it behind a privacy-defying signup form, laces it with ads, botches the metadata, and tries to appease you by offering stats and social ranking that promote constant comparison. What’s not to like?

A while back some low quality citations started showing up on Google Scholar. They had titles like “CHAPTER 2 draft — email xyz@ab.edu” and it was hard find actual bibliographic metadata. Google Scholar seemed to have scraped random PDFs uploaded on Academia.edu and decided it was worth counting the citations in them even in the absence of proper metadata.

How Academia.edu promotes poor metadata and plays to our vanity

I have always had a fondness for things considered marginal in linguistics. The tide may be turning for at least some marginalia: work on ideophones is clearly on the rise, and initiatives such as Martina Wiltschko’s Eh lab at UBC and a new nonlexical vocalizations project at Linköping University show there is significant interest in this area.

New!

Some of this is now published here (open access, free for all!): Dingemanse, Mark. 2020.

What is ‘non-lexical’? Notes on non-lexical vocalisations, II

I have always had a fondness for things considered marginal in linguistics. The tide may be turning for at least some marginalia: work on ideophones is clearly on the rise, and initiatives such as Martina Wiltschko’s Eh lab at UBC and a new nonlexical vocalizations project at Linköping University show there is significant interest in this area. Part I from my notes on a workshop on ‘Ideophones and non-lexical vocalizations’.

Last week I was happy to present my work at a workshop on

 Ideophones and nonlexical vocalisations

in Linköping, Sweden, organised by Leelo Keevallik and Emily Hofstetter. This was the kick-off for a new project on “Non-lexical vocalisations”. It was my first time in Linköping and it was great getting to know the vibrant community of interaction researchers from across departments.

A variety of vocal depictions: Notes on non-lexical vocalisations, I

This is the first ever published account of a visit to Akpafu. It was written down by David Asante, a Twi pastor who travelled throughout today’s Volta Region in the company of some white missionaries. The journey took place in January 1887; the date of the visit to Akpafu was January 25th, 1887.

A visit to Akpafu by David Asante, 1887

Words evolve not as blobs of ink on paper but in face to face interaction. The nature of language as fundamentally interactive and multimodal is shown by the study of ideophones, vivid sensory words that thrive in conversations around the world. The ways in which these “Lautbilder” enable precise communication about sensory knowledge has now for the first time been studied in detail.

Words   Few professions should be more familiar with the nature of words than academia. Words are the currency of our trade. They record our cumulative progress and they measure our productivity as we disperse our ideas through articles and books. How easy is it to fall in love with the printed word, black symbols on a white page, tidy spaces separating units of thought like stars dotting the skies of conceptual clarity!

How to paint with language

It’s easy to forget amidst a rising tide of synthetic text, but language is not actually about strings of words, and language scientists would do well not to chain themselves to models that presume so. For apt and timely commentary we turn to Bronislaw Malinowski who wrote:  In follow-up work, Malinowski has critiqued the unexamined use of decontextualised strings of words as a proxy for Meaning:  Malinowski did not write this on his substack,

Malinowski (1922) on Large Language Models

Lezenswaardig: een groep jonge medici ageert tegen de marketing-wedstrijd waarin volgens hen narratieve CVs in kunnen ontaarden — de nieuwste bijdrage aan het Erkennen &amp; Waarderen-debat. Maar niets is wat het lijkt. Over evidence-based CVs, kwaliteit &amp; kwantificatie.

Eerst dit: de brief benoemt het risico dat je met narratieve CVs een soort competitie krijgt tussen verhalen.

Van betekenisloze getallen naar een evidence-based CV

I have other things to do but one day I’ll enlarge on the insidious effects of elevating this cursed little histogram of “Research output per year” as the single most important bit of information about academics at thousands of universities that use Elsevier Pure. Consider this mini-rant my notes for that occasion. Most importantly, we DO NOT write per year. Our careers are too diverse and precarious to measure output that way.

A rant about Elsevier Pure

Will synthetic text generators usher in a new age of creative thinking? The remarkable fluency of large language models may make them interesting tools for rapidly exploring semantic and stylistic spaces, yet the deceptive ease with which they generate output also provides countless new ways of appropriating ideas and erasing authorship.

Human creativity in the age of text generators

Magritte’s best known work by far is of course his drawing of a pipe with the text

 Ceci n’est pas une pipe

. He made several versions over the years, but the work originated in 1928 or 1929. The title Magritte gave to this painting is

 La trahison des images

— the treachery of images.

Magritte on Words and Images (PDF)

Having been a small and quite isolated language for centuries, Siwu was relatively late to attract attention from outsiders. Europeans in search for gold to buy and people to enslave for the most part stayed near the coast.

‘Remnants of some ancient tribal idiom’: deciphering the oldest Siwu to appear in print

One of my projects here at The Ideophone has been to track down early sources on ideophonic phenomena. For example, I have suggested that we may call the 1850’s the decade of the discovery of ideophones in African linguistics. But we can push back the linguistic discovery of ideophones a little further by looking to other traditions.

Aduerbia sonus: Ideophones in two 17th century grammars of Japanese

Zotero takes it name from an Albanian verb minus some morphology.

If you’ve read yesterday’s post (Zotero, an Endnote alternative) or come across Zotero elsewhere, you may have been wondering about its name.

The etymology of Zotero

Featured philologist of today is Joh. Bernhard Schlegel, for providing us with precious data on ideophones (expressives) in nineteenth-century Ewe, a Kwa language of southeastern Ghana.

This is the first post in a series. Featured philologist of today is Joh. Bernhard Schlegel, for providing us with precious data on ideophones (expressives) in nineteenth-century Ewe, a Kwa language of southeastern Ghana. But since this is the first post on ideophones here, let’s first try to answer the obvious question: what are ideophones, anyway?

Early sources on African ideophones, part I: Schlegel on Ewe, 1857

Sigismund Wilhelm Koelle is one of the founding fathers of African linguistics, and 1854 was one of his more productive years: he published the first large-scale comparison of some 200 African languages (the famed Polyglotta Africana), but also a corpus of Kanuri folklore, a grammar of Vai, and a grammar of Kanuri.

It is high time for a continuation of our series honouring the ancestors of ideophone studies. Sigismund Wilhelm Koelle is one of the founding fathers of African linguistics, and 1854 was one of his more productive years.

Early sources on African ideophones, part IV: S.W. Koelle on Kanuri, 1854

We don’t generally see PhD dissertations as an exciting genre to read, and that is wholly our loss. As the publishing landscape of academia is fast being homogenised, the thesis is one of the last places where we have a chance to see the unalloyed brilliance of up and coming researchers. Let me show you using three examples of remarkable theses I have come across in the past years.

Mindblowing dissertations

Google Scholar is useful, but its inclusiveness and mix of automatically updated and hand-curated profiles means you should never take any of its numbers at face value. Case in point: the power couple Prof.

*

 Summary:

Google Scholar is useful, but its inclusiveness and mix of automatically updated and hand-curated profiles means you should never take any of its numbers at face value. Case in point: the power couple Prof.

Some things you need to know about Google Scholar

Knots are fascinating: they tie together topology, embodied experience, and material culture. As Thai textile artist and designer Nithikul Nimkulrath (2024) has pointed out, knots are the kind of thing we come to know “

 through

and

 in

making”. One of her artworks (see photo) explorers the materiality of knots by translating a physical, hand-knotted container into a 3D render.

Tying ourselves into knots about reasoning

Funeral dirges (

 sìnɔ

in Siwu) are sung during the period of public mourning preceding a burial. The musical structures of these dirges, the performances, and their place in the larger context of the funeral have been described in some detail by Agawu (1988) and before him by the German missionary Friedrich Kruse (1911); however, the linguistic aspects of the genre have not received any attention so far.

I thought I had company (a Mawu dirge)

The Ideophone

One of the benefits of today's preprint culture is that it is possible
to provide constructive critique of pending work before it is out,
thereby enabling a rapid cycle of revision before things are committed
to print. I have myself benefited from comments on preprints, and have
acknowledged such public pre-publication reviews in several of my
papers. The below remarks are shared in that spirit. (This is part I;
[part II is
here](https://ideophone.org/pitfalls-of-fossil-thinking-ii){data-type="post"
data-id="6350"}.)

Di Paola, Giovanna, Ljiljana Progovac, and Antonio Benítez-Burraco.
2023. "Revisiting the Hypothesis of Ideophones as Windows to Language
Evolution: The Human Self-Domestication Perspective." PsyArXiv.
<https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/7mkue>.

I could keep this short, and I probably should. I wrote about the idea
of ideophones as "linguistic fossils" in my thesis:

> In Kita's (2008) view, they are "fossils of protolanguage" and they
> provide us with a peek into the minds of our protolinguistic
> ancestors. Although many have granted such ideas at least some
> intuitive plausibility, in the absence of evidence I think it is
> hardly useful to speculate about the matter. The lack of evidence
> shows itself in the fact that speculation goes both ways. For
> instance, whereas Kita argues that "sound symbolic words are fossils
> of protolanguage that have been engulfed and incorporated (albeit not
> fully) into the system of modern language" (Kita 2008:32), we find
> Diffloth arguing the opposite: "Expressives \[ideophones, MD\] are not
> a sort of 'pre-linguistic' form of speech, somehow half-way between
> mimicry and fully structured linguistic form. They are, in fact, at
> the other end of the spectrum, a sort of 'post-linguistic' stage where
> the structural elements necessary for prosaic language are
> deliberately re-arranged and exploited for their iconic properties,
> and used for aesthetic communication" (Diffloth 1980:58).
>
> Dingemanse 2011:341-2

(The passage in my thesis is longer than this; it dismantles some
further assumptions about ideophone meanings and formulates a
constructive take on the relevance of depiction and multimodality to the
cultural evolution of language. As I show, such a take has no need for a
problematic notion of "fossils".)

In my thesis and my subsequent work, I come down more on the side of
Diffloth based on a detailed review of the typological evidence and
in-depth study of the ideophone system of Siwu, which I have found to be
sophisticated, creative, complex, systematic, conventionalized, and an
integral part of the larger linguistic system. It is therefore
surprising that the present ms, which cites no less than 11 of my
publications, somehow finds a way to paint a maximally exceptionalist
and exoticist picture of ideophones.

## A fraught history {#a-fraught-history .wp-block-heading}

The ms that I review here triggered my Google Scholar notification for
"intitle:ideophones". I was naturally interested to read it, though I
was immediately wary of the notion of "linguistic fossils".

Why might I be wary of such notions in a piece on ideophones? There is a
shameful history of scientific racism in the field of the evolution of
language and culture, and hastily formed impressions of ideophones have
played a questionable role in this. I have called out this scientific
racism in 2011 ('[Ezra Pound among the
Mawu](https://doi.org/10.1075/ill.10.03din){rel="noreferrer noopener"
target="_blank"}') and 2018 ('[Redrawing the
margins](https://doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.444){rel="noreferrer noopener"
data-type="link" data-id="https://doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.444"
target="_blank"}'). As I wrote in the first paper, there is a recurrent
pattern where Western scholars meet with ideophones "on the unholy
ground of scientific racism and cultural evolutionism" (p. 52). A
driving force here has been philosopher and professional racist Lucien
Lévy-Bruhl, whose view of sound-symbolic words as signs of "primitive
mentality" came to dominate public perceptions of ideophones and
iconicity in the early 20th century. [As I have
documented](https://www.glossa-journal.org/article/id/4972/),
Lévy-Bruhl's account acquires its force (if it has any) only through a
highly selective and misleading reading of Westermann, a primary source
on ideophones at the time.

Given this fraught history, I would expect any paper that broaches this
topic to tread very carefully. At the very least, it would seem a good
idea to acknowledge the problems and harms of past approaches in this
area, and to avoid Lévy-Bruhl's approach of selective reading, instead
carefully weighing all available evidence and arriving at a balanced
account.

Unfortunately, the version of the ms I am reviewing here does not show
awareness of this history, and I feel that it engages in several cases
of oversimplification and what has been called "[drive-by
citation](https://liorpachter.wordpress.com/tag/drive-by-citation/)".
Indeed, it seems to me that this ms presents a strikingly one-sided view
of ideophones that not only ignores large bodies of scholarly work on
ideophones (even while citing them) but also risks reverting to
centuries-old exoticist views without clearly attempting to fend off
problematic interpretations.

The notion of "linguistic fossil" is far from innocent in this regard.
It paints a living linguistic system in the most static way possible.
The use of this metaphor in creole studies and in work on click sounds
has been critiqued in the past as indirectly or directly linked to
racist and colonial-era notions about supposedly 'primitive' language
structures (see Güldemann & Sands 2009). It is not clear what using this
tarnished term buys one, academically speaking.

## That's it (for now) {#thats-it-for-now .wp-block-heading}

I was actually all set to publish a longer post with detailed and
substantive critique of many aspects of this preprint. I think those
comments deserve to be public just as the preprint is public. However, I
noticed that the preprint was uploaded by a senior corresponding author
and that the other two authors (including the first, who may be an early
career researcher) do not appear to be very active online.

In this situation, I am weighing the very public nature of the preprint
(and my blog) against the not-so-public-yet profile of the first author,
and choosing to err on the side of caution. I don't even know whether
they are aware that their work is public, and up for public discussion,
in this way. So as a first port of call I have shared my detailed
comments on the text with the senior corresponding author.

At the same time, since the fraught history alluded to above is
apparently not known widely enough, I am choosing to publish this little
prelude here and may revisit the post at a later point with an update.

Update: [part II is now
online](https://ideophone.org/pitfalls-of-fossil-thinking-a-peer-review-ii/){data-type="post"
data-id="6350"}.

Last week I was happy to present my work at a workshop on *Ideophones
and nonlexical vocalisations* in Linköping, Sweden, organised by Leelo
Keevallik and Emily Hofstetter. This was the kick-off for a new project
on "[Non-lexical
vocalisations](https://nonlexicalvocalizations.com){target="_blank"
rel="noopener"}". It was my first time in Linköping and it was great
getting to know the vibrant community of interaction researchers from
across departments. Also, I kind of fell in love with the Key Huset
building and its light-flooded wood toned spaces.

The workshop was thought-provoking in many ways. This is the first of
two posts in which I share some of my notes. It's a personal take, not
at all intended as a comprehensive summary, if only because I had to
leave early to pick up my daughter from daycare back in Nijmegen and
therefore missed the last third of the workshop, which (judging from
Emily Hofstetter's [live
tweeting](https://twitter.com/search?q=%23nonlexicals){target="_blank"
rel="noopener"}) was just as interesting as the first two thirds. A
central concern of the larger project hosting the workshop is to
"problematise the traditional boundaries of linguistics". This is
something I'm sympathetic to, if only because my own work on ideophones
and interjections has made me acutely aware of the subjectiveness of our
notions of what is marginal and what is core in language.

## Rara versus marginalia {#rara-versus-marginalia .wp-block-heading}

In thinking about marginality, I find it useful to distinguish two ways
in which things may be peripheral: *rara* and *marginalia* (see
[Dingemanse
2017](http://pubman.mpdl.mpg.de/pubman/item/escidoc:2346185:9/component/escidoc:2444986/Dingemanse_2017_On%20the%20margins%20of%20language.pdf){target="_blank"
rel="noopener"}). **Rara** are truly rare linguistic phenomena that are
interesting precisely because they are so out of the ordinary: things
like click phonemes, nominal tense, or affixation by place of
articulation. **Marginalia** are common phenomena that just don't happen
to be part of the traditional interests of linguistics: things like
gesture, ideophones, or indeed "non-lexical" vocalisations.

The crucial difference between rara and marginalia lies in the
subjectivity of the latter. We can objectively tell whether something is
truly rare or exceptional. But many classifications of things as
peripheral or marginal are much more subjective. What we think of as
marginal is determined by our data, methods, and theories; and in
addition to that, by our own linguistic experience and language
ideologies. There is nothing wrong about declaring some things as
peripheral to your current interests: time is limited and we all have to
make choices. But it is always useful to be aware of how you come to
such choices, and to reflect on whether your interests (or methods,
theories, ideologies) might benefit from a bit of recalibration.

Many of the phenomena in focus during the workshop were not rara but
*marginalia* in this subjective sense: they occur all the time in
language use and might tell us interesting things about language
structure --- but they've been mostly treated as marginal to the
concerns of mainstream linguistics. However, the tide may be turning for
at least some marginalia: work on ideophones is [clearly on the
rise](https://glossa-journal.org/articles/10.5334/gjgl.444/){target="_blank"
rel="noopener"}, and initiatives such as Martina Wiltschko's [Eh
lab](https://syntaxofspeechacts.linguistics.ubc.ca/){target="_blank"
rel="noopener"} at UBC and this new [nonlexical
vocalizations](https://nonlexicalvocalizations.com/){target="_blank"
rel="noopener"} project at Linköping University show there is
significant interest in this area.

## Vocal depiction is rampant {#vocal-depiction-is-rampant .wp-block-heading}

One thing that struck me during the workshop is how common it is to use
the voice to depict meaning, often in contexts where other means of
communication may be much less efficient or effective. Whether it's
during lindy hop learning sessions (as in [Leelo
Keevallik](https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Leelo_Keevallik){target="_blank"
rel="noopener"}'s work) or band practice (as in [Agnes
Löfgren](https://liu.se/en/employee/agnlo64){target="_blank"
rel="noopener"}'s data), in professional choreography rehearsals (as in
[Johanna
Skubisz](http://blackbox.fcsh.unl.pt/joanna-skubisz.html){target="_blank"
rel="noopener"}' work) or in everyday interaction in Siwu (as in [my
work on ideophones](https://ideophone.org/papers/){target="_blank"
rel="noopener"}), people use vocal depictions ---often in multimodal
ensembles--- to evoke perceptual experiences and coordinate bodily
behaviour.

One thing all kinds of vocal depictions have in common is that they
*show rather than tell*. It is incredibly hard to tell a dancer to
execute a movement in a certain way; it is much easier to show it,
either by means of a bodily demonstration or by means of gestural and
vocal depictions. Or to take an example from my own research in Ghana,
it is quite hard to explain how you can visually tell a real batch of
gunpowder from a counterfeit one, but if you manage to depict its
particular sheen using using gestures and an ideophone like
*kɛlɛŋkɛlɛŋkɛlɛŋ* (as in example 11.11
[here](http://thesis.ideophone.org/part-4/interaction/){target="_blank"
rel="noopener"}), you can go a long way.

Depictions construe a likeness or a replica of some sensory scene (Clark
2016), making aspects of it more directly accessible and manipulable
than would be the case if the scene was merely described in arbitrary
words. This is what makes them useful in a wide range of communicative
contexts. In my own work on [creative vocal
depictions](https://benjamins.com/catalog/ps.5.3.04din){target="_blank"
rel="noopener"} ([PDF](https://pure.mpg.de/rest/items/item_2071648_4/component/file_2071783/content){target="_blank"
rel="noopener"}) I mentioned settings as diversified as storytelling,
joint work in animation studios, and interaction in music and dance
lessons. During the workshop we saw further examples from band practice,
choreography rehearsals, multilingual conversations, and doctor-patient
interaction. This diversity of contexts brings home the versatility of
depiction as a communicative practice.

## Versions of the 'same' thing are analytical rich points {#versions-of-the-same-thing-are-analytical-rich-points .wp-block-heading}

Some of the richest opportunities for analysis come from cases where the
interaction provides multiple versions of some behaviour designed to
represent ostensibly the same scene. For instance, in [Agnes
Löfgren](https://liu.se/en/employee/agnlo64){target="_blank"
rel="noopener"}'s extract from a band rehearsal, we heard a bass player
convey (to the drummer) a particular rhythmic structure he had in mind
for this piece. The bass player produced at least four versions of
ostensibly the same content. The versions can be seen as escalations or
upgrades, in part shaped by the drummer's responses which ranged from
'isn't that what I'm doing now' to 'alright okay' to 'I don't see it
yet' to 'like it actually gets kind of cool':

1. a prose description ('so it's like you play fou- a four against our
 three')
2. a depiction in syllables (*du du ka du du ka du ka*) with the foot
 doubling as bass drum
3. a short rhythmic phrase played on the bass, soon abandoned
4. an actual demonstration on the drum set

Cases like this raise many intriguing questions, some inspired by Clark
& Gerrig's (1990) [classic
work](https://www.jstor.org/stable/414729?seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents){target="_blank"
rel="noopener"} on quotations as demonstrations. How do we decide
between  modalities (or combinations of modalities) in designing
depictions? What determines the ordering of strategies seen in
successive pursuits? What is the role of recipient design in choosing
one over another strategy? How do we select the aspects of a scene that
we are going to depict, and how do we map these to the depictive means
at hand? How is the design of our depictions shaped and constrained by
the affordances of meaning and modality? And so on.

We saw more examples in Leelo Keevallik's lindy hop data. In one
memorable case, a lindy hop learner asks a question about a possibly
problematic element of a dance move, referring to it using the creative
vocal depiction *"zup↑pum↑"*. The teachers decide to show rather than
tell by actually executing the moves, and in synchrony with this they
produce vocalisations that depict some of the rhythmic and kinetic
aspects of the dance --- including a piece that structurally is
recognisable (for us analysts as well as, presumably, for the learner
asking the question) as the relevant referent of ""zup↑pum↑". Also
during the dance, the other teacher produces 'nonlexical' syllables like
*chigi digi* *digi* in sync with the beat and with his movements, and
after completing the dance, adds, "So yeah, it's just a nice little
*jigijigijigi*', simultaneously depicting some of the kinetic aspects of
the dance in voice and hands.

Versions of ostensibly the same thing are crucial because they give us
more material to work with if we want to understand the link between the
depiction and the depicted scene --- often a challenge not just for the
analyst but also for the recipient in interaction. Versions give us
analytical purchase in two key ways: they show multiple iterations of
ostensibly the same action, and if we're lucky, they also give us
multiple takes on the material by the recipient, providing crucial
interactional evidence of the success or failure of depictive stretches
of behaviour.

One type of useful interactional evidence is when different participants
provide takes on ostensibly the same scene that demonstrate (rather than
just claim) their understanding or expertise. With ideophones, I have
found that when one participant produces an ideophone evoking a scene
(e.g., *munyɛmunyɛ* 'sparkling'), in second position another participant
may then produce another ideophone (e.g., *gelegele* 'shiny') as if to
say, I agree with you, and here is how *I *see it. This is where vocal
depictions in interaction touch on matters of epistemics and authority.

A key challenge when working with creative depictions is that it can be
hard for the analyst to even know what they are supposed to depict.
Here, another type of interactional evidence can be particularly useful:
when a recipient formulates their understanding of the depiction. In my
talk at the workshop I discussed a case from my study on [creative vocal
depictions](https://doi.org/10.1075/ps.5.3.04din){target="_blank"
rel="noopener"} where one person's creative ideophone *kpaw* is followed
by the other's interpretation in next turn: "the gun didn't go off":

1. A:  *lopɛ↑kpaw↑* 
      I fired ↑kpaw↑
2.      (1.2)
3. B:*  kùdu leiba inɔ̀* 
      the gunpowder didn't go through
4. A:  *kùdu leiba- kɔ* 
      the gunpowder didn't go- gee!

What B does in line 3 is take A's creative depiction and formulate an
understanding of it in descriptive terms. This is analytically very
useful, because it saves us the trouble of speculating what the
depiction was supposed to evoke. B's interpretation is ratified by A
when he repeats it and continues the telling.

It is kind of wonderful that we can create and interpret vocal
depictions just like that.  What cases like this show is that
interactional evidence can help us crack some of the most intriguing
questions about creative vocal depictions. Their interpretation is
scaffolded by context, supported by people's familiarity with
(conventional) depictive strategies, and ratified in interaction by
these kinds of understandings.

(An interesting boundary case comes from [Hannah
Pelikan](https://hannahpelikan.com/){rel="noreferrer noopener"
aria-label="(An interesting boundary case comes from Hannah Pelikan's work on interaction with Nao robots. She recorded people responding to Nao playing charades. Nao would produce a pre-programmed multimodal depiction (e.g. playing a plane sound and visually imitating wings with arms) and a participant would produce a verbal guess, which was then treated as right or wrong by Nao depending on a preprogrammed set of answers. (opens in a new tab)"
target="_blank"}'s work on interaction with a Nao robot. She recorded
games of charades. Nao would produce a pre-programmed 'depiction' (e.g.
playing a plane sound and visually imitating wings with arms) and a
participant would produce a verbal guess, which was then treated as
right or wrong by Nao depending on a pre-programmed set of answers.
Hannah's data shows that people 
are pretty graceful even when perfectly reasonable guesses are dismissed
by Nao, and rapidly adapt to the limited agency displayed by the robot.
What's potentially interesting here is that we could get multiple takes
on what is guaranteed to be the exact same depiction. Holding one side
of the equation still, as it were, to see what the other, more flexible
human side makes of it. However, due to the restricted format of the
charades game, usually there was only one guess and no opportunities for
redress.)

## In closing {#in-closing .wp-block-heading}

One thing that is so fascinating about marginalia is the combination of
relatively common occurrence with a striking lack of systematic
attention from linguists and interaction researchers. It means that
there are lots of things still to find out about some of the most
fundamental aspects of how we use language, and how language is shaped
by and for social interaction. In the next installment I'll explore some
other themes from the workshop, focusing on the question: [*what does it
mean to call something
"non-lexical"?*](https://ideophone.org/what-is-nonlexical)

## References {#references .wp-block-heading}

- ::: {.csl-bib-body}
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 Clark, Herbert H., and Richard J. Gerrig. 1990. "Quotations as
 Demonstrations." *Language* 66 (4): 764--805.
 :::
 :::

- ::: {.csl-bib-body}
 ::: {.csl-entry}
 Clark, Herbert H. 2016. "Depicting as a Method of Communication."
 *Psychological Review* 123 (3): 324--47.
 <https://doi.org/10.1037/rev0000026>.
 :::
 :::

- ::: {.csl-bib-body}
 ::: {.csl-entry}
 Dingemanse, Mark. 2014. "Making New Ideophones in Siwu: Creative
 Depiction in Conversation." *Pragmatics and Society* 5 (3): 384--405.
 <https://doi.org/10.1075/ps.5.3.04din>.
 :::
 :::

- Dingemanse, Mark. 2017. "On the Margins of Language: Ideophones,
 Interjections and Dependencies in Linguistic Theory." In *Dependencies
 in Language*, edited by N. J. Enfield, 195--202. Berlin: Language
 Science Press. <https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.573781>.

- ::: {.csl-bib-body}
 ::: {.csl-entry}
 Keevallik, Leelo. 2010. "Bodily Quoting in Dance Correction."
 *Research on Language & Social Interaction* 43 (4): 401--26.
 <https://doi.org/10.1080/08351813.2010.518065>.
 :::
 :::

- ::: {.csl-bib-body}
 ::: {.csl-entry}
 Keevallik, Leelo. 2014. "Turn Organization and Bodily-Vocal
 Demonstrations." *Journal of Pragmatics*, A body of resources -- CA
 studies of social conduct, 65 (May): 103--20.
 <https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2014.01.008>.
 :::
 :::



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