Mark Dingemanse (

Middelburg, Zeeland Middelburg () is a List of cities in the Netherlands by province, city and List of municipalities of the Netherlands, municipality in the south-western Netherlands serving as the Capital (political), capital of the Provinces of the Netherlands, ...

, the Netherlands, 1983) is a

Dutch Dutch or Nederlands commonly refers to: * Something of, from, or related to the Netherlands ** Dutch people as an ethnic group () ** Dutch nationality law, history and regulations of Dutch citizenship () ** Dutch language () * In specific terms, i ...

linguist Linguistics is the scientific study of language. The areas of linguistic analysis are syntax (rules governing the structure of sentences), semantics (meaning), Morphology (linguistics), morphology (structure of words), phonetics (speech sounds ...

. He is an

associate professor Associate professor is an academic title with two principal meanings: in the North American system and that of the ''Commonwealth system''. In the ''North American system'', used in the United States and many other countries, it is a position ...

in Language and Communication at the Centre for Language Studies of

Radboud University Nijmegen Radboud University (abbreviated as RU, , formerly ) is a public university, public research university located in Nijmegen, Netherlands. RU has seven faculties and more than 24,000 students. Established in 1923, Radboud University has consistentl ...

. He is also a Senior Investigator in the Multimodal Language and Cognition research group at the Nijmegen

Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics The Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics (German: ''Max-Planck-Institut für Psycholinguistik''; Dutch: ''Max Planck Instituut voor Psycholinguïstiek'') is a research institute located on the campus of Radboud University Nijmegen in Nijm ...

Life

Dingemanse obtained a MA degree in

African Languages The number of languages natively spoken in Africa is variously estimated (depending on the delineation of language vs. dialect) at between 1,250 and 2,100, and by some counts at over 3,000. Nigeria alone has over 500 languages (according to SI ...

and Cultures at

Leiden University Leiden University (abbreviated as ''LEI''; ) is a Public university, public research university in Leiden, Netherlands. Established in 1575 by William the Silent, William, Prince of Orange as a Protestantism, Protestant institution, it holds the d ...

in 2006, and a

PhD A Doctor of Philosophy (PhD, DPhil; or ) is a terminal degree that usually denotes the highest level of academic achievement in a given discipline and is awarded following a course of graduate study and original research. The name of the deg ...

degree in arts in 2011 at Radboud University Nijmegen. He performed linguistic

fieldwork Field research, field studies, or fieldwork is the collection of raw data outside a laboratory, library, or workplace setting. The approaches and methods used in field research vary across disciplines. For example, biologists who conduct f ...

in eastern

Ghana Ghana, officially the Republic of Ghana, is a country in West Africa. It is situated along the Gulf of Guinea and the Atlantic Ocean to the south, and shares borders with Côte d’Ivoire to the west, Burkina Faso to the north, and Togo to t ...

and did

comparative research Comparative research is a research methodology in the social sciences exemplified in cross-cultural or comparative studies that aims to make comparisons across different countries or cultures. A major problem in comparative research is that the da ...

on various languages. He is principal investigator of a research program on Elementary Particles of Conversation, on the small words in everyday language. He and several other researchers were awarded an

Ig Nobel Prize The Ig Nobel Prize () is a satirical prize awarded annually since 1991 to promote public engagement with scientific research. Its aim is to "honor achievements that first make people laugh, and then make them think." The name of the award is a ...

for their work on the presence of the word "huh" in all human languages.

Publications

Dingemanse's scholarly papers include: * ''The meaning and use of

ideophone An ideophone (also known as a mimetic or expressive) is a member of the word class of words that depict sensory imagery or sensations, evoking ideas of action, sound, movement, color, or shape. The class of ideophones is the least common syntac ...

s in Siwu'', PhD thesis, Radboud University Nijmegen, 24 October 2011. * with Francisco Torreira, and N. J. Enfield: Is "Huh?" a Universal Word? Conversational Infrastructure and the Convergent Evolution of Linguistic Items, '' PLOS One'', 2013. * with Liesenfeld, A.: From text to talk: Harnessing conversational corpora for humane and diversity-aware language technology, in ''Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the

Association for Computational Linguistics The Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) is a scientific and professional organization for people working on natural language processing. Its namesake conference is one of the primary high impact conferences for natural language proce ...

(Volume 1: Long Papers)'', 5614–5633, 2022, doi: 10.18653/v1/2022.acl-long.385. * with Heesen, R., et al.: Coordinating social action: A primer for the cross-species investigation of communicative repair, '' Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences'', 377(1859), 2022. doi: 10.1098/rstb.2021.0110.

Recognitions

* Dingemanse ''et al.'' were awarded an

for their work on the presence of the word "huh" in all human languages. * The

Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences The Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (, KNAW) is an organization dedicated to the advancement of science and literature in the Netherlands. The academy is housed in the Trippenhuis in Amsterdam. In addition to various advisory a ...

awarded Dingemanse a Heineken Young Scientists Award in 2020.

References

word for expressing pain. atarzyna Pisanski ''et al.'', writing in the ''Journal of the Acoustical Society of America'', have">Journal of the Acoustical Society of America">atarzyna Pisanski ''et al.'', writing in the ''Journal of the Acoustical Society of America'', havefound that pain interjections tend to contain the vowel sound 'ah' (written as [a] in the International Phonetic Alphabet) and letter combinations that incorporate it, such as 'ow' and 'ai.' These patterns may point back to the origins of human language itself." (p. 16.) "Researchers are continually discovering cases of

symbolism Symbolism or symbolist may refer to: *Symbol, any object or sign that represents an idea Arts *Artistic symbol, an element of a literary, visual, or other work of art that represents an idea ** Color symbolism, the use of colors within various c ...

, or sound

iconicity In functional- cognitive linguistics, as well as in semiotics, iconicity is the conceived similarity or analogy between the form of a sign (linguistic or otherwise) and its meaning, as opposed to arbitrariness (which is typically assumed i ...

, in which a word's intrinsic nature has some connection to its meaning. These cases run counter to decades of

linguistic theory Theoretical linguistics is a term in linguistics that, like the related term general linguistics, can be understood in different ways. Both can be taken as a reference to the theory of language, or the branch of linguistics that inquires into the ...

, which had regarded language as fundamentally arbitrary... onomatopoeically imitate a sound. Also">onomatopoeia.html" ;"title="any words onomatopoeia">onomatopoeically imitate a sound. Alsothere's the Bouba/kiki effect">'bouba-kiki' effect, whereby people from varying cultures are more likely to associate the nonsense word 'bouba' with a rounded shape and 'kiki' with a spiked one.... [S]omehow we all have a ''feeling'' about this,' says Aleksandra Ćwiek... [She and her colleagues have] show[n] that people associate the Trill consonant, trilled 'R' sound with roughness and the 'L' sound with smoothness. Mark Dingemanse... in 2013 found

hat A hat is a Headgear, head covering which is worn for various reasons, including protection against weather conditions, ceremonial reasons such as university graduation, religious reasons, safety, or as a fashion accessory. Hats which incorpor ...

the conversational 'Huh?' and similar words in other languages may be universal." (p. 18.)

External links

* . Video by Huh?. Duration 20s. {{DEFAULTSORT:Dingemanse, Mark 1983 births Dutch Africanists Leiden University alumni Ig Nobel laureates Linguists from the Netherlands Linguists of Yoruba Living people People from Middelburg, Zeeland Psycholinguists Radboud University Nijmegen alumni Academic staff of Radboud University Nijmegen

Life

Publications

Recognitions

References

Further reading

External links