What are the most important words? On average, one in every seven utterances in any conversation features small words like ‘m-hmm’, ‘oh’, or ‘huh?’. These humble words streamline our conversations, enable complex language, and help children grasp the fundamentals of the language system. They are, to use a metaphor developed in this project, “words below the waterline”: easily overlooked technologies that help keep language balanced, agile, and easy to steer while in motion. In...| Elementary particles of conversation
Readers of this blog know that I believe serendipity is a key element of fundamental research. There is something neatly paradoxical about this claim. We might like ‘key elements’ to be plannable so that we can account for them on budgets and balance sheets. But here is an element that I think can make a huge difference to the quality of our scientific work yet that is pretty much the antithesis of gantt charts, KPIs and work packages. (Then again, who has ever thought that gantt charts c...| The Ideophone
Panel A illustrates the notion of structure mapping. A sound wave representing the spoken Korean word tuˈgɯndugɯn ‘heartbeat’ is compared to another sound wave showing an actual heartbeat. Nodes and edges point out linkages across repeated structures for both. There are at least three levels and structures at which mappings can be made, yielding a cumulative iconicity score of 3.| Mark Dingemanse
