Mark Dingemanse

Mark Dingemanse (Middelburg, Zeeland, the Netherlands, 1983) is a Dutch linguist. He is an associate professor in Language and Communication at the Centre for Language Studies of Radboud University Nijmegen.

He is also a Senior Investigator in the Multimodal Language and Cognition research group at the Nijmegen Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. ^[1]

Life

Dingemanse obtained a MA degree in African Languages and Cultures at Leiden University in 2006, and a PhD degree in arts in 2011 at Radboud University Nijmegen. ^[2] He performed linguistic fieldwork in eastern Ghana and did comparative research 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 for their work on the presence of the word "huh" in all human languages. ^[3]

Publications

Dingemanse's scholarly papers include: ^{[4] [5]}

• The meaning and use of ideophones 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. ^[6]
• 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 (Volume 1: Long Papers), 5614–5633, 2022, doi: 10.18653/v1/2022.acl-long.385. ^[7]
• 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. ^[8]

Recognitions

• Dingemanse et al. were awarded an Ig Nobel Prize for their work on the presence of the word "huh" in all human languages. ^[9]
• The Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences awarded Dingemanse a Heineken Young Scientists Award in 2020. ^{[10] [11]}

References

1. "Mark Dingemanse". www.mpi.nl. Max Planck Institute. Retrieved 6 October 2022.
2. "dr. M. Dingemanse (Mark)". www.ru.nl. Radboud University. Retrieved 6 October 2022.
3. "Ig Nobel prize for MPI researchers | Max Planck Institute". www.mpi.nl. Retrieved 2025-02-28.
4. "Dingemanse, Mark". Worldcat.org. OCLC . Retrieved 5 October 2024.
5. "Mark Dingemanse". scholar.google.com. Google Scholar. Retrieved 6 October 2022.
6. Dingemanse, Mark; Torreira, Francisco; Enfield, N. J. (November 8, 2013). "Is "Huh?" a Universal Word? Conversational Infrastructure and the Convergent Evolution of Linguistic Items". PLOS ONE. 8 (11): e78273. Bibcode:2013PLoSO...878273D. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0078273 . PMC   3832628 . PMID   24260108. A word like Huh?–used as a repair initiator when, for example, one has not clearly heard what someone just said– is found in roughly the same form and function in spoken languages across the globe.
7. Dingemanse, Mark; Liesenfeld, Andreas. "From text to talk: Harnessing conversational corpora for humane and diversity-aware language technology" (PDF). aclanthology.org. ACL Anthology Association for Computational Linguistics. Retrieved 6 October 2022.
8. Heesen, R. (May 2022). "Coordinating social action: A primer for the cross-species investigation of communicative repair". Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences. 377 (1859). Royal Society. doi:10.1098/rstb.2021.0110. PMC   9310172 . PMID   35876201.
9. "Ig Nobel prize for MPI researchers | Max Planck Institute". www.mpi.nl. Retrieved 2025-02-28.
10. "Young researchers receive Heineken Young Scientists Award". www.theheinekencompany.com/newsroom. 29 June 2020. Retrieved 6 October 2022.
11. "Laureaten Heineken Young Scientists Awards 2022 bekend". www.knaw.nl (in Dutch). Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen (Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences). 12 July 2022. Retrieved 6 October 2022.

Further reading

• Allison Parshall, "Pain Language: The sound of 'ow' transcends borders", Scientific American , vol. 332, no. 2 (February 2025), pp. 16–18. "Many languages have an interjection word for expressing pain. [Katarzyna Pisanski et al., writing in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America , have] found 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, or sound iconicity, in which a word's intrinsic nature has some connection to its meaning. These cases run counter to decades of linguistic theory, which had regarded language as fundamentally arbitrary... [Many words onomatopoeically imitate a sound. Also] there's the '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 trilled 'R' sound with roughness and the 'L' sound with smoothness. Mark Dingemanse... in 2013 found [that] the conversational 'Huh?' and similar words in other languages may be universal." (p. 18.)

External links

• Is 'Huh?' a universal word? on YouTube. Video by Huh?. Duration 20s.