Mark Dingemanse

I have a co-authored, peer-reviewed chapter in this newly released book! With Laura Chahda, and drawing on my research for BYE BYE I LOVE YOU, I wrote about linguistic considerations at the end of life, aiming to show how speech-language pathologists can support communication. It's important!

Cover page of Klassen, Doreen Helen. 1999. ‘You Can’t Have Silence with Your Palms Up: Ideophones, Gesture, and Iconicity in Zimbabwean Shona Women’s Ngano (Storysong) Performance’. PhD dissertation, Indiana University.

What @michaelerard.bsky.social says. There's a lovely 1999 PhD thesis on this very phenomenon that uses the same term

the whack-a-mole problem: every few months we see a new creative bypass of this kind (that will be half-patched by ad hoc metaprompts & later by finetuning)

when will it dawn that LLMs are fundamentally vulnerable to endless new attacks like this, and therefore fundamentally unsafe?

I was in too much haste, and now have no time left.

drive by citations I’ve been grading the (in general very good) papers by the grad students in my culture seminar, and I’ve noticed a phenomenon I don’t remember from prior seminars. I’m namin…

a useful term for this is drive-by citations
scatter.wordpress.com/2009/04/30/d...

Iconicity in Word Learning and Beyond: A Critical Review Alan Nielsen & Mark Dingemanse 2021

I'm seeing quite some citations of our 2021 paper doi.org/10.1177/0023830920914339 that seem to have somehow missed

not just the evidence and arguments from the body of the paper

not just the abstract

but the subtitle 🫠

Taking notes as I'm reading a draft policy piece that ominously lauds AI's possibilities to make processes more efficient 👀

Cover page of Kenneth Pike's Language as Particle, Wave and Field (1959). W T IS the nature of language? What are its parts? How is the structure of language related to structural problems in other areas of investigation? Language, in my view, can be viewed profitably from three distinct standpoints. One of these is traditional, and views language as made up of particles -"things," pieces, or parts, with sharp borders. The second view is not at all thought of in lay circles perhaps, and is largely neglected on the technical front. This second view treats language as made up not of parts which are separated one from the other and added like bricks on a row, but rather as being made up of waves follOWing one another. This second view is one which I have recently been developing, and leads to some very stimulating insights as to the nature of language structure. A third view consists in viewing structure as a total field. Technicians have studied semantic fields as part of language, but the handling of the concept systematically in terms of the more ordinary structuring of sentences has not even been attempted. Some components which could enter such a possible view, however, have been developed for other purposes, and I have found the concept fruitful in certain practical situations of applied linguistics.

Language as Particle, Wave and Field, Pike 1959

We hoeven ons niet allemaal bezig te houden met de laatste ontwikkelingen, maar aan de gevolgen ontkomt niemand: een
publiek dat “AI” gretig omarmt, een opkomend tij van synthetische tekst, en een collectieve zinsbegoocheling in denken over taal, betekenis, en waarheid. doi.org/10.1075/nb.00030.din

We hoeven ons niet allemaal bezig te houden met de laatste ontwikkelingen, maar aan de gevolgen ontkomt niemand: een
publiek dat “AI” gretig omarmt, een opkomend tij van synthetische tekst, en een
collectieve zinsbegoocheling in denken over taal, betekenis, en waarheid. doi.org/10.1075/nb.00030.din

Pleidooi voor nutteloze beschaving doi.org/10.1075/nb.0...

Met voorzitters van Stutterheim tot Leufkens, sprekers van Jakobson tot Nissim, en onderwerpen van fonologie tot AI: de AVT heeft een roerige geschiedenis en een mooie toekomst — als we "nutteloze beschaving" op waarde blijven schatten

Iconicity ratings (every dot represents a single ideophone). A: Distribution of mean iconicity ratings. B: Distribution of ratings by cumulative iconicity, showing a stepwise increase in iconicity ratings and a narrowing distribution of variance as cumulative iconicity goes up.

Overview of the triangulation method. Structure mapping grounds the notion of iconicity, ratings capture subjective form-meaning fit, and guessability provides a baseline of guessing accuracy. For instance, Korean tuˈgɯndugɯn ‘heartbeat’ features at least three levels of iconic form-meaning correspondences (A). This predicts it should be rated as highly iconic (B) and should be more guessable than words with fewer detected correspondences (C). Consistent with this, it was rated 4.8 for subjective iconicity and guessed at 80% accuracy. Arrows indicate how measures predict (black) and inform (grey) each other.

One year ago, with Stella Punselie and Bonnie McLean: The Anatomy of Iconicity, in Open Mind doi.org/10.1162/opmi...

In which we combine iconicity ratings, experimental evidence, and structure mapping to identify & explain crosslinguistic patterns of iconic words

#iconicity #cognitivescience

The singularity is near, not because machine intelligence is suddenly surging, but because we are content to risk extinguishing the spark of human consciousness by exposing ourselves to endless streams of artificially generated bullshit. ideophone.org/bringing-abo...

AI pioneers claim human-level general intelligence is already here Tech leaders say systems now rival human intelligence in key tasks, further fuelling the superintelligence debate

As I was saying, if you give up thinking for yourself, the singularity is already here ideophone.org/bringing-abo...

(re FT story with "AI pioneers" claiming "human-level intelligence is already here" www.ft.com/content/5f2f... )

also massage therapy would arguably be a much better investment for everyone

why is our university sponsoring hype that deskills workers instead of actually making lives better?

I'd say just quit the service. They have always been tacky ideophone.org/academia-edu...

The opening chapterss of Weizenbaum's Computer Power and Human Reason, where he explains that an important reason to write the book was that a bunch of psychiatrists saw Eliza and did not think, we can do better for our clients, but said, hey let's automate therapy, this is great

there was a paper on the domestication of the horse a few years back and the open access fee max planck shelled out for it came down to a good race horse

for a pdf

Dienst die bij kan houden welke muziek je speelt (ik ben eraan verknocht omdat ik het al >20 jaar doe, kan tegenwoordig bv aan Spotify gekoppeld)

Last.fm listening history showing my plays of Omar Sosa, mostly in 2015-2019

Ah! Blijkt dat ik Mulatos al kende, maar de andere albums nog niet, en ik was 'm de laatste jaren duidelijk vergeten www.last.fm/user/strange...

OMG such a stark illustration of the double empathy problem

as if that 'social situation' doesn't also involve other people who could be making an effort

Nee, nog niet, waar zal ik beginnen?

Climbing the scaffolds and replastering this earthen building together is a beautiful sight, and a powerful metaphor for
language, as I wrote in @annualreviews.bsky.social doi.org/10.1146/annu... (h/t @maartenkossmann.bsky.social)

YouTube video by Guy Raz Esperanza Spalding: I’m Not the “Musical Prodigy” I’ve Been Made Out to Be

One more — Esperanza Spalding, one of my favourite artists, on her creative process. The bit about Exposure (her livestreamed creation of an album) was especially beautiful and interesting, touching on trust, creativity, privilege, community, and more (min 40 onward) youtu.be/uw7piG9vRic?...

YouTube video by Netherlands Bach Society Bach - Toccata in G minor BWV 915 - Maude Gratton | Netherlands Bach Society

Two bits of music as the weekend nears:

1. Jacob Collier's solo (but not quite solo) show at North Sea Jazz, with special guest Julian Lage around the 40m mark www.youtube.com/watch?v=mjCS...

2. New Netherlands Bach Society recording just dropped, w/ Maude Gratton: www.youtube.com/watch?v=JmTz...

CONVERGENT CULTURAL EVOLUTION OF CONTINUERS (mmhm) MARK DINGEMANSE*1,2, ANDREAS LIESENFELD1, and MARIEKE WOENSDREGT2 *Corresponding Author: mark.dingemanse@ru.nl 1Center for Language Studies, Radboud University 2Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics Continuers —words like mm, mmhm, uhum and the like— are among the most frequent types of responses in conversation. They play a key role in joint action coordination by showing positive evidence of understanding and scaffolding narrative delivery. Here we investigate the hypoth- esis that their functional importance along with their conversational ecology places selective pressures on their form and may lead to cross-linguistic similarities through convergent cultural evolution. We compare continuer tokens in linguistically diverse conversational corpora and find languages make available highly similar forms. We then approach the causal mechanism of convergent cultural evolution using exemplar modelling, simulating the process by which a combination of effort minimization and functional specialization may push continuers to a particular region of phonological possibility space. By combining comparative linguistics and computational modelling we shed new light on the question of how language structure is shaped by and for social interaction. 1. Int

not sure about insightful but I like how social interaction offers a natural laboratory to study convergent cultural evolution of linguistic items, as in this study of ours combining comparative evidence and a simple computational model pure.mpg.de/rest/items/i... (pdf)

perhaps (@duhe.bsky.social also mentions this)

but what we see is a bumbling fool, not a distracted eminence — it's a ridiculous look and plainly disrespectful to the audience, comparable to a musician coming on stage without tuning their instrument or doing a soundcheck

it clearly takes more than a PhD degree to understand that time passes as you talk

knowing your tools includes concepts like extended desktop (avoid the embarrassment of showing your inbox or your notes), understanding how pointers work (Geheimtipp: bring your own), and, a radical suggestion here, knowing your slides