diagram – Mark Dingemanse

Vowel space and the colour circle

24 October 2022

Illustration of how colour space is mapped onto vowel space based on the findings for >1100 participants in Cuskley, Dingemanse et al. 2019. Red usually goes with back vowels like /a/, while light hues like yellow and green go with front vowels like /i/ and darker hues go with /u/ and /o/. None of this is deterministic: associations vary across people and this just represents one of the most common solutions on average. Made by MD for the classroom materials in Van Leeuwen & Dingemanse 2022.

Repair across species

20 June 2022

Types of redoings of communicative behaviour and their interactional contingency. This diagram sums up the species-agnostic framework for studying communicative repair we introduce in a wide-ranging review of animal communication systems.

Vowel-colour associations

24 April 2022

L: The vowel space with colour associations by a synaesthete. R: The same vowels displayed according to tongue position when produced. Visualization: Christine Cuskley & Mark Dingemanse. For an interactive version of this visual, see here.

Five dimensions of alignment

30 October 2020

The relationship between the two parts of a behavior pair can vary on five dimensions, as outlined in this table. For each dimension, we visualize two different relationships between instances of behavior—one with a solid arrow and one with a dashed arrow. For meaning, we use tangram figures to visualize the referent of speech and/or gestures

Locations and settings

24 April 2017

There are a myriad ways to refer to places, but one useful way to think about their affordances in interaction is in terms of a distinction between locations and settings. Locations tell you where something is; settings invoke activities and actors. Many place references usefully combine the two: setting a story in the graveyard area not only localizes it for the audience in the know, but also provides a setting for ominous encounters.

Ideophone constructions in Siwu

The canonical syntactic home of ideophones in Siwu is toward the end of the clause. A finer analysis of patterns of occurrence in the corpus reveals a number of constructions in which ideophones can occur. The five most common constructions, together accounting for 95 % of ideophone tokens, are shown here.

This type of visualization —a table with horizontal bar plot— has no name as of yet. It uses the same logic as E.J. Tufte’s sparklines, which also display numerical information inline.

Two dimensions of interactive repair

25 April 2015

Two dimensions of formats for repair initiation. The distinction between open and restricted type formats is retrospective: it is about the nature and location of the trouble in prior turn. The distinction between request and offer type formats is prospective: it is about the nature of the response that is relevant in next turn. The two dimensions together define three basic types of formats for repair initiation: (1) open request, (2) restricted request, and (3) restricted offer.

Properties and formats of repair

Using elementary properties of interactional resources, we can capture commonalities and differences between repair formats in principled and precise ways. For instance, to capture the distinctions between four repair initiation formats in English (as presented in Sidnell 2010), we can use the following three properties: Question (is there a content question word?), Repetition (does the repair initiator repeat some material from the prior turn?) and Confirmation (does the repair initiator make confirmation relevant in next turn?).

Elements of other-initiated repair

24 April 2015

A repair sequence consists of a repair initiation that points back to a prior turn (identifying it as a trouble source) and points forward to a next turn (the repair solution). The visual style of this schematic was adapted in a broader account of repair in conversation by Albert & De Ruiter.

Arbitrariness, iconicity and systematicity

(A, B) Words show arbitrariness when there are conventional associations between forms and meanings. Words show iconicity when there are perceptuomotor analogies between forms and meanings, here indicated by shape, size and proximity (inset). (B, C) Words show systematicity when statistical regularities in phonological form, here indicated by color, serve as cues to abstract categories such as word classes. (D) The cues involved in systematicity differ across languages and may be arbitrary. (E) The perceptual analogies involved in iconicity transcend languages and may be universal.

Known cross-modal associations to vowels

30 March 2015

Diagram of attested cross-modal mappings to linguistic sound represented on typical vowel space. (Figure by first author Gwilym Lockwood.)

Deideophonisation and ideophonisation

25 April 2012

Deideophonization turns depictive signs into descriptive ones by decreasing expressiveness and increasing morphosyntactic integration; ideophonization turns descriptive signs into depictive ones by increasing expressiveness and decreasing morphosyntactic integration.

This simple diagram was created in 2012, in a style that evokes typical Langackerian cognitive linguistics diagrams. Published (due to editorial delays) only in 2017.

The paper has a further variation on the theme, displaying the two types of ideophone constructions in Siwu as “Bound” versus “Free” and placing them on opposite ends of this continuum:

Noun classification in Siwu

24 April 2011

Nouns in Siwu come with noun class prefixes that also mark number (singular, plural, or mass). Most grammars present such classes as simple SG/PL class pairings, making it hard to see underlying regularities. In this diagram, line thickness shows relative frequency. This kind of visualization is helpful for learners but also for linguists, who may be able to use it in work on grammaticalization and change.