astronomy

Mark Dingemanse

Mark Dingemanse is a astronomy topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand Mark Dingemanse rather than just read about it. In short: 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.

Key takeaways

Mark Dingemanse belongs to astronomy; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect Mark Dingemanse to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of Mark Dingemanse from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

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.

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. 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.

Publications Dingemanse's scholarly papers include:

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. 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. 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 Ig Nobel Prize for their work on the presence of the word "huh" in all human languages. The Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences awarded Dingemanse a Heineken Young Scientists Award in 2020.

References

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.

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with Mark Dingemanse

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what Mark Dingemanse claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In astronomy, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to Mark Dingemanse before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about Mark Dingemanse ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of Mark Dingemanse

In research: Mark Dingemanse appears in astronomy research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses Mark Dingemanse in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: Mark Dingemanse is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics 1983 births, Academic staff of Radboud University Nijmegen, Dutch Africanists, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for Mark Dingemanse outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

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How to study Mark Dingemanse in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what Mark Dingemanse means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain Mark Dingemanse out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is Mark Dingemanse in simple terms?

Why does Mark Dingemanse matter?

Because it connects several astronomy ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study Mark Dingemanse?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on Mark Dingemanse.