The relationship of language to cognition, especially in development, is an issue that has occupied philosophers, psychologists, and linguists for centuries. In recent years, the scientific study of sign languages and deaf individuals has greatly enhanced our understanding of deafness, language, and cognition. This Counterpoints volume considers the extent to which the use of sign language might affect the course and character of cognitive development, and presents a variety of viewpoints in this debate. This volume brings the (...) language-thought discussion into a clearer focus, both theoretically and practically, by placing it in the context of children growing up deaf and the influences of having sign language as their primary form of communication. The discussion is also sharpened by having internationally recognized contributors, such as Patricia Siple, Diane Lillo-Martin, and Ruth Campbell, with specialties in varied areas, all converging on a common interest in which each has conducted empirical research. These contributors clarify and challenge the theoretical assumptions that have driven arguments in the language-thought debate for centuries. An introduction by the editors provides a historical overview of the issues as well as a review of empirical findings that have been offered in response to questions about language-thought relations in deaf children. The final chapters are structured in the form of "live" debate, in which each contributor is given the opportunity to respond to the other perspectives presented in this volume. (shrink)

Here we develop a view of language as a form of material engagement, one that foregrounds its embodied and ecological character. Achieving such a view, however, requires disabusing ourselves of certain received and deeply entrenched notions. We present a thought experiment meant to illuminate the materiality of language, as a technological activity on par with the construction and manipulation of artifacts. We explore its implications, justifying the comparison with actual languages while emphasizing revealing differences. Ultimately, we (...) hope to expose the embodied and enactive nature of language, offering a view of language as continuous with our engagement with the environment, as opposed to a picture of language as an essentially symbolic system or code. (shrink)

The present-day traditional view of language has an essentially pedagogical background inherited from antiquity. Certain features of this heritage have passed through the centuries, reached our days and continue to be a sort of implicit postulates penetrating almost into every scientific conception of language. This causes specific divergences between the scientific view of language and its introspective view, i.e., the way it is actually conceived by an individual during ordinary communication. Studying those divergences is (...) important for a better grasping the nature of natural language and for a more adequate approaching to certain problems. (shrink)

The essay which follows is about the relationship between mind and language. Most recent thought about intentionality has it that (i) mental states of individuals are largely, or in the most fundamental cases, independent of social facts about public languages, and (ii) these social facts are derived from, or constituted by, the mental states of individuals. The purpose of this essay is to challenge this individualist orthodoxy (as well as the view of the relationship between mind and action (...) which often accompanies it), and suggest in its place a communitarian picture of intentionality which gives public languages a role to play in the constitution of thought. (shrink)

The essay which follows is about the relationship between mind and language. Most recent thought about intentionality has it that mental states of individuals are largely, or in the most fundamental cases, independent of social facts about public languages, and these social facts are derived from, or constituted by, the mental states of individuals. The purpose of this essay is to challenge this individualist orthodoxy , and suggest in its place a communitarian picture of intentionality which gives public languages (...) a role to play in the constitution of thought. (shrink)

While most evolutionary scenarios for language see it as a communication system with consequences on the language-ready brain, there are major difficulties for such a view. First, language has a core combination of features—semanticity, discrete infinity, decoupling—that makes it unique among communication systems and that raise deep problems for the view that it evolved for communication. Second, extant models of communication systems—the code model of communication (see Millikan 2005) and the ostensive model of communication (see (...) Scott-Phillips 2015) cannot account for language evolution. I propose an alternative view, according to which language first evolved as a cognitive tool, following Fodor’s (1975, 2008) Language of Thought Hypothesis, and was then expiated (externalized) for communication. On this view, a language-ready brain is a brain profoundly reorganized in terms of connectivity, allowing the human conceptual system to emerge, triggering the emergence of syntax. Language as used in communication inherited its core combination of features from the Language of Thought. (shrink)

This article is a theoretical examination of the relationship between truth and forms of dialogue, in discursive psychology. To do this, I mainly draw on Bakhtin and Kiekegaard . In contrast to a hermeneutic tradition that has sidelined the importance of the author to discourse , these authors offer an understanding of truth that depends on the author's emotional connection to the truth they are expressing. They most clearly demonstrate the dynamics of our emotional connection to truth in their descriptions (...) of different forms of speech. Kierkegaard describes the relationship between self and truth in irony, while Bakhtin does the same in the epic, the confession and the quarrel. It is my argument that these forms of speech interact with truth and help organise selfhood. I also argue that our current methodological emphasis on the function of words or the play of dominant discourses tend to overlook the experiential landscape of language and its reciprocal relationship with our subjectivity. (shrink)

Since Donald Davidson issued his challenge to anticausalism in 1963, most philosophers have espoused the view that our actions are causally explained by the reasons why we do them. This Davidsonian consensus, however, rests on a faulty argument. Davidson’s challenge has been met, in more than one way, by anticausalists such as C. Ginet, G. Wilson, and S. Sehon. Hence I endeavor to support causalism with a stronger argument. Our actions are correlated with our motivating reasons; to wit, we (...) often do what we have reason to do. In yet other words, we are often rational. Our frequent rationality is easily explained if causalism is correct, but looks like a staggering coincidence otherwise. Anticausalism thus appears to be ill-equipped to account for the very existence of rational behavior, and so far no attempts in this direction have succeeded. (shrink)

Several philosophers of science construe models of scientific theories as set-theoretic structures. Some of them moreover claim that models should not be construed as structures in the sense of model theory because the latter are language-dependent. I argue that if we are ready to construe models as set-theoretic structures (strict semantic view), we could equally well construe them as model-theoretic structures of higher-order logic (liberal semantic view). I show that every family of set-theoretic structures has an associated (...) language of higher-order logic and an up to signature isomorphism unique model-theoretic counterpart, which is able to serve the same purposes. This allows to carry over every syntactic criterion of equivalence for theories in the sense of the liberal semantic view to theories in the sense of the strict semantic view. Taken together, these results suggest that the recent dispute about the semantic view and its relation to the syntactic view can be resolved. (shrink)

What is the difference between the discriminations made by a home appliance able to distinguish salt from sugar, and my sensations of salty and sweet? It is never taken into consideration that, in contrast to the appliance, I can have offline sensations, i.e., phenomenal experiences in the absence of direct environmental stimuli, mainly evoked by words occurring into thought, conversation, reading, etc. If we put this detachment stimuli/sensations in relation with the correlative detachment signs/referents inaugurated by the cognitive revolution of (...) symbolic language , we might rethink the role played by language in our phenomenal experience as a whole. Qualia can be defined as forms of relationship between organisms and environment, given that human environment is extended to the linguistic dimension, and that the latter has ignited a coevolutionary process with human cognition. The very same properties we attribute to qualia, even when conceiving of them as pre-linguistic phenomenal traits, rely on the cognitive resources that language has made available. The substantialist notion of qualia, I argue, is formed by an online sensation on which the focus shifts from the perceived object to the sensory quality by virtue of linguistic modes of thinking, which are systematically neglected. (shrink)

There is a common-sense view of language, which is held by Wittgenstein, Strawson Dummett, Searle, Putnam, Lewis, Wiggins, and others. According to this view a language consists of conventions, it is rule-governed, rules are conventionalised, a language is learnt, there are general learning mechanisms in the brain, and so on. I shall call this view the ‘ ordinary language ’ view of language. Chomsky’s attitude towards this view of language (...) has been rather negative, and his rejection of it is a major motivation for the development of his own theory. In this paper I shall review Chomsky’s long-standing criticisms. I shall show that Chomsky’s argument does not constitute a dismissal of the ‘ordinarylanguage’ view of language, Chomsky’s conclusions about language do not follow from his argument, and the ‘ ordinary language ’ view actually points to a promising way for us to understand the true nature of language and mind. (shrink)

In this paper, I try to expatiate on the poetic function of language on the basis of considerations by Jakobson and Waugh. I try to bring in the consideration that pragmatics plays an important role in elucidating the poetic function of language. Contextualism allows us to interpret a poem: referents must be fixed or need not be fixed due to the requirements of the discourse; citations are brought in through pragmatic ways; polyphony is achieved by taking into account (...) the context of previous analyses of a poetic text; the vicinity of a certain word, or concept or line is likely to affect the interpretation of a certain expression; the poetic text can take different forms, from graffiti to discourse at the market place, to discourse between lovers. All these forms of poetic text would not exist if the notion of poetry did not include the idea of semantic/pragmatic compression which is matched, in interpretation, by expansions. (shrink)

Many pragmaticians have distinguished three levels of meaning involved in the comprehension of utterances, and there is an ongoing debate about how to characterize the intermediate level. Recanati has called it the level of 'what is said' and has opposed the idea that it can be determined semantically - a position that he labels 'pragmatic minimalism lo this end he has offered two chief arguments: semantic underdeterminacy and the Availability Principle. This paper exposes a tension between both arguments, relating this (...) discussion with Carruthers's cognitive view of language, according to which some thoughts are, literally, sentences of our natural language. First we explain how this view entails minimalism, and we construct an argument based on semantic underdeterminacy that shows that natural language sentences do not have the compositional properties required to constitute thoughts. Then we analyze the example of a subject's overhearing a sentence without an interpretive context, arguing that in the light of the Availability Principle the corresponding thought can be regarded as a natural language sentence. Thus, semantic underdeterminacy and availability pull in different directions, and we claim that there is no characterization of the latter that can relieve this tension. We contend that Recanati's availability shares with Carruthers's introspectivism an overreliance on intuitions about what appears consciously in one's mmd. We conclude, therefore, that the Availability Principle ought to be abandoned. (shrink)

본 연구는 독일의 철학자인 훔볼트(W. v. Humboldt)와 카시러(E. Cassirer)의 언어관을 상호 비교해 보는 데 그 목적이 있다. 본 연구의 결과를 요약해 보면 다음과 같다. 첫째, 훔볼트와 카시러는 모두 언어를 ‘정신의 활동’, 곧 에네르게이아로 간주한다는 공통점이 있다. 다시 말해 양자는 모두 언어를 정신의 능동적이고 구성적인 활동으로 이해하고 있다. 둘째, 훔볼트에 있어서 언어는 각 민족의 독자적인 세계관을 반영하고 있는 ‘언어적 세계관’으로 이해될 수 있으며, 카시러는 ‘상징형식’이라는 개념을 통해 ‘언어’를 세계인식이나 세계관의 특정한 방식으로 설명한다. 이러한 양자의 입장은 언어를 통한 세계 이해라는 측면에서 공통점이 (...) 있다. 셋째, 훔볼트와 카시러는 언어의 기원에 대해 다소 상이한 입장을 보인다. 훔볼트는 언어의 원형(Typus)이 인간의 이성에 이미 선험적으로 내재되어 있다고 보면서, 그러한 원형에서 언어의 기원을 찾는 데 반해, 카시러에 있어서 언어는 정동과 감성적 충동을 표현하는 기호이기 때문에, 언어의 기원을 추적해 보면 그것은 인간의 ‘정동(Affekts)’에서 찾을 수 있다. 넷째, 훔볼트와 카시러는 칸트로부터 많은 영향을 받았다. 즉, 훔볼트는 칸트가 주장하는 언어의 선험적 성격을 그대로 수용하고 있으며, 카시러는 신칸트학파의 대표적인 인물로 알려져 있듯이, 많은 부분에서 칸트의 사상을 수용하고 있다. 본 논문에서는 이와 같이 훔볼트와 카시러의 언어관에서 나타나는 유사성과 차이성을 해명해 보았다. (shrink)

According to the early Yogācāra, following non-conceptual awareness, the advanced bodhisattva is said to attain a state characterized by a "subsequent awareness". Yogācāra thinkers identify this state with ultimate knowledge of causality and view it as involving a unique kind of conceptual activity and propositional attitudes, which are very different, however, from ordinary conceptual awareness insofar as they do not involve vikalpa. Translated back into the terms of some version of the contemporary debate between conceptualists and nonconceptualists, this would (...) amount to something like the claim that we can use concepts in a non-conceptual way. But how can we make sense... (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction Hegel's Linguistic Inheritance Hegel's Early View of Language in the Jena Period (1804–1806) Language in the Jena Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) Language in Hegel's ‘Mature System’ ( The Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences ) (1818–1830) The Philosophy of Language: The Unwritten Volume.

이 글은 노장(老莊)의 언어와 실재에 대한 문제의식과 관점을 철학 치료주의 관점에서 재구성한 것이다. 노장 사상에서 철학 치료주의는 ‘철학 실천(philosophy practice)’을 가리키며, 그것을 제시한 궁극적인 목적은 ‘언어(language)’와 ‘실재(reality)’의 균열에서 비롯되는 ‘철학적 질병(philosophical disease)’을 규명하고 이를 적극적으로 치료하려는 데 있다. 이러한 문제의식과 구도를 고려할 때, 노장의 철학 치료주의는 일종의 언어 철학적 치료주의로 규정할 수 있는데, 이러한 목적을 성취하기 위해서 노장은 무엇보다도 기존의 도(道)와 사물의 실재성에 대한 사람들의 잘못된 인식과 판단을 해체하려고 시도한다. 노장이 보기에 언어와 실재 사이의 분열의 근본 원인은 언제나 부단한 (...) 운동을 전개하는 실재에 대한 언어의 양가적 분절(double-headed articulation)에 기초한 규정에 있다. 따라서 그것을 보다 효과적으로 치료하려면 이러한 언어적 인식과 존재의 실재성의 본질적 차이에 대한 예민한 통찰이 필요하며, 나아가 일종의 노에시스적 역전(noetic reversal)에 근거한 언어적 전회가 필요하다. 이처럼 인식 전환과 실천 행위를 통해 얻게 되는 참된 지혜는 기존의 지배 담론과 가치 규범에 의해 은폐되어온 도와 사물의 본래적 실재성과 존재의 논리를 온전히 밝혀주는 동시에 언어적 인식과 존재의 실재성이 서로 조화를 이룰 수 있는 새로운 길을 열어준다. 그 핵심은 기존의 기표(Signifiant)와 기의(Signifié)의 고정성과 폐쇄성을 부단히 해체하는 동시에 재구성하는 언어 행위를 통해서 탈-은폐된 자아의식을 형성하고 표현하는 것이다. 그리고 이러한 지혜와 언어 행위에 근거한 개체의 사유 방식과 삶은 사물의 경제적ㆍ사회적ㆍ정치적 유용성에 기초한 기술적 관심(technische Interesse)과 담론의 제약을 벗어나 진정한 자발성과 개방성을 토대로 한 인식과 삶을 구가하게 된다. 이것이 곧 노장이 철학 치료주의의 한 유형으로서 언어 철학적 치료주의를 제시한 궁극적 이념이다. (shrink)

Spoken language is an innate ability of the human being and represents the most widespread mode of social communication. The ability to share concepts, intentions and feelings, and also to respond to what others are feeling/saying is crucial during social interactions. A growing body of evidence suggests that language evolved from manual gestures, gradually incorporating motor acts with vocal elements. In this evolutionary context, the human mirror mechanism (MM) would permit the passage from “doing something” to “communicating it (...) to someone else.” In this perspective, the MM would mediate semantic processes being involved in both the execution and in the understanding of messages expressed by words or gestures. Thus, the recognition of action related words would activate somatosensory regions, reflecting the semantic grounding of these symbols in action information. Here, the role of the sensorimotor cortex and in general of the human MM on both language perception and understanding is addressed, focusing on recent studies on the integration between symbolic gestures and speech. We conclude documenting some evidence about MM in coding also the emotional aspects conveyed by manual, facial and body signals during communication, and how they act in concert with language to modulate other’s message comprehension and behavior, in line with an “embodied” and integrated view of social interaction. (shrink)

The current study investigates classroom interactivity in L2 tertiary literature classrooms in Hong Kong and Taiwan when ESL/efl students engage with and interpret literary texts in classroom talk as a pedagogic process of text recontextualization. It proposes a more ecological-based approach to language and languaging dynamics that is complementary to current social semiotic approaches to multimodality. It also aims to open up a more embodied analysis of the meaning-making process in tertiary literature classrooms. The multimodal investigation of real-time classroom (...) interactivity based on a multi-scalar approach showcases an embodied coordination of vocalization and gesticulation as integral aspects of the dynamic whole-body sense-making activity that arises in the pedagogic process of text recontextualization. The dynamics vary from students’ solo speech in individual presentation to teacher–student interactions in group discussion and to student–student interactions in role-play. The distributed language view of first-order languaging dynamics demonstrates the embodied and distributed dimensions of the real-time classroom interactivity that couples pedagogic subjects to the affordances of their pedagogic environment. It also provides insights into the impact of pedagogic activities on the multi-scalar dynamics of the meaning-making process with reference to embodied speech–gesture coordination. The paper demonstrates the value of applying an ecologically embodied perspective to multimodal studies in classroom research and stimulates a re-thinking of some of the important aspects of classroom interactivity that have received little attention thus far. (shrink)

The thesis of social constructionism is that emotions are shaped by culture and society. I build on this insight to show that existing social constructionist views of emotions, while providing valid research methods, overly restrict the scope of the social constructionist agenda. The restriction is due to the ontological assumption that social construction is indissociable from language. In the first part, I describe the details of the influential social constructionist views of Averill and Harré. Drawing on recent theorizing in (...) psychology, I suggest that their fixation on language makes these approaches inadequate to the analysis of the social construction of human emotional experience. In the second part, I extend the argument to other species, suggesting that these social constructionist views are incapable of accommodating the fact, ascertained by primatologists, that animals have cultures, and that part of animal culture concerns the social molding of their emotions. I conclude that a reconstructed social constructionism should be regarded not as inimical to, but as part and parcel of, a nonreductive biology of emotions. (shrink)

Georges Rey presents a much-needed philosophical defense of Noam Chomsky's famous view of human language, as an internal, innate computational system. But he also offers a critical examination of problematic developments of this view, to do with innateness, ontology, intentionality, and other issues of interdisciplinary interest.

In recent years there has been much productive interaction between phenomenological authors and work in (‘4e’) cognitive science emphasizing the embodied, embedded, enactive and extended nature of cognition. These interactions have centred on areas of interest common to phenomenology and philosophy of mind, such as embodiment or first-personal experience, with language receiving relatively little attention. This paper aims to broaden these interactions by showing how phenomenology of language complements systematic empirical theories in the 4e tradition. It begins by (...) outlining a phenomenological view of language and suggesting some differences between this and plausibly naturalizable nonextended mental states. I then argue that 4e cognitive science has a general need for phenomenology of language due to the central role it attributes to ‘scaffolds’, before highlighting more specifically how phenomenology provides an image of language better suited to 4e cognitive science than the ‘rules and representations’ model from which this distances itself. (shrink)

There is a certain view of religion, deriving from Wittgenstein’s thought, that might be called the language-game view of religion. It has many parts, but in essence it holds–in its own terms–that religion is a language-game in fact engaged in by men; or, what seems to be an alternative way of saying the same thing, or very nearly the same. thing, religion is a form of life participated in by men. As such it is in order. (...) Although one needs to enter into the torm ot lite and engage in the language-game to learn its grammar or logic and to see the order that it has. For its order has internal criteria: what count as, e.g., rational and meaningful within religion are determined not by criteria appropriate to physics or chess playing but by criteria appropriate to religion as it is lived by the religious. (shrink)

Philosophical views of language have traditionally been focused on notions of truth. This is a reconstructive view in that we try to extract from an utterance in context what the sentence and speaker meaning are. This focus on meaning extraction from word sequences alone, however, is challenged by utterances which combine different types of figures. This paper argues that what appears to be a special case of ironic utterances—ironic metaphorical compounds—sheds light on the requirements for psychological plausibility of (...) a theory of communication and thus presents a different view of communication and language to that dominant in philosophy of language. In the view presented here, the hearer does not extract the speaker’s communicative intention from the sequence of words in the utterance, but from other channels, so as to constrain the inferential space for the sentence and speaker meaning. Specifically, we examine an example of ironic metaphor discussed by Stern. He argues that ironic content is logically dependent on metaphorical content, but makes no claims about how psychologically plausible this is in terms of the processing order. We argue that a straightforward translation of logical order into temporal order makes little sense. The primary sticking point is that without a prior understanding of the speaker’s communicative intentions, it is computationally more challenging to process the sub-component meanings. An alternative solution based on communicative channels leads us to a more psychologically plausible account of the structure of communicative acts and intentions. This provides support for the psychological realism of a richer theory of communicative intent. (shrink)

How language works — its functions, mechanisms, and limitations — matters to the early moderns as much as it does to contemporary philosophers. Many of the moderns make reflection on language central to their philosophical projects, both as a tool for explaining human cognition and as a weapon to be used against competing views. Even in philosophers for whom language is less central, we can find important connections between their views on language and their other philosophical (...) commitments. (shrink)

Together with language, music is perhaps the most distinctive behavioral trait of the human species. Different hypotheses have been proposed to explain why only humans perform music and how this ability might have evolved in our species. In this paper, we advance a new model of music evolution that builds on the self-domestication view of human evolution, according to which the human phenotype is, at least in part, the outcome of a process similar to domestication in other mammals, (...) triggered by the reduction in reactive aggression responses to environmental changes. We specifically argue that self-domestication can account for some of the cognitive changes, and particularly for the behaviors conducive to the complexification of music through a cultural mechanism. We hypothesize four stages in the evolution of music under self-domestication forces: (1) collective protomusic; (2) private, timbre-oriented music; (3) small-group, pitch-oriented music; and (4) collective, tonally organized music. This line of development encompasses the worldwide diversity of music types and genres and parallels what has been hypothesized for languages. Overall, music diversity might have emerged in a gradual fashion under the effects of the enhanced cultural niche construction as shaped by the progressive decrease in reactive (i.e., impulsive, triggered by fear or anger) aggression and the increase in proactive (i.e., premeditated, goal-directed) aggression. (shrink)

Since the publication of The Structure of Scientific Revolution , relativism, resulting from the concepts of paradigm and paradigm shift, becomes one of the central problems in the philosophy of science. The author of this dissertation agrees with Thomas Kuhn in his criticism of the Logical Positivism, but denies that relativism arrives as a direct consequence. In this dissertation, the author tries to tackle the problem by analyzing some underlying basic concepts, e.g. paradigm, language and rationality. Firstly, he points (...) out that a hard-core model of paradigm, as understood by I. Lakatos, is not totally appropriate for an all-rounded understanding of a paradigm. Rather, among the elements certain "family resemblance" comes to the surface, they are therefore regarded as belonging to the same paradigm. A paradigm is not a hindrance to but an exemplar for our learning. And a paradigm shift needs not result in a total switch over, it could be a revolution with inheritance. Secondly, the incommesurability of languages does not mean the breakdown of communication between different linguistic communities. True bilinguals can achieve cross-paradigm understanding. In addition, due to the creative activities within a language, the problem of untranslatability could be solved. Finally, rationality, rather than assuming a hierarchical structure, could be taken as a reticulated model. As a result, various disagreements at the axiological level could be rationally resolved. ;The author also tackles in passing some issues concerning language and rationality in the Chinese tradition of science, and compares this tradition with that of the western. (shrink)

The chapter considers the relation between language and logic in early Daoism. It explains the Daoist experience of language, which is closely related to the Daoist experience of the Way (dao). It is shown how Daoist logic differs from the Confucian logic of correctness and the Mohist logic of naming. Even if Daoist discourse does not follow these more familiar forms of logic, it does not negate the law of non-contradiction nor does it fall into the performative contradiction. (...) Through readings of significant Daoist stories the Daoist logic beyond logic is brought to view. (shrink)

What do ‘meaning’ and ‘truth’ mean? And how are they situated in the concrete practices of linguistic communication? What is the relationship between words and the world? How—with words—can people do such varied things as marry, inaugurate a president, and declare a country’s independence? How is language able to express knowledge, belief, and other mental states? What are metaphors and how do they work? Is a mathematically rigorous account of language possible? Does language make women invisible and (...) encode a male worldview? These are the kind of questions that have been addressed by philosophers of language since ancient times. Interest in the subject stretches back to the beginnings of western philosophy . Interest in the philosophy of language has also been enduring—and has blossomed anew in the past century. This new title in the Routledge series, Critical Concepts in Philosophy, meets the need for an authoritative reference work to make sense of the subject’s vast literature and the continuing explosion in research output. Edited by A. P. Martinich, one of the subdiscipline’s leading scholars, this collection brings together in four volumes the canonical and the very best cutting-edge scholarship in the field to provide a synoptic view of all the key issues, figures, concepts, and current debates. With comprehensive introductions to each volume, newly written by the editor, which place the collected material in its historical and intellectual context, Philosophy of Language is an essential work of reference and is destined to be valued by philosophers and linguists—as well as psychologists and cognitive scientists working on language—as a vital research resource. (shrink)

The work of Lakoff (1987), Lakoff and Kovecses (1987), and Kovecses (1990, 2000a, 2002) on anger situates it within the bounds of "PHYSIOLOGICAL EFFECTS OF AN EMOTION STAND FOR THE EMOTION," thus implying a universal form of physiological embodiment for anger. The main contribution of this article is that anger in Tunisian Arabic (TA) shows many more dimensions of embodiment than physiological embodiment. Anger in TA comes as physiological embodiment, culturally specific embodiment, and culturally tainted embodiment. Similar to English, physiological (...) embodiment yields expressions of anger where the part of the body used for conceptualization is also actually physiologically affected. Culturally specific embodiment involves parts of the body that are culturally correlated with the emotion of anger. Culturally tainted embodiment uses animal behaviors and cultural ecological features to taint physiologically embodied anger expressions. These types of embodiment are shown to generally correlate physiology-based anger with metonymy, and culture-based anger with metaphor. (shrink)

The vast majority of Islamic scholars have claimed that the miraculousness of the Quran stems from its own structure; its fluency, eloquence and verse characteristics. They have also regarded the science of rhetoric as the basic tool for revealing the literary superiority of the Quran and understanding it properly. The objective of this research is to determine the views of the students of theology and sharia faculties on the rhetoric course and present them comparatively. To understand how rhetoric is taught (...) in different cultural and educational contexts, how it is perceived by students, and how the course contributes to their academic and personal development matters in terms of improving the rhetoric course. The method used in the study is qualitative research and the study was conducted in the phenomenological design. The study group of the research consists of the students studying at Cumhuriyet University Faculty of Theology, Batman University Faculty of Islamic Sciences and The University of Jordan- School of Sharia. The data were collected from the students selected by criterion sampling method using a semi-structured interview form in the second semester of the 2023-2024 academic year. The main criterion used was that the participants' native language was not Arabic and that they were taking a rhetoric course. Descriptive analysis technique was used to analyze the collected data. At the end of the research, it was concluded that the rhetoric course was important for the fields of the students at theology and sharia faculties. The vast majority of the students of faculty of theology stated that the rhetoric course contributed to the improvement of their Arabic, and a significant portion of them stated that the course was an important tool in understanding the Quran, other religious texts, and Arabic literature. Almost all of the students of the faculty of sharia stated that the course contributed to the understanding of the Quran in general, especially its literary i‘jâz. It was also concluded that a significant portion of both student groups had difficulty in the rhetoric course. According to the students of the faculty of theology, the most important issue that makes rhetoric difficult is their weak Arabic background, while according to the Sharia faculty students, it is their first encounter with rhetoric topics. The results reveal that the rhetoric course is effective in understanding the Quran and other religious texts and in developing students' thinking and expression skills, but the content and teaching method of the course needs to be updated. Within the framework of the findings and results of the research, it is suggested that the content of the rhetoric course should be organized in a way to center the literary aspect of the Qur'an in accordance with the theology program and more participatory teaching methods should be used. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Metamorphosis of Language in Apuleius: A Study of Allusion in the NovelGerald SandyEllen D. Finkelpearl. Metamorphosis of Language in Apuleius: A Study of Allusion in the Novel. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998. xii 1 241 pp. Cloth, $42.50.At first glance the use of the word “allusion” in the subtitle of this book suggests an old-fashioned approach to literary analysis. Finkelpearl has, however, given a (...) lot of thought to her choice of terms. She acknowledges the equivocalness of allusions but prefers to use this word for the process of incorporating material from earlier writers rather than “reference” or “intertextuality.” In spite of her somewhat informal description of the process of allusion (“recalling, modifying, transforming, and playing around with passages”), she has made a conscientious effort to circumvent the “fuzziness and inexactitude” of identifying allusions by making vigorous use of TLL and other traditional philological aids in order to isolate words, phrases, and lexical combinations that are unique to Apuleius and his putative sources. She has also deliberately avoided applying a single theoretical model, because “Apuleius draws on a wide variety of genres from different time periods,... use[s] his sources differently at different times [and]... often maintains an ambiguous stance—between rejection and incorporation, homage and polemic—even within single allusions” (24). This “ambiguous stance” is in fact central to the thesis that Finkelpearl consistently develops in her book: In the Metamorphoses, “allusion provides a medium [End Page 471] for exploration of the fit between the novel and the genres it contains and helps the novel toward a definition of its genre” (27). She emphasizes the ambiguity of her subject from the beginning to the end of her book, stating in chapter 1 that her aim is “to examine the multiplicity of interactions between the Apuleian text and its forebears, with a vigilant consciousness of the novel’s various uncertainties” (31) and concluding that she has focused on the tensions caused by situating “an uncertain genre” within a defined literary tradition.There is no uncertainty about the structure of the book. Each of the eight chapters begins with a survey of relevant scholarship and a declaration of Finkelpearl’s place within, or outside of, the range of summarized views. The sequence of chapters also unfolds logically. After surveying in chapter 1 (“Background and Method”) the various scholarly procedures that have been used to characterize allusions, she progresses from the seemingly most simple (parody) to the most complex practices of allusion. One of the strongest features of the book is that she manages to uncover complex patterns of allusion in passages that other scholars have been content to label parodies. Good examples of this resourcefulness occur in Finkelpearl’s examination of Apuleius’ use of Sallust, one of the canonical Latin archaic models during the second half of the second century. At 1.16.2–3 the “low-life character” Aristomenes makes an unsuccessful attempt to commit suicide by hanging himself with a rope attached to his bed. He addresses the bed in the words spoken by Adherbal over the corpse of his brother Hiempsal (BJ 14.22), substituting, however, grabattule for frater. Other scholars have commented on the obvious disparity between the dignified poignancy of the passage in Sallust and the low-life melodrama of the Apuleian revamping of it. Finkelpearl explains that “the choice of reference has relevance beyond its comic effect” (51), for Aristomenes’ words are “motivated by the questions posed... [by Adherbal] about life and death in the face of fratricide and injustice.” As she puts it, “Apuleius never merely defaces or satirizes; examination of his text reveals a complex thematic engagement with his sources.”In chapter 3 (“Reading Isolated Allusions”) Finkelpearl also manages to find overarching resonance in seemingly isolated pastiches. Others, including me, have perhaps been too quick to conclude that Lucius’ prolonged praise of the maidservant Fotis’ hair in book 2 of the novel is an empty piece of the type of rhetorical tour de force that characterizes the Second Sophistic. Finkelpearl argues, however, that hairstyle and other styles of appearance and dress can serve in the Augustan poets as emblems of literary doctrine and that Apuleius... (shrink)

The article argues for the possibility of translation manuals having an implicit internal structure. This structure is composed of specific methodological assumptions and techniques. Using the (N)-type and (G)-type distinction developed by Fuller for the study of scientific behavior, it is shown that these are incomplete characterizations of translation manuals. A more complete characterization must involve an analysis of how the presence or absence of methodological rules influences the interpretation of specific research questions. It is further argued that while Quine's (...) original indeterminacy thesis cannot be completely rejected, in some cases it can be modified to reflect the importance of the methodological constraints. Finally, it is suggested that the more critical analysis of translation manuals will benefit the on-going debates in the study of scientific behavior. (shrink)