Journal Name: Semiotica - Journal of the International Association for Semiotic Studies / Revue de l'Association Internationale de Sémiotique Volume: 2013 Issue: 195 Pages: 127-167.

Cognitive Science, Volume 46, Issue 2, February 2022.

Whether pattern-parsing mechanisms are specific to language or apply across multiple cognitive domains remains unresolved. Formal language theory provides a mathematical framework for classifying pattern-generating rule sets (or “grammars”) according to complexity. This framework applies to patterns at any level of complexity, stretching from simple sequences, to highly complex tree-like or net-like structures, to any Turing-computable set of strings. Here, we explored human pattern-processing capabilities in the visual domain by generating abstract visual sequences made up of abstract tiles (...) differing in form and color. We constructed different sets of sequences, using artificial “grammars” (rule sets) at three key complexity levels. Because human linguistic syntax is classed as “mildly context-sensitive,” we specifically included a visual grammar at this complexity level. Acquisition of these three grammars was tested in an artificial grammar-learning paradigm: after exposure to a set of well-formed strings, participants were asked to discriminate novel grammatical patterns from non-grammatical patterns. Participants successfully acquired all three grammars after only minutes of exposure, correctly generalizing to novel stimuli and to novel stimulus lengths. A Bayesian analysis excluded multiple alternative hypotheses and shows that the success in rule acquisition applies both at the group level and for most participants analyzed individually. These experimental results demonstrate rapid pattern learning for abstract visual patterns, extending to the mildly context-sensitive level characterizing language. We suggest that a formal equivalence of processing at the mildly context sensitive level in the visual and linguistic domains implies that cognitive mechanisms with the computational power to process linguistic syntax are not specific to the domain of language, but extend to abstract visual patterns with no meaning. (shrink)

While the PREDICATE(x) structure requires close coordination of subject and predicate, both represented in consciousness, the cognitive (ventral), and sensorimotor (dorsal) pathways operate in parallel. Sensorimotor information is unconscious and can contradict cognitive spatial information. A more likely origin of linguistic grammar lies in the mammalian action planning process. Neurological machinery evolved for planning of action sequences becomes applied to planning communicatory sequences.

In January 2019, What is Peppa?, a promotional video for a Chinese New Year movie, received widespread attention in China immediately after its release. This paper explains the success of the video from the perspective of visual framing, and employs Systemic Visual Grammar to analyze how visual semiotics are applied to frame prominent topics so as to achieve promotional purposes. The results show that: (i) visual semiotics are used to frame the topic of empty nesters, (...) implying that this issue brings negative consequences and evoking the audience’s empathy and concern; (ii) visuals frame the topic of family love, in which the main protagonist’s actions are highlighted; and (iii) the topic of family reunion is mainly framed and realized by delicate compositional arrangements. Using various visual semiotics at the denotative, stylistic-semantic, connotative, and ideological levels, this video establishes both visual and emotional communication between the main character and the audience, making the promotional purpose more successful. The results highlight and specify the important roles of visual frames in promotional videos, and the integration of Peppa with traditional Chinese culture, love, and family reunion represents a visual approach to glocalization. (shrink)

This paper provides a précis of Ernst Cassirer’s concept of art as a symbolic form. It does so, though, in a specific respect. It points to the fact that Cassirer’s concept of “symbolic form” is two-sided. On the one hand, the concept captures general cultural phenomena that are not only meaningful but also manifest the way man makes sense of the world; thus myth, religion, and art are considered general symbolic forms. On the other hand, it captures the formal structures (...) and semiotic tools thanks to which meaning is constructed within each general symbolic form ; thus, in art, perspective or the golden section are well-known examples of symbolic forms, now in a narrow sense, i.e. they are means to configure parts into an organized, meaningful whole. The paper will comment on art along both these two dimensions, but its main goal is to provide with concrete examples of aesthetic symbolic forms in the narrow sense in order to show how conceptual meaning can be inscribed in the space of aesthetic intuition. (shrink)

Grammar is a word associated with the rules that govern language and its related pedagogy for articulating types of declarative knowledge. It can also refer to the organizational structure of practices and their related forms of knowledge, as described here by Ludwig Wittgenstein: “Essence is expressed in grammar.... Grammar tells us what kind of object anything is. (Theology as grammar.)”1 Wittgenstein’s remark about theology can be generalized to visual art, and, by extension, to the grammatical (...) structure of art education. The grammar of creative practices is described by George Steiner as the “articulate organisation of perception, reflection and experience, the nerve structure of consciousness when.. (shrink)

Studies of AGL have frequently used training and test stimuli that might provide multiple cues for learning, raising the question what subjects have actually learned. Using a selected subset of studies on humans and non‐human animals, Trotter et al. demonstrate how a meta‐analysis can be used to identify relevant experimental variables, providing a first step in asssessing the relative contribution of design features of grammars as well as of species‐specific effects on AGL.

This volume gathers papers, which were read at the congress held at the University of Castilla-La Mancha in Toledo (Spain), in September 2007, under the general subject of phenomenology. The book is devoted to Wittgenstein s thoughts on phenomenology. One of its aims is to consider and examine the lasting importance of phenomenology for philosophic discussion. For E. Husserl phenomenology was a discipline that endeavoured to describe how the world is constituted and experienced through a series of conscious acts. His (...) fundamental concept was that of intentional consciousness. What did drag Wittgenstein into working on phenomenology? In his 'middle period' work, Wittgenstein used the headline 'Phenomenology is Grammar'. These cornerstones can be signalled by notions like language, grammar, rule, visual space versus Euclidean space, minima visibilia and colours. L. Wittgenstein s main interest takes the form of a research on language.". (shrink)

_Toward a Grammar ofion_ takes as its point of departure three features of modern art reading: the practice of translating the visual into institutional language, the vocabulary of representation in relation to abstract art, and the prevalence of totality as a model of art-historical knowledge.

Current inter-disciplinarity has rendered it feasible to utilize implements and methodologies to navigate around the communication of fashion at textual as well as material levels, reified by inter-semiotic and cultural translation. Fashion communication, from the perspective of post-translation studies, is a process of cultural translation with visual symbols as its text, visual rhetoric as its core meaning system, and visual stylists as its translator. This study takes one of the most formidable and awe-inspiring icons – the Chinese (...) totem Loong 龙 as the main research object, through the analysis of multifarious styles of visual text structures across the entire process of fashion communication, to deconstruct the semiotic transformation of Loong 龙 by means of visual rhetoric. In forging this rhetorical dynamic within the realm of visual art, the cultural translative procedure is orchestrated primarily through the registers of field, tenor, and mode. Furthermore, it is molded by the intricate interplay of transitivity, mood, and modality, culminating in this newly proposed concept – “cultural functionality” through the lens of systemic functional grammar. This study, by means of this rhetorical, semiotic approach, forays into the profundity of what is named as “Made in China” and showcases Chinese spirit in fashion communication. (shrink)

Narratives are an integral part of human expression. In the graphic form, they range from cave paintings to Egyptian hieroglyphics, from the Bayeux Tapestry to modern day comic books (Kunzle, 1973; McCloud, 1993). Yet not much research has addressed the structure and comprehension of narrative images, for example, how do people create meaning out of sequential images? This piece helps fill the gap by presenting a theory of Narrative Grammar. We describe the basic narrative categories and their relationship to (...) a canonical narrative arc, followed by a discussion of complex structures that extend beyond the canonical schema. This demands that the canonical arc be reconsidered as a generative schema whereby any narrative category can be expanded into a node in a tree structure. Narrative “pacing” is interpreted as a reflection of various patterns of this embedding: conjunction, left-branching trees, center-embedded constituencies, and others. Following this, diagnostic methods are proposed for testing narrative categories and constituency. Finally, we outline the applicability of this theory beyond sequential images, such as to film and verbal discourse, and compare this theory with previous approaches to narrative and discourse. (shrink)

A range of arguments are presented to demonstrate that (1) human visual orientations are conceptually constituted (concept?bound); (2) the concept?boundedness of visual orientations does not require a cognitivist account according to which a mental process of ?inference? or of ?interpretation? must be postulated to accompany a purely ?optical? registration of ?wavelengths of light?, ?photons?, or contentless ?information'; (3) concept?bound visual orientations are not all instances of ?seeing as?, contrary to some currently prominent cognitivist accounts; (4) the dispute (...) between cognitivist and realist accounts about the phenomenon of ?seeing as? is spurious, and is based upon a confusion about the fundamental analytical distinction made by Wittgenstein between ?seeing? and ?seeing as'; (5) ?perceiving?, ?seeing?, and ?seeing as? are but three of a large array of verbs of human visual orientation, and are not ?master categories? under which one can subsume these other modalities; (6) one cannot deduce a continuity of human visual orientation from a continuity of photon?photoreceptor interaction, a point we characterize as the ?staggered character? of human visual orientations; (7) detailed attention to the grammars of the diverse verbs of human visual orientation can open up a domain of study which we here refer to as a ?praxiology of perception'; (8) the nature of such an inquiry can be illustrated with exemplary reference to the analysis of the properties of ?noticing? as embedded in courses of practical action; and (9) such arguments, which claim that existing perceptual theories overly homogenize what is involved in visual orientations to the world, parallel those of Stroll, who proposes that standard accounts of ?what is perceived? overly homogenize the perceptible environment. (shrink)

Although requests constitute a type of action that have been widely discussed within conversation analysis-oriented work, they have only recently begun to be explored in relation to the situated and multimodal dimensions in which they occur. The contribution of this paper resides in the integration of bodily-visual conduct (gaze and facial expression, gesture and locomotion, object manipulation) into a more grammatical account of requesting. Drawing on video recordings collected in two different hair salons located in the French-speaking part of (...) Switzerland and in France (23 h in total), this paper analyzes clients’ negative requests by exploring how they interface with the participants’ embodied conducts. Contrary to what the literature describes for positively formulated requests, with negative requests clients challenge an expectable next action (or ongoing action) by the hairdresser. One linguistic format constitutes the focus of this article, roughly glossable as ‘You don’t do [action X] too much (huh)’. Our analysis of a consistent collection of such formatted turns will show that clients present them (and hairdressers tend to treat them) in different ways, depending on how they relate to embodied conduct: When these turns are used by the client as instructions, they are accompanied by manipulations of the client’s own hair and tend to occur toward the initial phase of the encounter, at a stage when hairdressers and clients collaboratively negotiate the service in prospect. When uttered as directives, these turns are not accompanied by any touching practices from the client and are typically observable in subsequent phases of the encounter, making relevant an immediate linguistic or/and bodily response from the professional, as shown by the client who is actively pursuing mutual gaze with him/her. Therefore, an action cannot be distinguished from another on the basis of the turn format alone: Its sequential placement and the participants’ co-occurring embodied conduct contribute to its situated and shared understanding. By analyzing the clients’ use of a specific linguistic format conjointly with the deployment of specific embodied resources, this study will advance our understanding of how verbal resources and embodiment operate in concert with each other in the formation and understanding of actions, thereby feeding into new areas of research on the grammar-body interface. (shrink)

Research on metaphor has over the past decades increasingly been extended to its visual and multimodal varieties. While analysts of verbal metaphors are helped by the fact that languages have grammars and vocabularies, researchers of visual and multimodal metaphors need to rely on other methods for identification and interpretation. One approach that claims to have developed a robust method for analyzing metaphor in moving images is FILMIP, which has hitherto focused on the specific genre of commercials. In this (...) paper it is argued that there are serious problems with FILMIP. First, the theoretical basis of FILMIP and two empirical studies drawing on it are discussed. Subsequently, its limited use for analyzing metaphors in the genre of feature films is demonstrated on the basis of four case studies. The paper ends with sketching some general advice pertaining to researching metaphor in film, and provides a cautious alternative to FILMIP. (shrink)

How does a picture teach a viewer to look at it, understand it, and make meaning?. “Cross-mediality and narrative textual form: A semiotic snalysis of the lexical and visual signs and codes of the picture bnook.” Semiotica, 118 : 1–70 and Peter Pericles Trifonas.. “Texts and images.” In International handbook of semiotics, Vols. 1&2, edited by Peter Pericles Trifonas. The Netherlands: Springer. Pp. 1139–1154.) The suggestion for a pictorial grammar has been derived from the fact that pictures have (...) no unique visual metalanguage and therefore require recourse to language as an instrument for pictorial analysis. The lexical-visual relationship in a text is more complex than is suggested in the question. Proponents for the semiotic autonomy of pictures have objected that the commentaries of crossmedial contexts have not asserted the semiotic priority of the lexical over the visual message. ‘Is an autonomous semiotics of visual perception possible, or does the semiotic analysis of pictorial text always require recourse to the model of language?’. (shrink)

Summary In this contribution, I discuss the perceptual potential of certain genres of experimental and contemporary music, commonly grouped under the label “sound-based music”. The sonic patterns typical of this music are mostly associated, during listening, with visual and tactile sensory qualities and can evoke mental representations as shapes in motion. These are the result of physical-acoustic energies organized according to a perceptual grammar whose organization follows a series of Gestalt and kinaesthetic principles. The paper explores the nature (...) of the relationship between sound patterns of sound-based music and their mental images. Based on morphodynamic theory, it is proposed the emergence of cognitive image schemas, which are at the centre of this relationship. The image schemas depict the forces and tensions of our experience of the world (e.g., figure-background, near-far, superimposition, compulsion, blockage), as being the cognitive and experiential response to the incoming sound patterns. The sense of this music activates precisely the basic structures of sensorimotor experience by which we encounter a world that we can understand and act within, leading to a rich series of high-level associations and responses. (shrink)

What is the meaning of historical changes to the visualisation of knowledge? This article examines the long history of the Latin grammar from antiquity until early modernity and traces shifts in graphics through hundreds of manuscripts and printed books. It shows how the table—today the most common means for representation of grammatical paradigms—only became a common feature of grammar books in the Renaissance. To account for this visual change requires teasing apart the effects of intellectual from material (...) factors on one of the most basic branches of knowledge and learning. It brings to the fore educational practices which are often unnoticed by scholars and shows how humanism, paper and print interacted in forming a new learning experience. Following the evolution of one schoolbook genre throughout a millennium and a half, the articles challenges some of our notions regarding transmission of ideas and entails some important methodological lessons about dealing with visualisations in scientific texts more generally. Above all, it underscores the importance of cognitive considerations in shaping epistemic genres and whole fields of knowledge. (shrink)

Music can be interpreted by attributing syntactic relationships to sequential musical events, and, computationally, such musical interpretation represents an analogous combinatorial task to syntactic processing in language. While this perspective has been primarily addressed in the domain of harmony, we focus here on rhythm in the Western tonal idiom, and we propose for the first time a framework for modeling the moment‐by‐moment execution of processing operations involved in the interpretation of music. Our approach is based on (1) a music‐theoretically motivated (...) grammar formalizing the competence of rhythmic interpretation in terms of three basic types of dependency (preparation, syncopation, and split; Rohrmeier, 2020), and (2) psychologically plausible predictions about the complexity of structural integration and memory storage operations, necessary for parsing hierarchical dependencies, derived from the dependency locality theory (Gibson, 2000). With a behavioral experiment, we exemplify an empirical implementation of the proposed theoretical framework. One hundred listeners were asked to reproduce the location of a visual flash presented while listening to three rhythmic excerpts, each exemplifying a different interpretation under the formal grammar. The hypothesized execution of syntactic‐processing operations was found to be a significant predictor of the observed displacement between the reported and the objective location of the flashes. Overall, this study presents a theoretical approach and a first empirical proof‐of‐concept for modeling the cognitive process resulting in such interpretation as a form of syntactic parsing with algorithmic similarities to its linguistic counterpart. Results from the present small‐scale experiment should not be read as a final test of the theory, but they are consistent with the theoretical predictions after controlling for several possible confounding factors and may form the basis for further large‐scale and ecological testing. (shrink)

The implicit-explicit distinction is applied to knowledge representations. Knowledge is taken to be an attitude towards a proposition which is true. The proposition itself predicates a property to some entity. A number of ways in which knowledge can be implicit or explicit emerge. If a higher aspect is known explicitly then each lower one must also be known explicitly. This partial hierarchy reduces the number of ways in which knowledge can be explicit. In the most important type of implicit knowledge, (...) representations merely reflect the property of objects or events without predicating them of any particular entity The dearest cases of explicit knowledge of a fact are representations of one's own attitude of knowing that fact. These distinctions are discussed in their relationship to similar distinctions such as procedural-declarative, conscious unconscious, verbalizable-nonverbalizable, direct-indirect tests, and automatic voluntary control. This is followed by an outline of how these distinctions can be used to integrate and relate the often divergent uses of the implicit-explicit distinction in different research areas. We illustrate this for visual perception, memory, cognitive development, and artificial grammar learning. (shrink)

As James Chapman has famously put it in National Identity and the British Historical Film, historical films are “as much about the present in which they are made as they are about [the] past in which they are set.” This article discusses Shekhar Kapur’s aesthetically ground-breaking Elizabeth and its sequel Elizabeth: The Golden Age focusing on two main aspects, namely national identity issues and the representation of the enemy. Kapur’s Elizabeth films will first be placed within the larger context of (...) Elizabeth’s film and television appearances. Informed by Giroux’s critical methodology guidelines, in an attempt to “historize” the films under scrutiny and so foster “sane historical sense,” a se­miotic analysis will then be offered. Largely inspired by the tenets of Fairclough’s critical discourse analysis and Kress and Leeuwen’s visual grammar, this will draw a parallel between the verbal and visual discourses in both films. Data will finally be discussed and the contention will be made that England’s religious heritage has left indelible traces which remain latent in the English imagination, for which historical evi­dence will be presented. The article’s ultimate aim will be to provide evidence suggesting that, in the English case, religious and national discourses merged from the late 16th century onwards, clearly influ­en­cing not only the perception that the English had of themselves but also and crucially the image they may still have of “Other” nations. (shrink)

In this article, we show how postphenomenology can be used to analyze the Affinity Map: a data visualization that reveals the hidden dynamics that exist between individuals within large organizations. We make use of the Affinity Map to expand the classic postphenomenology that privileges a ‘linear’ understanding of technological mediations and introduce the notions of ‘iterativity’ and ‘collectivity.’ In the first section of the paper, we discuss both classic and more recent descriptions of human-technology-world relations in order to transcendentally approach (...) the discipline of data visualization. In the second section, we use the Affinity Map case study to consider three elements: 1) the collection of data and the design process; 2) the visual grammar of the data visualization, and 3) the process of self-recognition for the map ‘reader.’ In the third section, we introduce the hermeneutic circle of data visualization. Finally, we suggest that the Affinity Map, because of its ethical and political multistability, might be seen as a material encounter between postphenomenology, actor-network theory (ANT), and hermeneutics. (shrink)

This research investigates how multimodality is applied in logos to build a heritage brand identity for Chinese destinations. As a historical country, China is known for its huge reserves of cultural and natural heritage, which ideally offers abundant resources for developing its tourism industry. These can be taken advantage of in branding its destinations. Kress and van Leeuwen’s Visual Grammar was adopted in this study to conduct a qualitative analysis of the images and words of destination logos collected (...) from 34 provincial-level administrative regions in China. The findings indicate that pictorial and written elements are skillfully used in the logos through the manifestation of heritage, capturing features that convey significant connotations to promote a positive brand identity of the Chinese destinations. This research adds to the existing literature on destination branding through heritage commodification by embodying evocative multimodal features in destination logos, as well as promoting the semiotic approach as an effective tool in constructing the heritage brand identity of Chinese destinations. (shrink)

This article examines the connecting lines between the Chilean Project Cybersyn’s interface design, the German Hochschule für Gestaltung Ulm and its cybernetically inspired approaches towards information design, and later developments in interaction design and the emerging field of Human–Computer Interaction in the USA. In particular, it first examines how early works of designers Tomàs Maldonado and Gui Bonsiepe on operative communication, that is, language-independent pictogram systems and visual grammars for computational systems, were intertwined with attempts to ground industrial design (...) in a scientific methodology, to address an era of computing machines, and to develop the concept of the interface as a heuristic for a renovated design thinking. It thereby also reconstructs further historical vanishing lines—e.g. the pictorial grammar of Otto Neurath’s ISOTYPE—of the development of the ‘ulm model’ of design. Second, the article explores how an apprehension of first-order cybernetics in West Germany—e.g. represented by hfg ulm staff like Max Bense or Abraham Moles, merged with Cybersyn’s second-order cybernetics ideas, as represented by Stafford Beer’s Viable System Model. And third, it asks about a further conceptual turn regarding an understanding of design which resulted in a focus on communicative interaction, e.g. in the later works of Fernando Flores and Terry Winograd on HCI, or in Beer’s Team Syntegrity approach. As an effect, the text will explore a specific and international network of cybernetic thinking between Latin America, Europe, and North America which emerged around Project Cybersyn, and which was occupied with questions of HCI, a democratization of design, and intelligence amplification. (shrink)

Artificial grammar learning (AGL) is used to study how human adults, infants, animals or machines learn various sorts of rules defined over sounds or visual items. Ten Cate et al. introduce the topic and provide a critical synthesis of this important interdisciplinary area of research. They identify the questions that remain open and the challenges that lie ahead, and argue that the limits of human, animal and machine learning abilities have yet to be found.

This study shows how three Chilean media construct in their discourse the social actor ‘secondary students’, in a multimodal way. It focuses on the representation of Televisión Nacional de Chile (also known as TVN), El Dínamo and El Ciudadano of this social group which is often suppressed suppressed from the media sphere. It is a qualitative study with a social semiotic approach, following the guidelines of Visual Grammar and the typology of representation of social actors by van Leeuwen (...) (2003). The corpus comprised 15 multimodal texts of 2018 compiled from internet sites, which constitute a semiotic chain of a news event about education. The results suggest that TVN creates the meaning of an ‘aggressor student’, El Dínamo as a ‘student to be reformed’; whereas El Ciudadano, represents him as a social actor who is an ‘active participant’. (shrink)

This paper presents an experimental study investigating artificial grammar learning (AGL) in monolingual and bilingual children, with and without dyslexia, using an original methodology. We administered a serial reaction time (SRT) task, in the form of a modified Simon task, in which the sequence of the stimuli was manipulated according to the rules of a simple Lindenmayer grammar (more specifically, a Fibonacci grammar). By ensuring that the subjects focused on the correct response execution at the motor stage (...) in presence of congruent or incongruent visual stimuli, we could meet the two fundamental criteria for implicit learning: the absence of an intention to learn and the lack of awareness at the level of resulting knowledge. The participants of our studies were four groups of 10-year-old children: 30 Italian monolingual typically developing children, 30 bilingual typically developing children with Italian L2, 24 Italian monolingual dyslexic children and 24 bilingual dyslexic children with Italian L2. Participants were administered the modified Simon task developed according to the rules of the Fibonacci grammar and tested with respect to the implicit learning of three regularities: (i) a red is followed by a blue; (ii) a sequence of two blues is followed by a red and (iii) a blue can be followed either by a red or by a blue. Results clearly support the hypothesis that implicit learning took place, since participants of all groups became increasingly sensitive to the structure of the input, implicitly learning the sequence of the trials and thus appropriately predicting the occurrence of the relevant items, as manifested by faster reaction times in predictable trials. Moreover, group differences were found, with bilinguals being overall faster than monolinguals and dyslexics less accurate than controls. Finally, an advantage of bilingualism in dyslexia was found, with bilingual dyslexics performing consistently better than monolingual dyslexics and, in some conditions, at the level of the two control groups. These results are taken to suggest that bilingualism should be supported also among linguistically impaired individuals. (shrink)

Glossolalia (“speaking in tongues”) is a rhythmic utterance of word‐like strings of sounds, regularly occurring in religious mass gatherings or various forms of private religious practices (e.g., prayer and meditation). Although specific verbal learning capacities may characterize glossolalists, empirical evidence is lacking. We administered three statistical learning tasks (artificial grammar, phoneme sequence, and visual‐response sequence) to 30 glossolalists and 30 matched control volunteers. In artificial grammar, participants decide whether pseudowords and sentences follow previously acquired implicit rules or (...) not. In sequence learning, they gradually draw out rules from repeating regularities in sequences of speech sounds or motor responses. Results revealed enhanced artificial grammar and phoneme sequence learning performances in glossolalists compared to control volunteers. There were significant positive correlations between daily glossolalia activity and artificial grammar learning. These results indicate that glossolalists exhibit enhanced abilities to extract the statistical regularities of verbal information, which may be related to their unusual language abilities. (shrink)

Cohn's (2013) theory of “Visual Narrative Grammar” argues that sequential images take on categorical roles in a narrative structure, which organizes them into hierarchic constituents analogous to the organization of syntactic categories in sentences. This theory proposes that narrative categories, like syntactic categories, can be identified through diagnostic tests that reveal tendencies for their distribution throughout a sequence. This paper describes four experiments testing these diagnostics to provide support for the validity of these narrative categories. In Experiment 1, (...) participants reconstructed unordered panels of a comic strip into an order that makes sense. Experiment 2 measured viewing times to panels in sequences where the order of panels was reversed. In Experiment 3, participants again reconstructed strips but also deleted a panel from the sequence. Finally, in Experiment 4 participants identified where a panel had been deleted from a comic strip and rated that strip's coherence. Overall, categories had consistent distributional tendencies within experiments and complementary tendencies across experiments. These results point toward an interaction between categorical roles and a global narrative structure. (shrink)

The aim of this chapter is to examine the philosophical conditions of understanding. It is based on Wittgenstein’s talk on understanding recorded by Moritz Schlick. The first two sections contain an overview of the meaning of ‘understand’ and the diversity of language games in which ‘understand’ is used, respectively. The third part deals with the mode in which psychological states are expressed and analyses fallacies produced by the combining of scientific with prescientific expressions. The fourth section is dedicated to the (...) nature of ambiguous concepts and the role of grammar. Finally, the question of what it means to understand a piece of art is discussed by comparing visual language to verbal language. (shrink)

The aim of this study was to find out how people process the dialectal variation encountered in the daily linguistic input. We conducted an eye tracking study (Visual Word Paradigm) that targeted the predictive processing of grammatical gender markers. Three different groups of Norwegian speakers took part in the experiment: one group of students from the capital Oslo, and two groups of dialect speakers from the Western Norwegian town Sogndal. One Sogndal group was defined as ``stable dialect speakers'', and (...) one as ``unstable dialect speakers'', based on a background questionnaire. The students participated in two eye tracking experiments each, one conducted in the their own dialect, and one in the other dialect (i.e., Sogn dialect for the Oslo students, and Oslo dialect for the Sogndal students). The gender systems in the two dialects differ: the Sogn dialect makes an obligatory three-gender split (Masculine, Feminine and Neuter) whereas the Oslo dialect only obligatorily makes a two gender distinction. The research question was whether speakers could use gender markers to predict the upcoming target noun in both local and non-local dialect mode, and furthermore, if they correctly could adjust their expectations based on dialect mode. The results showed that the Sogn speakers could predict upcoming linguistic material both in the local and Oslo dialect, but only the stable group were able to adjust their predictions based on the dialect mode. The unstable group applied a more general Oslo-compatible parsing to both the local and the non-local dialect. The Oslo speakers on the other hand were able to use gender markers as predictors only in their own dialect. We argue that the stable Sogn group should be treated as a bilingual group, as they show native-like skills in both varieties, while the unstable Sogn group can be seen as accommodated monolinguals, in that they treat the two varieties as sharing an underspecified grammar. The Oslo group on the other hand lacks sufficient competence in the other dialect to make use of grammatical markers to make predictions. (shrink)

A partir d'une relecture de l'oeuvre de Wittgenstein étudie sa réfutation des théories philosophiques sur l'existence d'un champ propre aux sensations visuelles, ainsi que son projet phénoménologique de description de l'espace visuel.

Language and speech depend on a relatively well defined neural circuitry, located predominantly in the left hemisphere. In this article, I discuss the origin of the speech circuit in early humans, as an expansion of an auditory-vocal articulatory network that took place after the last common ancestor with the chimpanzee. I will attempt to converge this perspective with aspects of the Mirror System Hypothesis, particularly those related to the emergence of a meaningful grammar in human communication. Basically, the strengthening (...) of auditory-vocal connectivity via the arcuate fasciculus and related tracts generated an expansion of working memory capacity for vocalizations, that was key for learning complex utterances. This process was concomitant with the development of a robust interface with visual working memory, both in the dorsal and ventral streams of auditory and visual processing. This enabled the bidirectional translation of sequential codes into hierarchical visual representations, through the development of a multimodal interface between both systems. (shrink)

As multiparty interactions with single courses of coordinated action, workplace meetings place particular interactional demands on participants who are not primary speakers as they work to initiate turns and to interactively coordinate with displays of recipiency from co-participants. Drawing from a corpus of 26 hours of videotaped workplace meetings in a midsized US city, this article reports on multimodal practices – phonetic, prosodic, and bodily-visual – used for coordinating turn transition and for consolidating recipiency in these specialized speech exchange (...) systems. Practices used by self-selecting non-primary speakers as they secure turns in meetings include displays of close monitoring of current speakers’ emerging turn structure, displays of heightened interest as current turns approach possible completion, and turn initiation practices designed to pursue and, in a fine-tuned manner, coordinate with displays of recipiency on the parts of other participants as well as from reflexively constructed ‘target’ recipients. By attending to bodily-visual action, as well as phonetics and prosody, this study contributes to expanding accounts for turn taking beyond traditional word-based grammar. (shrink)

There have been many criticisms of “nativism” in “Cartesian linguistics,” attacking positions that neither Chomsky nor any well-known generative grammarian has ever thought to defend. Shanker's polemic is no exception. It involves two spurious claims: Cartesian linguistics vitiates understanding language structure and use; nativism permits linguistic anthropology only to “validate” and “apply” generative principles. Briefly, Chomsky's outlines a language system, LS, of the human brain. LS reflexively discriminates and categorizes parts of the flux of human experience as “language,” and develops (...) complex abilities to infer and interpret this highly structured, and structurally peculiar, type of human production. There is nothing intrinsically different about LS – concerning innateness, evolution or universality – than the visual system, immune system, respiratory system, or any other complex biological system. Much polemic is driven by distaste for “innateness,” “genes,” and “evolution.” Historical and ideological reasons explain this aversion - some well-justified. None bear on universal grammar. Biologists believe all life consists of universal, highly structured codings of biological information. Still, biologists go on to explore diversity at many different levels. Similarly, linguistic anthropology can use generative grammar to better comprehend the diversity of languages and the cultural worlds they describe. This includes the very issues about proper names that Shanker highlights. (shrink)

Wittgenstein's middle period work has been brought into the current debate on rule following and representation by Kripke and the Hintikkas. In my dissertation, I argue that approaches which aim at a consistent reconstruction of Wittgenstein's argument, while valuable in their own right, fail to do justice to his focus on the conflicting intuitions that lie behind philosophical theory building. For this hidden and ambiguous side to his thought is the turning point in his philosophical development. ;One can summarise my (...) findings as follows: In 1929, Wittgenstein recognised that the analysis of colour propositions forced him to give up the Tractarian doctrine that analysis must end in logically independent elementary propositions. From this point, his work branched out in two main directions. On the one hand, he worked on 'philosophical grammar': analyses of the rules we follow in talking about such matters as colour, visual experience, intention, time, memory and the philosophical subject. Here, the picture theory provided the basis for an account of how the mind represents the world. On the other hand, he also thought of language as a 'secondary' system, to be contrasted with direct apprehension of the 'primary' phenomena. This view, which is set out most fully in several chapters of an unpublished typescript , led to a seemingly inexpressible solipsism on which 'all is in flux.' The attempt to reconcile the two conceptions of the pictorial analogy--language as a system of representational conventions and experience as a direct presentation of the phenomena--ultimately led him to see the dangers in that analogy and thus to his later notion of a 'philosophical picture.'. (shrink)

In several sign languages, plurals can be realized with unpunctuated or punctuated repetitions of a noun, with different semantic implications; similar repetition-based plurals have been described in some homesigns and silent gestures. Unpunctuated repetitions often get approximate ‘at least’ readings while punctuated repetitions typically correspond to ‘exactly’ readings. The prevalence of these mechanisms could be thought to be a case in which Universal Grammar does not just specify the abstract properties of grammatical elements, but also their phonological realization, at (...) least in the visual modality. We explore an alternative in which punctuated and unpunctuated repetitions arise from general properties of iconic representations. On an empirical level, we argue that in ASL, punctuated and unpunctuated repetitions are unlikely to be an exclusively grammatical mechanism, as they can be found with purely iconic representations. On a theoretical level, we argue for a modular account with three components. First, repetition-based plurals can create a simplified pictorial representation. Second, unpunctuated repetitions give rise to pictorial vagueness, resolved by way of quantification over precisifications. Third, a pragmatic process involving strategic reasoning maps these vague representations onto a set of candidate linguistic meanings, including some ‘at least’ plural readings that are best expressed by unpunctuated repetitions. (shrink)

This edited volume brings together the latest research on fictive interaction, that is the use of the frame of ordinary conversation as a means to structure cognition (talking to oneself), discourse (monologues organized as dialogues), and grammar (“why me? attitude”). This follows prior work on the subject by Esther Pascual and other authors, most of whom are also contributors to this volume. The 17 chapters in the volume explore fictive interaction as a fundamental cognitive phenomenon, as a ubiquitous discourse-structuring (...) device, as a possibly universal linguistic construction, and as an effective communicative strategy in persuasion and language pathology. The data discussed involve a wide variety of unrelated languages (spoken and signed) and modes of communication (oral, written, visual), across cultural contexts and historical time. The research presented combines linguistics and cognitive science, while bridging the gap between core grammatical studies and modern conversation and discourse analysis. The volume further reaches across what may be the most basic divide in linguistics: that between descriptive, theoretical, and applied linguistics. (shrink)

Cognition and Temporality argues that both verbal grammar and figural grammar have their cognitive basis in twelve characteristic forms of judgment, distributed among individuals in human populations throughout history. These twelve logical forms are context-free and language-free foundations in our attentional awareness, and shape all verbal and figural statements. Moreover, these types of historical judgment are psychogenetic inheritances in a population, and each serves a distinct problem-solving function in the human species. Through analysis of verbal and figural statements, (...) the author contends, the researcher can find evidence of these forms of judgment, and in turn analyze how the event to which those statements attend is formally constructed by that judgment. This construction guides how the event is assessed, approached, and engaged in the process of problem-solving. Artists and aestheticians in the early twentieth century--including Wassily Kandinsky, Stephen C. Pepper, and Andrew Paul Ushenko--have all posited an inherited attentional perspective in individuals, manifested in the logical correspondence between their distinctive verbal and figural grammars. Cognition and Temporality elaborates these claims, arguing that while the styles of well-known artists and writers are conditioned by the public styles of a particular time period, variations in personal style manifest one's inherited form of judgment, and the characteristic grammars that express that form. Through rigorous visual and stylistic analysis, the author demonstrates the expression of these forms among notable writers and artists across history. The result is a wide-ranging and provocative contribution to phenomenology, aesthetic philosophy, and cultural history. (shrink)

In 1865, the Brussels educational reformer Pierre Temples advocated to take drawing as the cornerstone of education. He criticized that education was modelled on conventions and grammatical rules in order to learn to read and write, this way ignoring the potential of drawing to create new concepts. This paper is also concerned with the significance of drawing in the realm of education. However, not to elaborate on its added value for education, but to discuss the mode of thinking that it (...) seeks to disclose. The paper starts with a re-reading of two stories: Pliny the Elder's image of the origin of drawing and Viktor Lowenfeld’s artistic developmental theory. This brings us to an understanding of the significance of drawing not as a pure sensory experience, nor as a cognitive one, but as a new gesture that marks the visual as visual, to make it an object of thought. Unlike Temples, this contribution is not against grammar, but understands the act of drawing as a form of grammatisation in itself: i.e. a particular response to an event, which simultaneously enables us to visualize what confronts us. Hence, an ability to imagine and create new relationships with the world. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World by Zakiyyah Iman JacksonBernabé S. Mendoza (bio)Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World New York: By New York University Press, 2020, 320 pp. ISBN 978-1-4798-9004-0the radical work of black feminism is to upend Western dualistic ways of thinking that structure our understanding of what it means to be human. In Becoming Human: Matter and (...) Meaning in an Antiblack World, Zakiyyah Iman Jackson troubles the dominant dualistic distinction of the human and the animal. Jackson argues that antiblackness undergirds Enlightenment discourses on the human-animal divide such that blackness cannot be extricated from the very concept of the animal because both “are not only interdependent representations but also entangled concepts” (28). Central to Jackson’s argument on the animalization of blackness is the notion of “ontologized plasticity,” which posits the being of black(ened) people as infinitely malleable and mutable matter and further points to the fluidification of form and “fleshly existence.” Far from seeing the human as a category that has “ontological integrity,” as scholars in the fields of animal studies, new materialisms, and posthumanism presuppose, Jackson instead seeks to redefine the concept of the human through the theorization of blackness (16). She points out that such theorization has been, for such scholars, a lacuna and the “space of the unthought,” which thus marks her intervention in these fields. [End Page 211]The author offers a sustained engagement with the knowledge claims of science and philosophy, reading them through and against the intellectual contributions of black feminist writers and artists. She draws from such luminaries as Toni Morrison, Nalo Hopkinson, Octavia Butler, Audre Lorde, and the artist Wangechi Mutu to show the ways in which they reject an enclosed notion of the human that is defined only by keeping the racialized other at bay and in a degraded animalized and liquified state. As such, she showcases how black feminist visual and literary culture “theorizes and philosophizes” and reveals the faulty, antiblack premises upon which science and philosophy establish their claims of knowledge on the human.Offering a materialist theory of black ontology and temporality, Jackson poses three main arguments on the racialization of the human-animal distinction. The first is the aforementioned notion of ontologized and black(ened) plasticity that speaks to the constant modulation and manipulation of black matter as it relates to gender, sexuality, and sexual reproduction. Reading US slavery as an experimental playground for testing the limits of the human, Jackson argues that “black female f lesh... functions as the limit case of ‘the human’ and is its matrix-figure” (4). She defines plasticity as a “praxis that seeks to define the essence of a black(ened) thing as infinitely mutable in antiblack, often paradoxical sexuating terms as a means of hierarchically delineating sex/gender, reproduction, and states of being more generally” (11). There is, in other words, an inversion that takes place in that it is only through opposition and the imposed instability and illegibility of blackness—of black matter and the black mater(nal) situated as “chaos by design”—that such categories as “woman,” “mother,” and “female body” can themselves take hold and become intelligible forms (11). Jackson engages with the work of Hortense Spillers and Sylvia Wynter in order to argue that “Man,” as the object of analysis within liberal humanism, “produces an untenable dichotomy—‘the human’ versus ‘the animal,’ whereby the black(ened) female is posited as the abyss dividing organic life into ‘human’ or ‘animal’ based on wholly unsound metaphysical premises” (12). This claim on the centrality of the black female in the plasticization of blackness is given support in chapter 2, which focuses on Nalo Hopkinson’s speculative novel Brown Girl in the Ring, where plasticity gives way to opacity.In this chapter, Jackson explores the ways in which the black female body, as that which is opaque and nonrepresentable within the “dominant grammar of representation,” shatters what she argues is Heidegger’s metaphysical and hierarchical ordering of human, animal, and world. In exploring “how our received conceptions of being hinges on our im/perception of black mater... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:BreathingLuk Van den Dries (bio)This text, "Breathing," was conceived for the book From Act to Acting: Fabre's Guidelines for the Performer of the 21st Century (2021). The book was conceived and designed by Jan Fabre, author, theatre artist, and visual artist, active since the 1970s. The book was written by Luk Van den Dries, dramaturg and theatre researcher of the University of Antwerp, in tight collaboration with Jan (...) Fabre and the three most important performers/teachers of the Belgian theatre company, Troubleyn (Annabelle Chambon, Cédric Charron, and Ivana Jozic). The book sheds new light on the physical, mental, and vocal training of the performer and furthermore gives insight into Fabre's revolutionary thoughts on contemporary theatre.1Breathing is the first of the ten performative principles that together create the basic grammar in which the language of the performers is grounded.Three-phased breathing (one part in, one part out, one part nothing) is a basic condition in the series of exercises Jan Fabre developed throughout his career. This respiration technique returns in all exercises. Also, it is the first principle that the performers are taught: by dividing breathing into three equal parts, energy is built up and stress or fatigue is canalized. It is a way to rebalance, to find a place of rest after a strenuous effort, or it can also be used as a springboard to a heightened performance. Very regularly during individual exercises, Fabre will refer to this respiration technique, especially in specific situations of high adrenaline, but of course the performers should learn to use this respiration technique autonomously. They should become so familiar with the rhythm of this breathing that they automatically fall back on it when necessary. Because this respiration technique is so crucial to Fabre's acting pedagogy, it is described in detail as the very first exercise in his book. Its basic principles are explained below as well, as the first performative principle.Breathing is a sign of life, and on this primal and essential level it needs to be understood that, through breathing, the performer gives life. He breathes life into the performance. Fabre himself has described this basic condition for the birth of theatre through breathing very precisely: [End Page 30]The most important weapon of the warrior of beauty is his respiration. When the performance starts, life stops. Life itself dies. The warrior of beauty is alive, but life itself is dead. The warrior of beauty remains with just his own breath. When he enters the stage, he needs to breathe life into deceased life. Like a god gives his breath to create life. In the same way he will create life with his breath. How will he achieve this? By breathing correctly: one-third inhaling through the nostrils, one-third exhaling through pursed lips, one-third without breathing. And then the miracle happens. The breath becomes imagination and the imagination breathes. The warrior of beauty is the master of breath and life.2Fabre's abdominal breathing differs from regular forms of breathing, such as techniques derived from Asian yoga techniques, Chi-kung or Tai-chi, as it stresses different parts. At the same time, it is closely related to it, because these practices also adopt the notion that breathing in the first place rouses vitality and spirit and that the right kind of breathing thus aims at controlling life currents and bringing about a clear mind. In yoga it is called pranayama: prana meaning spirit or force of life, ayama meaning 'control' or 'grasp.' Yoga knows many variants in directing the breath, depending on the asanas (yoga postures) in which they are bedded. Sometimes focusing mainly on the diaphragm and the flanks, sometimes on abdominal breathing. Also, suspending your breath (kumbhaka) is a yoga technique, applied at the end of inhalation as well as after exhalation and during taking breath.In Fabre's case, abdominal breathing is stressed: first, air is inhaled through the nose, subsequently sent in the direction of the peritoneal cavity and the flanks, and then again exhaled via a very precise blowing technique (a dosed flow of air through an imaginary straw). During the cycle the diaphragm remains... (shrink)

Barsalou's contribution converges with basic ideas and empirical findings of cognitive linguistics. They posit the same general architecture. The perceptual grounding of conceptual structure is a central tenet of cognitive linguistics. Our capacity to construe the same situation in alternate ways is fundamental to cognitive semantics, and numerous parallels are discernible between conceptual construal and visual perception. Grammar is meaningful, consisting of schematized patterns for the pairing of semantic and phonological structures. The meanings of grammatical elements reside primarily (...) in the construal they impose on conceptual content. This view of linguistic structure appears to be compatible with Barsalou's proposals. (shrink)

This paper addresses the use of noun-class markers in Tagbana from the perspective of a cognitively-inspired approach based on Langacker’s (2000. Grammar and conceptualization. Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter) semiological principle. Drawing on this basic tenet of Cognitive Grammar according to which the symbolic function of language consists in making speakers’ conceptualizations auditorily or visually perceptible, it demonstrates that in syntactic constructions composed of ‘noun-stem+noun-class marker’ and ‘noun-class marker+identifier’, noun-class markers fulfil the semantic function of making (...) explicit the way the speaker conceives of the experiential entity referred to in the utterance.This view goes beyond form-centred functions such as referent-tracking to include the signifying of complex conceptualizations involving more than one noun-class marker with the same noun-stem, as well as the discourse functions of indicating topicality, insistence on a referent’s existence and contrastive focus. (shrink)