Literary narratives are well recognised for their power to foster engagement with complex social themes. Transmedia narratives, which present the same story in different media, can help advance both critical multimodal discourse studies and multiliteracies pedagogies. To harness this potential, we need to develop methods for systematically relating media affordances to discourse-semantic patterns and the broad social themes these patterns construct in narratives, and ensure these methods build on the knowledge learners bring to the classroom. This article introduces a social (...) semiotic method for analysing transmedia narratives and illustrates its ability to reflect the persuasive power of narrative and build on young children's critical multimodal awareness. This is achieved through a case study comprising data from three adaptations of the same award-winning narrative - animated film (Joyce, W. (Producer), Joyce, W., & Oldenburg, B. (Directors) (2011). The fantastic flying books of Mr Morris Lessmore [Motion Picture]. Moonbot Studios), interactive app (Moonbot Studios. (2011). The fantastic flying books of Mr Morris Lessmore (Version 1.4). [Mobile Application Software]), and traditional-format picture book (Joyce, W. (2012). The fantastic flying books of Mr Morris Lessmore. Illustrations by William Joyce and Joe Bluhm. Moonbot Books) - and mother-child interactions with the book and the app. (shrink)

This article examines some of S. Lem’s statements about his philosophical and worldview positions regarding the mysterious nature of language and the linguistic sign, the connection between language, mind and reality. The main goal of the paper is to understand what texts on the philosophy of language the Polish thinker read and what attitude he has formed towards them. Lem is the follower of an analytical intellectual culture that focuses on the naturalistic worldview and the consequences of the “linguistic turn” (...) in Western philosophy. For Lem, language is not only an interesting philosophical object, but also a complex precise instrument of his own creative thinking. In this regard, the philosophy of language for a writer cannot be based only on logical-linguistic atomistic methodology. Lem seeks in his contemporary interdisciplinary methods ways to combine realistic and anti-realist positions. Many concepts, such as “the effect of semantic transparency”, “polymorphic language model”, “variation model” are quite correlated with modern theories of language and require additional philosophical comments. (shrink)

RESUMO Este artigo investiga a presença do heterodiscurso em narrativas da tradição oral. Para tanto, a fundamentação teórica baseia-se na perspectiva bakhtiniana, que compreende o discurso, nas narrativas literárias, como marcado pela heterodiscursividade, evidenciando uma diversidade de vozes sociais que sinalizam modos de compreensão e pontos de vista sobre o mundo. A análise do corpus, composto por duas narrativas da tradição oral, aponta, portanto, que as vozes do narrador, dos contadores tradicionais de histórias e das personagens aparecem em constante dialogicidade (...) com as vozes sociais, orientadas por axiologias, posições e centros valorativos de ordem social, cultural e histórica. O estudo constatou, assim, formas de refletir e de refratar os acontecimentos da existência, quadros morais que os pautam e as compreensões dos modos de ser e de agir em situações concretas da vida em sociedade, em consonância com os pressupostos dialógicos da pesquisa. (shrink)

Visual narratives like comics involve a range of complex cognitive operations in order to be understood. The Parallel Interfacing Narrative‐Semantics (PINS) Model integrates an emerging literature showing that comprehension of wordless image sequences balances two representational levels of semantic and narrative structure. The neurocognitive mechanisms that guide these processes are argued to overlap with other domains, such as language and music.

NoViolet Bulawayo’s recently published novel titled, Glory, fictionalises the tragic fall of Robert Mugabe from the helm of power. The removal of Mugabe from power through the 2017 “military coup” engendered a problematic narrative that depicted the former first lady, Grace Mugabe as the biblical Eve’s doppelganger. The purported resemblance of Eve, a character from sacrosanct text, and Grace of contemporary Zimbabwe is often based on mythical and misogynist (mis)interpretations of the former as an epitome of sin and the (...) latter as instrumental to Mugabe’s demise. Arguably, the construct of Eve in Zimbabwe and the personified allegory in the fictive society of Bulawayo is profoundly laden with semantics and tropes of power together interwoven with innuendoes that denigrate women. This article reflected upon the ‘blame Eve myth’ with interlocking discourses of toxic politics and religion that reinforce phallocentric attitudes and practices that denigrate the female gender in Zimbabwe. Ecofeminism enriches the discussions of the novel Glory as a satire that provides imperative fictional sites to chart these intricate discourses. Ecofeminist framework offers insights that enrich the discussions of Eve’s myth and other representations which disparage women in the novel, Glory. The study concludes that blaming Grace Mugabe in her fictional doppelganger Marvelous, symbolically illuminates how women and the feminised nature are both insulted and held accountable for woes that befall humanity in both the fictive nation of Jidada and its referent Zimbabwe. Contribution: Ecofeminist conceptual framework has rarely been used to examine the complex connection between gender, politics, religion and nature in Zimbabwean fictional writing. Thus, this study offered fresh insights that are significant in understanding these subjects from a multidisciplinary perspective because the analyses and readings of the novel were based on literary criticism, political discourse and theology. (shrink)

Semantics traditionally focuses on linguistic meaning. In recent years, the Super Linguistics movement has tried to broaden the scope of inquiry in various directions, including an extension of semantics to talk about the meaning of pictures. There are close similarities between the interpretation of language and of pictures. Most fundamentally, pictures, like utterances, can be either true or false of a given state of affairs, and hence both express propositions (Zimmermann, 2016; Greenberg, 2013; Abusch, 2015). Moreover, sequences of (...) pictures, like sequences of utterances, can be used to tell stories. Wordless picture books, comics, and film are cases in point. In this paper I pick up the project of providing a dynamic semantic account of pictorial story-telling, started by Abusch (2012) and continued by Abusch & Rooth (2017); Maier & Bimpikou (2019); Fernando (2020). More specifically, I propose here a semantics of speech and thought bubbles by adding event reference to PicDRT. To get there I first review the projection-based semantics for pictures (section 1), noting the fundamental distinction between symbolic and iconic meaning that makes speech bubbles especially interesting (section 2). I then review the dynamic PicDRT framework for pictorial narratives (section 3), add events (section 4), and propose an account of speech bubbles as quotational event modification (section 5). I end with a brief look at other conventional, symbolic enrichments in comics (section 6). (shrink)

Past research has suggested that those spontaneous movements of the human hand made during talk convey significant semantic information over and above the speech, at least when the unit of speech analyzed is the individual clause. However, no previous research has tested whether this information is represented linguistically elsewhere in the narrative . The first study, reported here, uses an experimental procedure to identify which specific imagistic gestures add semantic information to the speech. The second study analyzes whether the (...) specific gestures still do this when respondents hear the whole narrative. It was found that two thirds of the semantic information, thought to be carried by the gestures, is, in fact, represented in the linguistic discourse, or is inferable from it. However, one third of the additional semantic information contained in the gestures is not represented linguistically in the narrative nor is it inferable from it. In other words, a proportion of the imagistic gestures that accompany speech are absolutely critical to semantic communication. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 25.2 (2001) 215-232 [Access article in PDF] Eighteenth-Century Print Culture and the "Truth" of Fictional Narrative Lisa Zunshine As a session entitled "Truth" at a recent Modern Language Association of America annual convention has demonstrated, the obsession with the epistemologies of truth is alive and well. Our "familiar ways of thinking and talking about truth," as one of the speakers, Barbara Herrnstein Smith, observed, remain (...) "theoretically elusive, discursively slippery, and hard or perhaps impossible to articulate clearly in relation to other current concepts and ideas" 1 --an irresistible invitation to further thinking and talking on the subject. My essay enters this conversation by attempting to contemplate truth not as a stable attribute but as a ongoing attribution, that is, not as an inherent property but rather as a dynamic process predicated upon functional idiosyncrasies of our evolved cognitive architecture. The broad question posed here is this: What if our never-ending quest for truth is itself cognitively constructed and the various forms that this quest takes manifest the (not necessarily harmonious) interaction between our evolved cognitive capacities and the ever-changing specifics of our cultural environment?Consider just one of the forms of such an interaction, namely, our age-long preoccupation with the "truth" of literary narrative. In many respects, this preoccupation is counterproductive: the most "fantastic" story contains a number of contingently useful "truths" about the world, whereas the most "factual" narrative manipulates facts by virtue of being a narrative or a subjective arrangementof information. Still, we persevere in wanting to put the label "fiction" or "nonfiction" onto any story that comes our way. As I will argue, the bookstore's organization of its sections satisfies this species of "cognitive" craving as well as [End Page 215] reinforces it, making it seem culturally inevitable. Viewed from this perspective, our culture appears to be a multifaceted feedback mechanism engaged in the process of satisfying, reinforcing, struggling with, and manipulating our cognitive predispositions.The cultural manipulation of our cognitive predispositions is the topic of the present essay, which discusses several examples of such manipulation that respond to our desire to assign a certain "truth-value" to a given narrative, i.e., to attach a label to it announcing its "factuality" or "fictionality." "Truth-value" is a loaded term, resisting definition, and liable to lead me into trouble. Imperfect as it is, however, I need it in order to shuffle between two scholarly discourses that do not (yet) have much vocabulary in common: literary criticism and cognitive science. The reason for turning to cognitive science in my discussion of literary narrative is that cognitive anthropologists and psychologists frequently engage the same problems that we do when we ask, What is "Fiction"? How is it different from "History"? How do we decide whether what we are reading is "true?" The key difference between the two approaches is, however, that whereas the literary critic focuses on specific texts produced and read in specific cultural circumstances, the cognitive anthropologist pays attention to the cross-cultural insistence with which people wish to and often claim to distinguish "truth" from "fiction" and inquires into the possible evolutionary history of the cognitive architecture implicated in our never-ending quest for "truth." The latter perspective can thus be useful for literary studies because, by suggesting that our evolved cognitive architecture often "encourages" us to construe the world as a negotiation of "truths" and "nontruths," this perspective begins to account--at least on some level--for the fact that people may approach a complex cultural artifact, such as a novel, with a "truth"/"non-truth" binary in mind that is ultimately not very productive. 2 Evolutionary psychologists and anthropologists frequently point to disjunctions between the tasks that our brain evolved to solve and the tasks that we have to deal with in the modern environment; our vexed insistence on determining the truth-value of the 500-page printed narrative--not an object one would come across in the Pleistocene--can be seen as yet another instance of such a disjunction.Thus, I suggest that, on the... (shrink)

The article explores the semantic potential of social narratives associated with the creation and constitution of the Orthodox Church of Ukraine, which caused a interpretations conflict, marked by conflicting interpretations and differences in meanings that are applied in different contexts. The narrative arranges events in a certain time sequence, accumulates and translates meanings, individual and social experience. The presence of meanings in the interpretation of the narrative depends on the perspective, interpretation horizons and the subject's ability to analyze (...) information and its correct application. The social narrative accumulates a set of stories and messages that are fragmentary and disordered, constructs a coherent plot aimed at finding and defining meanings, and forming social discourse. Social narratives materialized in social structures, orientations, expectations, and stereotypes of their bearers due to everyday modification in the form of simple images, attitudes, and principles. Since each social narrative claims to be exclusive and correct in its own way of understanding events, a clash of narratives and their interpretations is inevitable. A large-scale event determines the modification of social structures, standards, and evaluation criteria, is accompanied by the transformation of everyday life, reveals deep mental layers, and opens up new perspectives. The extraordinary event that was marked by the creation of the Orthodox Church of Ukraine is accompanied by diametrically opposite assessments from the clergy, believers, politicians, experts – from the statement about autocephaly as the only opportunity to achieve unity and recognition of Ukrainian Orthodoxy to the political subtext justification of the new religious organization creation. Church circles represented by representatives of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate claim that the state interferes in the internal Affairs of the Church. The Constitution of the Orthodox Church of Ukraine takes place in the context of the confrontation of two social narratives – the «ukrainian world» and the «russian world». The social narrative «ukrainian world» is based on values rooted in the national soil, but the social narrative «russian world» denies the existence of the Ukrainian nation and the Ukrainian state. Under the patronage of the Russian Orthodox Church, the expression of the ideas of the «russian world» is the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate, which enshrines in the minds of believers ideologies about «the common origin of the Ukrainian and Russian peoples», «the common baptismal font», «the unity of the historical space of Holy Rus», «the identity of the East Slavic Orthodox civilization». The Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate did not support the decision of patriarch Bartholomew to grant autocephaly to the Orthodox Church of Ukraine. Metropolitan Onufriy did not give his blessing to the hierarchs to participate in the Unification Council, which is called «a non-canonical assembly of schismatic groups». The Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate, according to its primate, has de facto autocephaly, so it is the only canonical local Orthodox Church in Ukraine. In the face of the conflict of public narratives, the Orthodox Church of Ukraine, along with meeting the spiritual needs of believers, contributes to the formation of national identity, the formation of a worldview matrix that will determine the vision of the future development of the country. (shrink)

Controlled elicitation of linguistic and psycholinguistic experimental data facilitate strong inferences about phonological, syntactic, semantic and pragmatic structures and functions, yet neglect the ecological validity of responses. Ecological validity in this paper refers to whether data gathered under controlled conditions are commensurate with routine problem solving and language use in natural settings. All methods produce "white room" effects that compromise data gathering and analysis. Unexamined folk knowledge and experiences also guide the investigator s interpretation of data from field research, laboratories, (...) testing sessions, and target sentences. Story recall data from children in a combined second-third grade classroom and their narrative responses to cartoons without sound are used to illustrate ecological validity issues. The child's spontaneous, imaginative narratives about the story and cartoons resemble adult folk theory, and their semantic content reveal sociocultural knowledge essential for understanding subjects ' reasoning and information processing skills. (shrink)

At least as important as a particular item of medical knowledge itself is to know something about the relationships of that knowledge to the experiential world it is talking about. The reason is that the patients the physician is concerned with are parts of that experiential world. So, when using any knowledge in her practice, e.g., some knowledge on infectious diseases, a morally conscientious doctor will be interested in whether, and in what way, this knowledge relates to the ‘world out (...) there’. Does the medical knowledge she employs bear any relevance to the bodies and souls of her patients? Does it enable her to understand the patient’s suffering, illness experience, and illness narrative? Will it help her find useful diagnoses and treatments? Are there in fact any indicators of such qualities of medical knowledge? Why not use astrology, Ayurveda, or exorcism instead of the theory of infectious diseases? A prerequisite for dealing with such questions is the awareness of the relationships between medical knowledge and its referent, i.e., of the semantics of medical knowledge, on the one hand; and of the pragmatic factors beyond this semantics, which influence the role medical knowledge plays in health care, on the other, e.g., social and economic processes. In the present chapter, we shall look at these issues with an eye toward understanding why some particular information is allowed to enter the medical world as knowledge, whereas other information is considered unacceptable or quackery. Is there a clear line of demarcation between medical knowledge and self-deception? To begin with, we will discuss the issues of truth and justification because, as pointed out in Section 10.1 on page 402, knowledge is traditionally defined as justified true belief . These two defining features of knowledge, truth and justifiedness, are due to the classical conception of knowledge as the representation of some ‘reality’. This ancient, representational postulate brings with it that the predominant view on the semantics of medical knowledge is realism, i.e., the view that medical knowledge is concerned with and represents ‘the real world out there’. We shall therefore need to inquire into the philosophy and medical relevance of this doctrine before we proceed to alternative views. Our discussion thus divides into the following five parts: 12.1 Justified True Belief; 12.2 Realism; 12.3 Anti-Realism; 12.4 Beyond Realism and Anti-Realism in Medicine; 12.5 Social Epistemology. (shrink)

At the beginning of the 20th century, the shorter Greek version of the book of Tobit, GI, which is included in the Catholic Bible, was thought to be the oldest version. It was defined as ‘a lesson on almsgiving and its redeeming powers’. As the discoveries of the Semitic copies of Tobit at Qumran, GI is recognised to be a reworking of the longer version GII, most probably originally written in Aramaic, between 225 and 175 BCE. In all versions of (...) Tobit, the theme of almsgiving is introduced as specifically directed to Jewish kinsmen, but towards the end, is to be directed to all poor, suggesting that it may have been written by a Hellenistic Jew. Although the surface context of the narrative of Tobit is the Jewish tradition of proper observation of mitzvot and sacrifice and eventual reward, the various versions contain varying degrees of ancient Near Eastern wisdom, and an ironic, subversive reflection of hypocritical righteousness. This article questioned why the endings differ markedly in different versions. To try to find answers, a semantic comparison was made between GI and the most complete Aramaic version 4Q196. Contribution: This article considered the implications of source criticism in the reception of the various versions of Tobit. The possibility was examined that the pre-Christian, Aramaic version 4Q196Tobit does not confirm the excessive focus on almsgiving as righteousness apparent in the GI version of LXX Tobit. (shrink)

This paper attempts to make more explicit the relationship between narrativity and feminist care ethics. The central concern is the way in which narrativity carries the semantic load that some accounts of feminist care ethics imply but leave hanging. In so doing, some feminist theorists of care-based ethics then undervalue the major contribution that narrativity provides to care ethics: it carries the semantic load that is essential to the best care. In this article, I defend the narrative as the (...) central medium though which we make sense of and communicate our lives and their attendant hopes and cares. More than just working with the narrative of the cared-for, caring is about investing in the narrative of the cared-for in order to meet the needs of this cared-for and how this narrative might turn out. I will further demonstrate how the attitude of caring or investing in a narrative would amount to what Gabriel Marcel has described as the attitude of disponibilité. (shrink)

As part of a recent attempt to extend the methods of formal semantics beyond language, it has been claimed that music has an abstract truth-conditional semantics, albeit one that has more in common with iconic semantics than with standard compositional semantics. After summarizing this approach and addressing a common objection, we argue that music semantics should be enriched in three directions by incorporating insights of other areas of Super Semantics. First, it has been claimed (...) by Abusch 2013 that visual narratives make use of discourse referents akin to those we find in language. We argue that a similar conclusion extends to music, and we highlight it by investigating ways in which orchestration and dance may make cross-referential dependencies more explicit. Second, we show that by bringing music semantics closer to the semantics of visual narratives, we can give an account of the semantics of mixed visual and musical sequences. Third, it has been claimed that co-speech gestures trigger characteristic conditionalized presuppositions, called ‘cosuppositions’, and that their semantic status derives from their parasitic character relative to words. We argue that the same conclusion extends to some instances of film and cartoon music: it may trigger cosuppositions that can be revealed by embedding film excerpts or gifs in sentences so as to test presupposition projection. We further argue that under special discourse conditions, pro-speech gestures and pro-speech music alike can trigger cosuppositions as well. These results suggest that new insights can be gained not just by extending the methods of semantics to new objects, but also by drawing new connections among them. (shrink)

Semantic Field Analysis in the Study of Parent-Child Relationships This article discusses the applicability of semantic field analysis to the study of development and change in important interpersonal relations on the example of parent-child relationships. The narrative material was compiled from responses of 348 teenagers and young adults aged 13-30 years. Participants wrote about their parents. On the basis of the context, semantic fields were generated for the high-incidence phrase "to love one's parents", which is the primary model of (...) conceptualizing the parent-child relationship in our culture. The results demonstrate the material complexity of the "love for parents" semantic field in the study group, and reveal the associative network of other semantic relations involving this concept. They also confirm the hypotheses on subtle developmental changes in the understanding of "love for parents" between early adolescence and adulthood. The study presents the application of methods based on linguistic analysis of language to the analysis of developmental changes in important personal relationships. (shrink)

By manipulating the location of prosodic boundary and the semantic bias of the ambiguous “V+N1+de+N2” phrase, which is composed of one verb (V), one noun (N1), one functional word (de), and another noun (N2), this study investigated how prosodic boundary and the semantic bias affect the processing of temporary ambiguous sentences formed by the ambiguous phrase “V+N1+de+N2” through an eye movement experiment. We found the effect of prosodic boundary in the late processing stage and observed an interaction between prosodic boundary (...) and the semantic bias of ambiguous phrases as well. The participants required more time for fixation and more regressions occurred when the meaning of the ambiguous phrase guided by prosodic boundary was inconsistent with context, especially when the ambiguous phrase was biased to the narrative-object phrase. This result suggests that prosodic boundary affects the processing of temporal ambiguous sentences and is influenced by the semantic bias of the ambiguous phrase. These findings provide further evidence from Chinese that indicate that implicit prosody plays a general role in language comprehension. (shrink)

Our paper proposes to follow the history of the “Burning Bush”, a spiritual and cultural movement in the 1940s in Romania that had proposed the solution of spiritual resistance to communism through culture and faith. The analysis holds as key-concepts: discourse analysis, narrativity, semantics and hermeneutics, following the discourse of the Securitate’s archives with reference to the Burning Bush in terms of: - conflictual discourses: inquisitor vs. imprisoned; - motives and themes of the incriminatory discourse of the Securitate; - (...) the existence of a master narrative of the archives. (shrink)

Since there are independent reasons for associating the habitual reading of the imperfective, in Italian, to a logical form based on universal or generic quantification, the purpose of Part I is to see how this kind of semantical structure accounts for another important interpretation of the imperfective: the progressive reading. And since in some particular cases the imperfective can also have a marginal interpretation which can be assimilated to a perfective effect (it is the so-called “narrative” reading), a further (...) problem is how to provide a reasonable explanation for this phenomenon too. If one considers the co-occurrence of the imperfective with different event predicates (in particular, accomplishments and achievements) it is possible to show that, with some minimal assumptions, the theoretical framework under discussion correctly predicts the following facts, which represent a crucial, but puzzling, characteristic of the imperfective in Italian: (i) activities allow for the progressive reading of the imperfective, but not the “narrative” reading; (ii) with achievements we have the opposite situation; (iii) accomplishments are compatible with both these readings. From this point of view, the semantic properties of the progressive reading of the imperfective are quite distinct from those of the perifrasi progressiva, which is the specialized form used in Italian to express the progressive meaning. Part II, which addresses the issue of the intensional character of both forms of the progressive, is more problematic, in the sense that it takes into consideration a possible extension of the theoretical framework presented in Part I. First of all I discuss some examples which clearly show that the perifrasi progressiva calls for some sort of “branching” representation of time, for it crucially refers to future courses of events which are not realized in the real world. On the other hand, since similar examples can be found in the case of the progressive reading of the imperfective, the main problem is represented by the fact that the kind of logical form under discussion is not completely adequate to account for such intensional phenomena.. (shrink)

While much has been written about verbal narratives, we still lack a clear account of what makes images narrative. I argue that there are narrative characteristics of images and show this with examples of single images. The argument proceeds in three steps. First, I propose that from a semantic perspective, the following two characteristics are necessary for an image to be narrative: a representation of an event and a representation of time. Second, I argue that there are (...) paradigmatic characteristics, such as at least two events, bridging connections, and unifying subjects between these events, characters with intentions, and the representation of goal-directed actions. Third, I show that it is possible to differentiate between narrative and non-narrative images while also accounting for the idea that narrativity is a matter of degree. While I do not provide a full definition of narrative images, my account constitutes a necessary first step in this direction. (shrink)

Two main goals of the emerging field of neurocognitive poetics are the use of more natural and ecologically valid stimuli, tasks and contexts and providing methods and models allowing to quantify distinctive features of verbal materials used in such tasks and contexts and their effects on readers responses. A natural key element of poetic language, metaphor, still is understudied insofar as relatively little empirical research looked at literary or poetic metaphors. An exception is Katz et al.’s corpus of 204 literary (...) metaphors by authors such as Shakespeare or Dylan Thomas, for which various rating data are available. We reanalyzed their corpus using a combination of quantitative narrative analysis, latent semantic analysis, and machine learning in order to identify relevant features of the metaphors that influenced the ratings. The combined application of computational tools sheds light on surface and affective-semantic features that co-determine the reception of poetic metaphors and successfully predicted the period of origin, authorship and goodness ratings of the metaphors. The present results can be used for generating quantitative hypotheses or selecting and matching verbal stimuli in empirical studies of literature and neurocognitive poetics. (shrink)

We use a graphic formalism to make explicit differences in the interpretation of temporal relations in natural-language text. Out of the panoply of computational representation methods for time or tense, we select Petri nets, and discuss why. We illustrate their potential for semantics and for sign theorists, by analyzing how some late antique and medieval exegeses understood the narrative of Moses and Pharaoh's magicians, and the former's rod swallowing up the rods of the other ones, once these rods (...) had been turned into crocodiles or snakes. We extend the treatment to another situation concerning the semantics of eating and being eaten. (shrink)

The Issues at Issue: Heidegger declares metaphor to be a function of metaphysics. Ricoeur's tension theory of metaphor takes the understanding of metaphor beyond metaphysics. Ricoeur's theory of metaphor is a theory of metaphorical statement not of naming. The classical, lexical theory of metaphor focuses on a primary meaning of each metaphor. As such metaphor is merely ornamentation in language. What it names could more appropriately be accomplished in literal language. In contrast, metaphor is understood by Ricoeur to be a (...) semantic event made possible by three kinds of tensions. One may understand symbols to function with the same metaphorical tensions. In the case of symbols, however, these tensions function not at the level of the sentence but rather of the narrative. Metaphor and symbol both have an ‘ontological priority’ over other elements of discourse and experience. They ‘work’ because of the event character of both understanding and experience. Understanding and experience have event as their condition of possibility. Metaphor and symbol both have a ‘temporal priority’, as well, for they serve as the shock to think ‘more’. This can occur, however, because they are part of a circularity that is non-metaphysical, that is, the circularity of the event character of the Being-of beings. Hence, just as metaphors are always ‘larger’ than the sentence, so are symbols always ‘larger’ than the narrative. (shrink)

This article aims to reveal the semantic dynamics of narratives on Rousseau in Kyiv academic philosophy of the 19th and early 20th centuries. through the separation of the informational layer from the rhetorical one in their content and the identification of hidden (unarticulated) elements that determined both the general nature of the narrative and the evaluative judgments of the narrators. Based on archival primary sources and printed editions (mostly bibliographic rarities), a historical and philosophic study of the narratives on (...) Jean-Jacques Rousseau and his philosophy of education performed, which were created and broadcast by professors of Kyiv Theological Academy and St.Volodymyr University Pamfil Yurkevych, Sylvester Gogotskyi, Markellin Olesnitskyi, Mykola Makkaveiskyi, Oleksandr Selikhanovych, and Vasyl Zenkovskyi. Keeping almost the same informational core, the narratives of Kyiv academicians on Rousseau differ significantly in terms of rhetoric. While the “older generation” goes into philosophical criticism of the pedagogical ideas of the Swiss thinker as the Stranger, the “younger ones”, limiting themselves to remarks about their controversial nature, represent him as the Self. This difference is due to both personal factors and institutional conditions for the development of Kyiv academic philosophy, as well as changes in the general political situation in the period of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. (shrink)

This article adopts a Systemic Functional Linguistics framework of appraisal theory to interpret the behavioural and attitudinal resources in written narratives and proposes the idea of proximity as an alternative representation to explain the meaning-making process of Chinese students’ possible selves in a less examined context of UK-based transnational university in China, by focusing on the lexical and semantic explanation of how these Chinese students use and are mediated by contextual resources in discourse. Six written narratives were collected from six (...) Chinese students from the School of International Communications at the University of Nottingham Ningbo China. The overall findings revealed that all six Chinese students from different years shaped proximal past, current and future possible disciplinary selves through repeated engagement and positive alignment with the contextual values, although they had differentiated developmental processes of using and being mediated by the contextual recourses. This article concludes by arguing for a need to investigate the Chinese learners in the current changing world by looking at their repertoire experience of disciplinary learning and reservoir context. (shrink)

The present investigation challenges the traditional distinction between cohesion and coherence; i.e., the distinction between the syntactical rules governing the composition of lexical units within the scope of the clause and the semantic-pragmatic rules guiding the composition of text units beyond the scope of the clause. To this end it exposes two major principles of semantic combination that are active through all levels of linguistic composition: viz. frame-schematic structure and narrative structure. These principles are considered as being components of (...) a semantic combinatorial system to be determined in terms of dependency relations. (shrink)

Semantic Network Analysis in Social Sciences introduces the fundamentals of semantic network analysis and its applications in the social sciences. Readers learn how to easily transform any given text into a visual network of words co-occurring together, a process that allows mapping the main themes appearing in the text and revealing its main narratives and biases. Semantic network analysis is particularly useful today with the increasing volumes of text-based information available. It is one of the developing, cutting-edge methods to organize, (...) identify patterns and structures, and understand the meanings of our information society. The first chapters in this book offer step-by-step guidelines for conducting semantic network analysis, including choosing and preparing the text, selecting desired words, constructing the networks, and interpreting their meanings. Free software tools and code are also presented. The rest of the book displays state-of-the-art studies from around the world that apply this method to explore news, political speeches, social media content, and even to organize interview transcripts and literature reviews. Aimed at scholars with no previous knowledge in the field, this book can be used as a main or a supplementary textbook for general courses on research methods or network analysis courses, as well as a starting point to conduct your own content analysis of large texts. (shrink)

Speakers frequently produce elaborate hand movements during talk that have been shown to serve a communicative function. Nevertheless, two-thirds of the semantic content of these hand movements is encoded linguistically elsewhere in the discourse . The present experiment demonstrated that while 62.9% of semantic information in gesture was elsewhere, most gestures retained at least one semantic feature that was never represented linguistically. Semantic features were more explicit when they occurred in gesture than when represented linguistically. Even in cases where the (...) imagistic gesture appeared somewhat redundant, gesture at the narrative level preserves a discernable communicative function. (shrink)

Within the philosophy of language, contextualists typically hold (and semantic minimalists deny) that pragmatic elements of an utterance can affect its semantic content. This paper concretizes this debate by analogizing both positions to different kinds of time-travel stories: contextualism is akin to Ludovician narratives that deny the possibility of temporal editing (or “the changing of past events”) while semantic minimalism is aligned with stories that allow the past to be literally altered. By focusing particularly on Denis Villeneuve’s 2016 film Arrival, (...) which portrays a Ludovician model of temporality that firmly denies the possibility of temporal editing, this paper defends the strength of the contextualist position. (shrink)

This paper attempts to provide a defence for a narrative theory of the self in the face of criticisms from the anti‐narrative camp. It begins by addressing certain uncontroversial premises that both pro‐ and the anti‐narrative camps might be thought to agree on: the status of humans as homo significans or meaning‐makers, the natural form‐finding tendency and certain desiderata for significance and value that we possess, and the raw material of life and its constituents that we proceed (...) from. Whereas the pro‐narrative camp seeks to provide the narrative theory of the self as a valid argument for how we proceed from the raw material of life and undifferentiated experience and these desiderata and tendencies (i.e.: the premises) to a conception of both selfhood and moral responsibility (i.e.: the conclusion), the anti‐narrative camp holds the conclusion to be false and the narrative theory of the self to be invalid. The Parfitian view holds the conception of the self to be ultimately false, whereas the Strawsonian view holds both the conception of the self and the conception of moral responsibility to be ultimately false. The grounds they provide, however, tend to be metaphysical in nature, demonstrating that they have fundamentally misunderstood how the narrative theory of the self functions as a semantic thesis. I will demonstrate certain defects in the metaphysical arguments that anti‐narrativists like Parfit and Strawson have made against what is essentially a semantic thesis about how we make sense of our lives. I will also attempt to shore up the semantic thesis in other relevant aspects. (shrink)

In the article art forms of utopian ideas embodiment in the novels of the Scottish writer I. Banks are considered. Utopian narratives are found both in the science-fiction cycle devoted to the civilization of Culture and in the novel "Business". Art modeling of the fundamental strategies of the society development characteristic for the New time, reveals their internal inconsistencies. Preindustrial, patriarchal living forms are offered instead. Novels by I. Banks visually demonstrate the feature of modern public consciousness and the absence (...) of ideal future representations. In the article fantastic and realistic I. Banks’ novels are compared from the point of this utopian ideal. (shrink)

In all facets of our lives, humans construct meaning to understand their place in the world and their relationships to one another and to broader environments. Within this semantic web, words, stor...

The article considers Jürgen Habermas's views on the relationship between postmetaphysical philosophy and religion. It outlines Habermas's shift from his earlier, apparently dismissive attitude towards religion to his presently more receptive stance. This more receptive stance is evident in his recent emphasis on critical engagement with the semantic contents of religion and may be characterized by two interrelated theses: the view that religious contributions should be included in political deliberations in the informally organized public spheres of contemporary democracies, though translated (...) into a secular language for the purposes of legislation and formal decision making and the view that postmetaphysical philosophy should seek to salvage the semantic contents of religious traditions in order to supply the evocative images, exemplary figures, and inspirational narratives it needs for its social and political projects. With regard to, it argues that the translation requirement impairs the political autonomy of religious believers and other metaphysically inclined citizens, suggesting that this difficulty could be alleviated by making a distinction between epistemologically authoritarian and non-authoritarian religious beliefs. With regard to, it argues that the salvaging operation is not as straightforward as Habermas seems to suppose and that social and political philosophy may not be able to tap the semantic power of religious traditions without relying on metaphysical assumptions; it concludes that, here, too, a distinction between authoritarian and non-authoritarian approaches to knowledge and validity may be useful. (shrink)

We perform a mixed-method frame semantics-based analysis on a dataset of more than 49,000 sentences collected from 5846 news articles that mention AI. The dataset covers the twelve-month period centred around the launch of OpenAI’s chatbot ChatGPT and is collected from the most visited open-access English-language news publishers. Our findings indicate that during the six months succeeding the launch, media attention rose tenfold—from already historically high levels. During this period, discourse has become increasingly centred around experts and political leaders, (...) and AI has become more closely associated with dangers and risks. A deeper review of the data also suggests a qualitative shift in the types of threat AI is thought to represent, as well as the anthropomorphic qualities ascribed to it. (shrink)

The normative ideals of democracy, trust and respect are under threat from the forces of populism and extremism. I argue for a recalibration of some basic ideas in the moral and social domains in which each person sees her/himself as one among others. I defend 0093The Principle of Personal Worth0094 which asserts that persons are more valuable than non-persons such as nations, religions, ethnicities, tribes, gangs, and cultures. The 0091collectivist0092 mentality denied by this principle is often held up against a (...) strongly (individualist) or atomistic one. However, these two extremes are not the only possibilities.Collectivism and identity politics link our identities to those associations and institutions with which we identify. This link is based on a confusion between qualitative and quantitative identity. Our actual (numerical) identities are determined by a combination of semantic (conceptual) and deictic (referential) factors, not by our qualitative associations.The Alt-Right combines extremes of individualism and collectivism by way of self-serving narratives that simultaneously elevate the individual over the State, and promote the agendas of specific religious, ethnic, gender and sexuality groups. These impoverished narratives support an impoverished sense of community which functions as an echo chamber for its own ideas, while rejecting those coming from beyond its boundaries. Ultimately, the task of repairing and reconstructing such narratives lies in formal education. Teachers and students need to enact forms of discourse and community which are intellectually, ethically and affectively powerful, both as tools for better teaching and learning, and as preparation for living worthwhile lives. (shrink)

Religion and violence are related in an ambivalent, paradoxical way, for the systems of religious knowledge tend to prohibit violence and to motivate it at the same time. This paper looks for the roots of that ambivalence and reveals particular mechanisms that generate violence within religious systems and their associated practices. It argues that violence in religious systems is present in at least three forms: It is inherent to communication with the “sacred,” it is generated by processes of inclusion and (...) exclusion, shaping religiously interpreted lifeworlds, and it is motivated or moderated by the respective semantics of religious narratives. The paper concludes that violence as a moment of hierophany is constitutive for the living experience in religious systems and cannot be eliminated entirely by moderating semantics. (shrink)

“The object of this book,” writes William C. Dowling in his preface, “is to make the key concepts of Paul Ricoeur’s _Time and Narrative_ available to readers who might have felt bewildered by the twists and turns of its argument.” The sources of puzzlement are, he notes, many. For some, it is Ricoeur’s famously indirect style of presentation, in which the polarities of argument and exegesis seem so often and so suddenly to have reversed themselves. For others, it is the (...) extraordinary intellectual range of Ricoeur’s argument, drawing on traditions as distant from each other as Heideggerian existentialism, French structuralism, and Anglo-American analytic philosophy. Yet beneath the labyrinthian surface of Ricoeur’s _Temps et récit_, Dowling reveals a single extended argument that, though developed unsystematically, is meant to be understood in systematic terms. __Ricoeur on Time and Narrative_ _presents that argument in clear and concise terms, in a way that will be enlightening both to readers new to Ricoeur and those who may have felt themselves adrift in the complexities of _Temps et récit,_ Ricoeur’s last major philosophical work. Dowling divides his discussion into six chapters, all closely involved with specific arguments in _Temps et récit_: on mimesis, time, narrativity, semantics of action, poetics of history, and poetics of fiction. Additionally, Dowling provides a preface that lays out the French intellectual context of Ricoeur's philosophical method. An appendix presents his English translation of a personal interview in which Ricoeur, having completed _Time and Narrative, _looks back over his long career as an internationally renowned philosopher. __Ricoeur on Time and Narrative___ _communicates to readers the intellectual excitement of following Ricoeur’s dismantling of established theories and arguments—Aristotle and Augustine and Husserl on time, Frye and Greimas on narrative structure, Arthur Danto and Louis O. Mink on the nature of historical explanation—while coming to see how, under the pressure of Ricoeur’s analysis, these ideas are reconstituted and revealed in a new set of relations to one another. "The scholarship in William C. Dowling's __Ricoeur on Time and Narrative____ __is impeccable; Dowling knows Ricoeur inside out. He highlights Ricoeur's most important arguments, presents them in a limpid, concise language, and links them to the relevant nineteenth- and twentieth-century philosophical developments. Dowling's book provides us with a lucid, intelligible version of Ricoeur's major work, one that will be of considerable significance to philosophers, historians, and literary theorists." —_Thomas Pavel, Gordon J. Laing Distinguished Service Professor of French Literature, and the Committee on Social Thought, University of Chicago_ "William C. Dowling's __Ricoeur on Time and Narrative___ _is a subtle and remarkably well-sustained piece of work. It provides a detailed introduction to a major work of philosophy and narrative theory—already a considerable achievement, given the difficulty of Ricoeur's text. However, Dowling also shows us, sometimes explicitly, sometimes simply through the way he conducts his argument, why we should bother with Ricoeur—what we have to gain from knowing him better than we do, however well we may think we know him." —_Michael Wood, Charles Barnwell Straut Class of 1923 Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Princeton University _. (shrink)

In 2015, the filmmaker, artist, and writer Penny Woolcock created an imaginary city, Utopia, at the Roundhouse, London, in collaboration with Block9. It staged a blend of miscellaneous pop-up installations featuring Londoners who were each telling their individual stories about inequality, consumerism, gentrification, education, crime, and social media.1 The narrative soundscapes set within an extraordinary design brought to light the parallel lives yet opposite experiences of people in urban environments and, at the same time, revealed their hopes and dreams.Woolcock's (...) current exhibition at the Museum for Modern Art in Oxford, England, shows a part of this project. The video, Utopia, depicts eight people... (shrink)

While law and justice issues are well represented in the vast and diverse world of Japanese Manga, the medium’s predilection for fantasy tends to produce futuristic or overblown fiction far removed from everyday life. Fantastic treatments may also reflect relatively low awareness of legal matters in a society of low crime and litigation. One law and order institution that most people are familiar with, however, is the network of community police boxes that covers Japan, and this has spawned a (...) gag-ridden yet somewhat more realistic genre of justice-related comics. This article focuses on Ishikawa Chika’s KOBAN, whose humour revolves around the contrasting personalities and petty squabbles of two cops in their dealings with mundane police work. The characters, plots and conversations are visually supported by juxtaposing the weaponry and equipment of law enforcement with childlike facial features and cute mascots, thereby constructing the police box as a halfway house between local neighbourliness and state bureaucracy. (shrink)

Pelkey’s anchoring of the semiotic square in embodiment is excellent news for cognitive literary theory, a dynamic field still in search of itself. However, his validation of the square, though theoretically unexceptionable, suffers in the execution, for his interpretation of the country song “Follow your Arrow” is less successful. The present article benefits from Pelkey’s validation as it organizes a tool of cultural-semantic analysis (CS-tool) as a ‘deviant’ semiotic square. The article then shows how this particular semiotic square allows us (...) to analyze the song in terms which build on Pelkey’s analysis, but also arrive at more satisfying results. Where Pelkey sees liberation in the song and the square, the tool uncovers manipulation in the former and closure in the latter. The article then assesses the complementarity of and differences between the two squares: Pelkey works on a local sentence-level through direct implicature, thus following the narrative/authorial voice of the poem. The CS-tool starts from a position of higher abstraction requiring a less defined, but still sufficient and more wide-ranging, three-step implicature. This allows the tool to step back from the song’s authorial voice and uncover its manipulations. The article closes by discussing the deviant features of the present square. (shrink)

While recent studies have claimed that non-referential gestures (i.e., gestures that do not visually represent any semantic content in speech) are used to mark discourse-new and/or -accessible referents and focused information in adult speech, to our knowledge, no prior investigation has studied the relationship between information structure (IS) and gesture referentiality in children’s narrative speech from a developmental perspective. A longitudinal database consisting of 332 narratives performed by 83 children at two different time points in development was coded for (...) IS and gesture referentiality (i.e., referential and non-referential gestures). Results revealed that at both time points, both referential and non-referential gestures were produced more with information that moves discourse forward (i.e., focus) and predication (i.e., comment) rather than topical or background information. Further, at 7–9 years of age, children tended to use more non-referential gestures to mark focus and comment constituents than referential gestures. In terms of the marking of the newness of discourse referents, non-referential gestures already seem to play a key role at 5–6 years old, whereas referential gestures did not show any patterns. This relationship was even stronger at 7–9 years old. All in all, our findings offer supporting evidence that in contrast with referential gestures, non-referential gestures have been found to play a key role in marking IS, and that the development of this relationship solidifies at a period in development that coincides with a spurt in non-referential gesture production. (shrink)

The life and career of the Soviet scholar of myth and religion Izrail′ Grigor′evič Frank-Kamenetskij is discussed, tracing his development from a scholar working exclusively on semitology to a theorist of myth and literature. The scholar’s relationship to German philosophy and Biblical scholarship is outlined, along with his relationship to Soviet scholarship of the 1920s and 1930s. The development of the scholar’s work is related to his encounter with N. Ja. Marr in the early 1920s, and the way in which (...) Marr’s doctrine underwent considerable revisions when subjected to German philosophy and applied to narrative material is detailed. Finally the way in which attention increasingly turned to the genesis of literary plots and poetic metaphor is discussed, along with both the influence such work exerted and the enduring value of such work today. (shrink)

This book is a careful study of writings by Paul Ricoeur from his early discussions of phenomenology, through the development of his hermeneutic philosophy, to recent texts on the self and the other. Venema identifies the development of a hermeneutical understanding of identity and selfhood as the central issue that belongs to Ricoeur’s work. He discusses the distinct phases that belong to that work, and the specific concerns that Ricoeur comes to address in those phases, in the light of this (...) issue. The hermeneutical treatment of identity and selfhood begins in a critique of Husserlian transcendental phenomenology. Venema develops that critique by focusing, not exclusively but significantly, on the first part of Ideas I. He argues that one finds in transcendental phenomenology claims to a self-transparent and independent ego whose achievements occur with necessity. A critique that discovers immanent problems in these claims is the first step that Ricoeur takes in moving toward a hermeneutical understanding of identity. A second step occurs when Ricoeur focuses on the significance of the imagination. Imagination mediates between the multiplicity of involuntary dispositions and the unifying function of voluntary capacity. It also mediates between the finitude of passive receptivity and the infinite effort to determine what is received with names. This effort, in turn, locates the self in a situation of power over others in a context that nonetheless also calls for the reciprocals constitutions of selves. Venema notes the anomalous character of this position. He claims that it continues to be present in related and basic ways throughout the development of Ricoeur’s work. The analyses of metaphor seriously attempt to exhibit the reciprocity of identity and difference and to contribute to a hermeneutic of reciprocal self-constitution. At the same time, parts of those analyses suggest a primacy of identity over difference in relation to language, selfhood, and Being. This undercuts the claim that selves are constituted through reciprocal relations with each other and with the world. The analyses of narrative uncover an understanding of identity as something that comes about insofar as narrative discourse configures and refigures temporal experience. At the same time the appropriation of narrative possibilities seems to presuppose a voluntary cogito that stands over against the flux of symbolic and narrative discourse. Finally, Ricoeur extends the discussion of identity expressly to include the problem of selfhood. Continuing to define identity in narrative terms, he insists on both the distinction between and the correlation of self-sameness and self-constancy in the identity of the self. However, the way in which his discussions of identity and selfhood combine a semantic analysis of selfreference with a pragmatic analysis of self-designation leads to problems that ultimately render his account of the self’s receptivity of the other inadequate or at least incomplete. (shrink)