Search results for "Linguistics"

On Referring to Gestalts

2010

This paper discusses a fresh approach to formal semantics based on mereology and Gestalt Theory. While Wiegand (2007, Spacial Cognition & Computation, Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum) unfolds the technical details of this new approach, the following paper aims to discuss the philosophical motivation an implications of what I have called mereological semantics. Particular attention will be given to an ongoing debate on the nature of relations.

Notes on the Success of Speech Acts and Negotiating Commitments

1996

Technologies that support communication and models used in the development of communications need good underlying theories. One theory suggested as a base for design is speech act theory. Both communication support tools and modelling notations informed by speech act theory have been proposed. Speech act theory forms no unified, single theory, but actually houses several variants for dealing with semantics, pragmatics, and social context of communications. They all have one common feature: they assume that language is not merely a means of describing but also a means for doing things. In this paper we present an overview of speech act theories and their uses in information systems research.…

Control Structures in Motivational Psychology

1996

Abstract Motivational processes in psychology have been interpreted from many different viewpoints. In the general case, they present an information feedback structure, with goals and disturbances, in a similar way most control systems behave. In this contribution, this similarity is analysed and examples of motivational processes corresponding to the most common control system structures are given. This comparison will be fruitful from both sides: to explore a new field of control theory application and to provide a new framework to the analysis of these complex processes.

Implicit learning and statistical learning: one phenomenon, two approaches.

2006

The domain-general learning mechanisms elicited in incidental learning situations are of potential interest in many research fields, including language acquisition, object knowledge formation and motor learning. They have been the focus of studies on implicit learning for nearly 40 years. Stemming from a different research tradition, studies on statistical learning carried out in the past 10 years after the seminal studies by Saffran and collaborators, appear to be closely related, and the similarity between the two approaches is strengthened further by their recent evolution. However, implicit learning and statistical learning research favor different interpretations, focusing on the forma…

The Mechanisms of Control, Affiliation and Self-expression

2016

The main theme in this chapter centres on the conceptual difference between psychological processes and the underlying mechanisms that propel these processes. The chapter starts with a brief historical overview and recognises the existence of the one single mechanism that throughout the past has repeatedly tended to rise to the surface, admittedly in different forms. This mechanism is called balanced dual tension. The chapter further includes a discussion on the possibility that there are distinct kinds of balanced dual tension that are characteristic for each of the three previously mentioned motivational systems. It ends with a summary of the arguments and suggests that further analyses o…

2020

Abstract This article discusses a hypothesis recently put forward by Kanai et al., according to which information generation constitutes a functional basis of, and a sufficient condition for, consciousness. Information generation involves the ability to compress and subsequently decompress information, potentially after a temporal delay and adapted to current purposes. I will argue that information generation should not be regarded as a sufficient condition for consciousness, but could serve as what I will call a “minimal unifying model of consciousness.” A minimal unifying model (MUM) specifies at least one necessary feature of consciousness, characterizes it in a determinable way, and sho…

Cognitive Pragmatics. The Mental Processes of Communication

2012

Default semantics. Foundations of a compositional theory of acts of communication

2009

The metaphorical species: Evolution, adaptation and speciation of metaphors

2015

Studying cartoons about the economic crisis and focusing on a pair of scissors as a symbol, I prove how they first turn into unambiguous metaphor for the economic crisis and then experience an evolution in order to adapt to new communication contexts. Along these processes, they undergo more complex changes such as coadaptation and speciation. This has allowed for the scissors meme as a symbol of economic cutbacks to permeate society, and for its metaphorical use to occupy many disparate communication scenarios, unlike other symbolic elements that were also used, but turned out to be less cognitively efficient and therefore offered fewer evolutionary possibilities.

Between Composition and Emergentness: A Cognitive Semantics Re-Reading of the Way-Construction

2016

This study re-analyzes the English way-construction by having recourse to diverse concepts and tools of Talmy’s cognitive semantics. Drawing on his theory of recombinance and its relevance for conceptualizing the construction, the article implements Talmy’s theory of event integration, categorizes the way-construction as an instantiation of the open path event frame, considers link-ups of the schematic systems of force dynamics and attention as they become instantiated in the construction, and probes into its motion-aspect patterning, grounded in a conformation of space and time and resulting in a strategy that is called de-conflation. Further, it will recruit Talmy’s types of semantic conf…