Lorand Gaspar, les pores du mot. « Pierre » et la contemplation énactive

Cognitive science is a real umbrella term covering the various disciplines that investigate human communication and information processing: first of all cognitive psychology, psycholinguistics, certain branches of linguistics and recently discourse analysis (used to describe the mechanisms of natural conversation as well as dramatic discourse, very long neglected). These various disciplines explore the psychological processes involved in the acquisition, organization, and use of knowledge. The debate between socioand cognitive pragmaticists is still going on. The former are more interested in the inter-personal sphere, in the standards of social behavior, since in interactions linguistic (as well as other) behavior is often assessed socially. Conversely, for cognitive pragmaticists, more important than any social contract underlying interactions is the role played by personal beliefs, assumptions, inferences, and inner mental representations involved in the communicative event. Nevertheless, both share many common methods and basic views, and their specific concept of communication may help to define more convincingly the still quite vague notion of theatricality. I would like here to attempt a first step toward understanding how theatrical language, as well as the audience's responses, are constrained and shaped by human information processing and communication, and how the various tools offered by cognitive science could be employed to analyze them in a relatively new way. In earlier attempts to deal with the thorny problem of theatricality, theater scholars tried to define it within a binary opposition to the performance arts. Thus performance, while deconstructing theater's essential features, allowed these features to be seen more clearly. Thought of as the flip side of theater, performance was called a phenomenon of the here-andnow, with no other referent than itself. Since it distances itself from representation and rejects any codes and structures permitting signification, materials on which it works are used only to present; they are indexes, and not symbols or icons as is the rule in conventional theater. As a non-narrative ? Board of Regents, University of Wisconsin System, 2002 225 SubStance # 98/99, Vol. 31, nos. 2 & 3, 2002

Cognitive science is a real umbrella term covering the various disciplines that investigate human communication and information processing: first of all cognitive psychology, psycholinguistics, certain branches of linguistics and recently discourse analysis (used to describe the mechanisms of natural conversation as well as dramatic discourse, very long neglected). These various disciplines explore the psychological processes involved in the acquisition, organization, and use of knowledge. The debate between socio- and cognitive pragmaticists is still going on. The former are more interested in the inter-personal sphere, in the standards of social behavior, since in interactions linguistic (as well as other) behavior is often assessed socially. Conversely, for cognitive pragmaticists, more important than any social contract underlying interactions is the role played by personal beliefs, assumptions, inferences, and inner mental representations involved in the communicative event. Nevertheless, both share many common methods and basic views, and their specific concept of communication may help to define more convincingly the still quite vague notion of "theatricality." I would like here to attempt a first step toward understanding how theatrical language, as well as the audience's responses, are constrained and shaped by human information processing and communication, and how the various tools offered by cognitive science could be employed to analyze them in a relatively new way.

Based on the premise that modernity’s understanding of the linguistic sign has a long history dating back to ancient Greece when the linguistic mediation of knowledge preoccupied thinkers like Parmenides and Plato, this dissertation synthesizes contemporary post-structuralist and rhetorical understandings of language with like-minded findings of other fields of language study. It sees post-structuralist and deconstructive understandings of language as being congruent with the long tradition of rhetorical theory and the infamous linguistic turn in philosophy, that was initiated by the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, as a turn away from the actual phenomena of language towards an idealization of it. Nevertheless the thesis discovers recent findings by some of the beneficiaries of the “philosophy of language” that corroborate rhetorical theory’s insights. Inspired by both Derrida and Plato, this dissertation presents a rhetorical-deconstructive image of language that, recalling the root of the term skopevw (‘I look,’ ‘behold,’ ‘contemplate’), I characterize as sceptical. This study follows the theoretical matrix of de Man, Fish, Culler and Barbara Johnson, who are, of course, themselves following Derrida. It has a holistic attitude to language characteristic of the Bakhtin/Volsohinov approach, drawing insights from classical and contemporary rhetorical theory, post-structuralist theory, findings of systemic functional grammar, recent work in cognitive science and psychology on affect and language use, the scholarship of reported speech, and the ostensive-inferential theory of communication called Relevance. This cross border work in intellectual history, language theory and stylistics examines the interstices of theory and style in the work of figures such as Plato, Aristotle, Bacon, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Voloshinov, Bakhtin and Derrida. Sperber and Wilson, Scholars of Reported Speech and Halliday are central to its findings; the thinking of William James and Silvan Tomkins play supporting roles. It positions Plato as the founder of rhetorical theory and studies the voices of Plato and Derrida as language theorists. I examine both how Plato and Derrida talk about language and what theories of language underlie their styles, determining finally that their sceptical-rhetorical theories prompt their ironic-conversational stylistics.

A long-standing and cardinal issue in the cognitive science and humanities research literatures on lexical metaphor is whether figurative language is derived from literal language. In examining this issue, research from a broad spectrum of studies in both cognitive science and the humanities is addressed with particular attention to findings from classicist research on ancient Greek texts, on the cognitive significance of the invention of the Crreek vocalic alphabet. These findings are related to current research on brain hemispheric laterality. It will be suggested that lexical metaphor was originally not a linguistic figure-of speech derived from literal language but only later came to be so conceptualized as the consequence of a neurofunctional shift (NFS) in hemispheric laterality, a shift that was precipitated in part by the invention and adoption of the Crreek vocalic alphabet. It will be further suggested that the prevailing view of metaphor as a linguistic figure of speech is the consequence of an inappropriate cognitive turn that resulted in a superimposition or back scanning of a modern alphabetic-based epistemology on to phenomena originating in a preliterate culture

Reviewed by: The Provocation of the Senses in Contemporary Theatre Deirdre O’Leary The Provocation of the Senses in Contemporary Theatre. By Stephen Di Benedetto. New York: Routledge, 2010. Cloth $110.00. xii, 238 pages. In the final chapter of his book, The Provocation of the Senses in Contemporary Theatre, author Stephen Di Benedetto admits that he has “little desire to sit through yet another national tour of Death of a Salesman” (167). Yet he concedes that he learned what good theatre was by attending such shows. Di Benedetto’s experience is not unique. As theatre scholars, we initially developed our critical apparatuses largely through years of study and attendance at “traditional” theatrical performances. While this does not make us unable to critically engage with performances that fall outside the conventional parameters and definitions of theatre, might there be ways that we can enhance and enrich our understanding of these events? For Di Benedetto, the answer lies in cognitive science and phenomenology. The Provocation of the Senses has as its central conceit that cognitive neuroscience can provide a new framework for better understanding theatrical expression. Di Benedetto maintains that being aware of how our senses are engaged in performance enriches our ability to interpret the form and function of the theatrical event. Additionally, theatre and performance artists can better understand how to use the sentient bodies of audience members, referred to as attendants throughout the book, to create more conscious involvement in the theatrical present. The book is divided into six chapters with an introduction, four chapters addressing the five senses (smell and taste are included in one chapter), and a conclusion that looks to future trends in performance and considers the implications of sentient performances. “Our Sensing Bodies,” the first chapter, is primarily concerned with explaining how the brain and body receive stimuli, and introduces the compelling argument that mimesis can stimulate the brain to remodel its neural pathways. Each of the “sense” chapters begins with a general, though detailed, summary of how each sense functions in relation to cognitive science and physiology, followed by descriptions of performances that engage each sense. “Scintillating Visions and Visual Perception,” the second chapter, examines the role of light and movement in attendant awareness. Di Benedetto asks how theatre artists and practitioners have consciously employed light to keep audiences stimulated and interested in what is happening on stage. Robert Wilson’s work is discussed in detail, with particular emphasis on his use of color as an expressive element. Di Benedetto concedes that while we will never see how the mixing of photons produces specific colors, to be more aware of how light affects our perception allows us to be more conscious interpreters of a theatrical event. Quite simply, we become more aware of the act of seeing. The third chapter, “Attendant to Touch,” considers performances where touch is directly employed to disrupt attendant awareness of the spatial distinctions [End Page 232] between performer and audience. Examples are drawn from Dionysus in 69, Karen Finley’s Return of the Chocolate Smeared Woman, and the work of Ulay and Marina Abramović, among others. However, the most vivid description is given to an amusement park Star Trek simulation experience. As touch is described as the most social of the senses, Di Benedetto argues that theatre performances that specifically challenge the attendant’s understanding of touch create new ways of learning about the world without risk. “Noses, Tongues, and Other Surprising Possibilities” looks at the ways in which smell and taste are used in order to connect the participant’s memory of lived experiences to the present theatrical moment. Di Benedetto is careful to note that efforts to incorporate smell into performance are hardly exclusive to contemporary theatre, and gives extensive descriptive space to the experiments of the Symbolists. His contemporary examples, however, are largely confined to film and television, with multiple examples of Scratch-and-Sniff and Smell-O-Vision projects in aroma technology. In “Aural Landscapes,” Di Benedetto focuses on the ways in which sound is used in performance, beyond the obvious use of language in theatre. He documents “how sound triggers visceral sensations, which in turn evoke mood in the context of performance” (125...

The literary history of Bengal is characterized by a multilingual ecology that nurtured the development of Middle Bengali literature. It is around the turn of the second millennium, during the Pāla period (c. 8th–12th century), that eastern South Asia became a major region for the production of literary texts in Sanskrit and Apabhramsha. Early on, Bengal developed a distinct literary identity within the Sanskrit tradition and, despite abrupt political transitions and the fragmentation of the landscape of literary patronage, fundamental aspects of the literary culture of Pāla Bengal were transmitted during later periods. It was during the Sultanate period, from the 14th century onward that courtly milieus began to cultivate Middle Bengali. This patronage was mostly provided by upper-caste Hindu dignitaries and (in the case of lyric poetry at least) by the Sultans themselves. During the period ranging from the 15th to the early 19th centuries, vernacular literature can be divided into two broad categories: short narrative forms called padas or gītas (songs), which were often composed in an idiom derived from songs by the Old Maithili poet Vidyāpati (c. 1370–1460); and long narrative forms in Middle Bengali called pā̃cālīs, which are characterized by the alternation of the prosodic forms called paẏār and tripadī and the occasional insertion of songs. These poetic forms are the principal markers of the literary identity of Bengal and eastern South Asia (including Assam, Orissa, and Arakan). The Ḥusayn Shāhī period (1433–1486) contributed to the consolidation and expansion eastward of vernacular literary practices. Then, the political landscape became fragmented, and the multiplication of centers of literary production occurred. This fragmentation fostered the formation of new, locally grounded literary trends. These could involve the cultivation of specific genres, the propounding of various religious doctrines and ritual practices, the fashioning of new idioms fostered by either dialectal resources, classical idioms such as Sanskrit or Persian, and other vernacular poetic traditions (Maithili, Avadhi, Hindustani). The late Mughal and early colonial periods witnessed the making of new trends, characterized by a radical modification of the lexical component of the Middle Bengali idiom (i.e., Dobhāṣī), or the recourse to scripts other than Bengali (e.g., Sylhet Nagari/Kaithi, Arabic). The making of such new trends often implied changes in the way that authors interacted with Sanskrit, Persian, and other vernacular traditions. For instance, Persian played as crucial a role as Sanskrit in the various trajectories that Middle Bengali poetry took. On the one hand, Persian in Bengal had a history distinct from that of Bengali; on the other hand, it constituted a major traditional model for Bengali authors and, at times, Persianate education replaced the one based on Sanskrit as the default way to access literacy. Even if Middle Bengali poetic forms continued to be used in the context of various traditional performances, the making of a new literary language in the 19th century, the adoption of Western genres, and the development of prose and Western prosodic forms occasioned a radical break with premodern literary practices. From the second half of the 19th century, with the notable exception of some ritual and sectarian texts, access to the ancient literature of Bengal began to be mediated by philological analysis and textual criticism.

From ancient through modern times there have persisted various versions of a dichotomy between ‘natural’ and other, implicitly ‘unnatural’ forms of language. One version is a split between natural language and an ‘artificial’ literary or standard language. This paper examines several key moments in the development of this particular dichotomy, starting with Varro's belief that the language of poets should not be subject to the same rules of analogy as ordinary language is. Dante sets the pattern for modern considerations of the literary and standard language, which he would create by instituting a reversal of history. The concept is subsequently politicized by, for example, Nebrixa and Du Bellay. Saussure's views on literary language have parallels with Dante's ‘elimination of history’, and resonance for other aspects of Saussure's theory of language. The implications for contemporary views of what is and is not ‘natural’ in language are also considered.

According to the dynamic-historic strand of new institutional economics (Fu-rubotn/Richter 2008), institutional rigidity is one of the major problems of economies. “Institutional rigidity” designates states or situations which are characterized by institutions in need of change but do not change, or not to the required degree. Our paper addresses the question whether institutional rigidity can be explained as a result of mental path processes, i. e., path dependent or even locked individual mental models. Path dependency theory is usually not applied to mental phenomena; it is no approach that has any roots in cognitive science or psychology. That notwithstanding, we state that path dependency theory can be applied to cognitive systems. We therefore had to build our analysis on concepts or ideas already available in cognitive science, i. e., information processing or mental representation, which we connected with early works in cognitive psychology or radical constructivism by Piaget. Piaget’s distinction between assimilation and accommodation provides a connection point to path dependency theory, since assimilation is a source of the continuity of the mental structure which thus contains the germ of a path process. In this regard, our paper can be read as an attempt to marry cognitive or radical constructivism and path dependency theory in order to build a micro-level model of mental processes.

During the summer of 2008 in Washington, DC, the Cognitive Science Society celebratedthe 30th anniversary of its seminal 1979 conference in San Diego. The 2008 conferenceorganizers—Bradley Love, Ken McRae, and Vladimir Sloutsky—commissioned a sympo-sium to celebrate the occasion. In discussing possibilities, we agreed that the symposiumshould not simply address the Society’s origins and subsequent history, but that it shouldfocus on contributions from the disciplines and theoretical perspectives central to CognitiveScience, along with their future directions.We originally settled on five disciplines and five theoretical perspectives, and then weinvited 10 active established researchers to address them at the conference. To accommo-date these 10 speakers, two symposia were presented, one on disciplines and one onperspectives. Each speaker was asked to address: (a) What was your discipline⁄perspectivelike at the time of the 1979 conference? (b) How has the discipline⁄perspective changedover the past 30 years to what it is today? (c) How do you foresee the discipline⁄perspectivechanging in the next 30 years?Because of time constraints, we could not include all disciplines and perspectives centralto Cognitive Science. Fortunately, however, we were able to remedy this limitation byasking additional researchers to contribute articles here. The resulting collection of articlescovers disciplines and perspectives that have been central to Cognitive Science for the past30 years and that are likely to be central for the next 30 years and beyond. Specifically, thedisciplines (and the authors addressing them) include the following:Psychology (Dedre Gentner)Artificial Intelligence (Kenneth D. Forbus)Philosophy (William Bechtel)Linguistics (Elissa L. Newport)

Central figures in the phenomenological tradition, such as Aron Gurwitsch, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, drew extensively on gestalt psychology in their writings. The dialogue between phenomenology and psychology they began continues today in the field of embodied cognitive science. We take up this conversation starting from Aron Gurwitsch’s rich phenomenological analysis of the perception of the cultural world. Gurwitsch’s phenomenological descriptions of the perception of the cultural world bear a striking resemblance to work in embodied cognitive science that takes its inspiration from Gibson’s ecological psychology. Gibson coined the term “affordance” to refer to the possibilities for action that can be directly perceived by persons [Gibson 1979]. However, Gibson from his earliest writings made a distinction between a universal, strictly individual and nonsocial form of perception and a perception of the world that was subject to social and cultural influences. We use Gurwitsch to argue against Gibson’s individualist understanding of direct perception. Each affordance that can be selected as an object of perception refers to a wider sociocultural context, which Gurwitsch called an “order of existence”. We end our paper by taking up the question of the relation of phenomenological description of the perceptual world and explanations of perceptual experience provided by embodied cognitive science.

This paper describes conceptual metaphor theory and the cognitive neural network, showing that literary language has a great place in cognitive linguistics and cognitive science. Lakoff and Johnson argue that metaphor is widely pervaded in behaviors and thoughts as well as in everyday language and not just literary language. Paul Churchland suggests the theory of representation from results of cognitive neural network. According to the representational theory, our representations of our world and our selves can be represented as the locations of phase state spaces with the movements of the neurons. This paper attempts to analyze the role of representations and metaphors in Robert Frost’s poetry. I raise some problems based on both the conceptual Metaphor theory and the theory of cognitive neural network, I try to analyze cognitive theories to a poem titled “The Silken Tent.” Therefore, this research suggests that critical ideas in consilience of the studies should raise questions as to our fundamental principles and give them new creative theories.

Teaching and Learning Guide for: Pragmatics: From Theory to Experiment and Back Again

This paper addresses the work of the Austrian poet Friederike Mayröcker (1924–2021) with an interdisciplinary approach contextualised within Cognitive Poetics and Cognitive Literary Theory studies. The specific focus of this study is the voice and the meaning produced through the proposed notion of a ‘poetic spoken atmosphere’. The poetic spoken atmosphere is understood here not as the unique property of an audio-text but rather as an intersubjective phenomenon emerging at the intersection of the poetic language and a listener. This notion underlines the importance of voice and its effects in the dynamics of poetry reception in order to investigate sound patterns and meaning-making dynamics, approaching three specific processes – rhythm, expectation, and emotion. The general theoretical frame of this study is based on principles of both phenomenology and cognitive sciences. Likewise, the analysis of Mayröcker’s poems is based on her recordings, available on the Lyrikline platform of the Haus für Poesie Berlin, from which spectrograms were generated to complement the textual and acoustic analysis. The observations of this study address the vocal structures modulating what can be termed an ‘insideness’, which allows to analyze sound attributes such as duration, intensity, ubiquity, and disappearing. Recognising such attributes help us to understand the emotional level of poetic sounds, i. e. the relationship between feeling and meaning in listening, hypothesising that meaning is indeed felt. Finally, the paper offers a comparative perspective that suggests further research on the basis of the paper’s theoretical-analytical methodology, and it provides specific examples from several literary systems.

The present paper deals with the analysis of folk geographic terminology. Since the Middle Dniper dialects is the basic component of the Ukrainianliterary language, the purpose of the article is to observe phenomena that are different from the literary standard. The source base is dialectal textsof Cherkasy region. Recently Ukrainian dialect textography has been enriched with new works from different territories of Ukraine. Such form ofinformation recording allows to research all language levels, to determine linguistic phenomena in their natural interactions and to reveal the specificity of dialect speakers’ world perception. This factor is important for the study of ramified and complex semantics of nominative unites that name the geographical objects. The research shows that the range of lexemes denoted separate notions is wider in the dialect speakers’ speech than in the literary language. This contributes to the expansion of the semantics, the formation of synonymic sets within a single dialect and interdialecte quivalents in the studied dialect continuum. Such conclusions indicate that lexemes register of literary language dictionary is significantly limited and our research is relevant and perspective.

Mac Wellman is an award-winning American playwright whose theatre can be daunting to a first-time spectator. Since he thinks of his playFnu Lnu as a “new version of Aeschylus’Eumenides,” the classical play can provide entrance to the contemporary play but with adjustments for the experimental mode of presentation. The Furies, for example, are singing sorceresses, and Orestes is an old anarchist reminiscing about the good old days. There is a quester, however, and a quest that takes him beneath the play’s site to the old, lost city that is the Dionysian flux, the source of imagery that is the basis of poetic theatre’s language (as opposed to the literal language of geezer or naturalistic theatre) and of freedom of choice that is the basis of a political, moral, creative society. The spectator-reader is encouraged to take the journey, for once the obstacles are overcome, the experience is very rewarding.