Different Aspects Of Meaning Research Articles

A multimodal critical discourse analysis of city as text: investigation of meaning metafunctions of Rasht’s Imam Khomeini Street

Studying the city as text is influenced by a phenomenon called the linguistic turn. This is because the text of the city is composed of different semiotic systems. This study employs multimodal discourse analysis as its theoretical framework. Through a close examination of the organizational, interactional and representational metafunction of the city text, the authors aim to highlight its characteristics as a communicational resource to provide a multimodal reading of the city. They demonstrate how applying a social semiotic approach to the physical dimensions of a street contributes to a particular understanding of how this public space is used or navigated and how the formal management of the flow of cars and people is materialized. Here the city is classified into different levels of resolution based on urban morphology’s description of the urban tissue. The text of the city is constructed through dialogue among meaning metafunctions on one level and among different levels. Examining different aspects of meaning in the text of Imam Khomeini Street and the city of Rasht indicates how, in such a text, the producers and participants communicate through the material aspect of the city. Uses of semiotic materials are ideological and their affordances have evolved in specific socio-political moments. In this street, the city as an institution and as a place of authority having the biggest share in the production of this text persuades other participants to follow and reproduce a certain narration of the reality. Controlling and training the body, on one hand, and using the urban space for advertising the dominant discourse, on the other hand, are the boldest motives of this street’s design, and the formation of the different dimensions of meaning is somehow at the service of the consolidation of a particular kind of everyday life.

Meaning of life as a resource for coping with psychological crisis: Comparisons of suicidal and non-suicidal patients.

IntroductionMeaning is an important psychological resource both in situations of accomplishment and in situations of ongoing adversity and psychological crisis. Meaning in life underlies the reasons for staying alive both in everyday and in critical circumstances, fulfilling a buffering function with respect to life adversities.AimThe aim of the present study was to reveal the role of both meaningfulness, including specific sources of meaning and reasons for living, and meaninglessness (alienation) in patients suffering from profound crisis situations with or without suicidal intentions and behavior.MethodsThe sample included 148 patients (all Caucasian) who were referred to a crisis center in Moscow, Russia. Seventy-seven patients (54 females, mean age 32.00 ± 11.98 years) reported a current crisis situation in their life but denied suicidal thoughts or behavior. Twenty-nine patients (21 females, mean age 31.55 ± 13.76 years) reported suicidal ideations but denied suicidal attempts or self-harming behavior. Forty-two patients (31 females, mean age 30.64 ± 11.38 years) had episodes of suicidal attempts or self-harming behavior accompanied by suicidal intentions. There were no significant gender or age differences between groups.Participants completed a number of measures of different aspects of meaning and meaninglessness, well-being, ill-being and psychological resources. For some patients (N = 74), a clinical checklist was completed by their doctors assessing 28 various characteristics associated with the patient’s clinical status.Results and discussionMeaningfulness and reasons for living were more helpful in distinguishing between reactions to profound crisis situations (suicidal intentions versus non-suicidal behavior) than were measures of well-being, ill-being, meaning crisis or personality resources. In both suicidal and non-suicidal crisis patients meaningfulness predicted more positive reasons for living. The relationship between meaningfulness and most reasons for living remained significant after controlling for clinically appraised suicidal “readiness,” acute stress and lack of social support. Self-transcendence was the major specific source of meaning predicting higher reasons for living after adjusting for general meaningfulness.ConclusionThe data cast some light on the psychological meaning of suicide. It follows that prevention efforts are to be focused not on eliminating the factors “pushing” one to suicidal behavior, but rather on supporting inner strengths conducive of a positive decision, to be, through enhancing meaningfulness and reasons for living.

Normality i normalcy - primer dubleta -ity/-cy u britanskom nacionalnom korpusu

Corpus-based research into derivational morphology can explain how affixes function, answer questions about their productivity and its relation to their synonymy, and clarify the rivalry between certain affixes and their semantic distinction. The aim of this research is to establish the similarities and differences between the nouns normality and normalcy by contrasting the suffixes -ity and -cy they contain in the British National Corpus (BNC). The focus is on the collocates which precede the nouns and the sources in which they appear. The attempt is also to understand what characterises the suffixes and their distribution. By focusing on normality and normalcy, we examine how lexical items behave in an electronically-stored corpus and whether a strong connection between meaning and form manifests itself in different word patterns highlighting different aspects of meaning.

The Architecture of the Enlightenment and the Birth of Modernity: from the High Baroque to Late Classicism

The article is devoted to the architecture of the Enlightenment in a broad sense. The author is convinced that this period is the time of the beginning of Modernity, the birth of the Early Modern Times architecture. He thinks that the cycle of the development of humanity, which architecture has been expressing most clearly of all other arts since the 17th century - the epoch of the English Revolution, has not ended yet. The ideas developed at that time continue to exist in our minds. They are still actual for contemporary architecture, developing it and solving the problems established at our civilization’s birth. The most contemporary ideas: of the sustainable architecture, natural, biologically orientated, friendly to the environment, which create the world of the perfect natural man preserving the ideals of the Ancients and the Moderns, creativity, and technologies – they are all directly linked to the ideas which were on the agenda of the architectural theory of England, France, Russia, Italy, Germany of the Age of Enlightenment. They were put into practice in the implemented designs of those times. The panorama of the European art of building, including Russian as one of the central laboratories of the Enlightenment during which the vast country’s territory underwent reforms, is truly gigantic. The author cites the main theories of the period in question. He shows one of the main qualities of the art of architecture from the High Baroque style to the Late Classicism, and further – up to postmodernism and even sustainable architecture: the attempt to create the environment, in which architecture would emphasize different aspects of meaning, would become architecture parlante as Claude Ledoux said. The interaction of several stylistic trends took place during the implementation of the stated process. In this process, the author underlines the importance of the Baroque’s universal character and the ideology of the Enlightenment, which gave birth to the “clever choice” of architectural forms.

Beyond Language Classes: Semiotic Practices in PowerPoint Slideshows in Pharmaceutical English-Mediated Presentations

Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL) has attracted considerable attention lately due to our increasing reliance on technology in education. This article contributes to educational research on CALL by considering the semiotic practices that surround PowerPoint slideshows. The article examines how a year-five female undergraduate in pharmacy designs her PowerPoint slideshow to represent and communicate knowledge in an English-mediated literacy event, i.e. pharmaceutical seminar presentations. While language plays an essential role in engagement in this event, the article seeks to highlight the role that visuals and writing plays in PowerPoint slideshows to help the presenter represent and communicate different aspects of meaning which reflect what she considers to be important for a successful engagement in a professional presentation. The investigation is carried out through a qualitative case study, using a social account of literacy and a social semiotic multi-modal approach to meaning making. Though this investigation is not carried within a traditional language class, it is used to highlight some of the issues that can help inform language education by drawing attention to the potential benefits that lie in exploring situated practices of meaning making in different professional and academic settings.

Models, information and meaning

There has recently been an explosion of formal models of signaling, which have been developed in order to learn about different aspects of meaning. This paper discusses whether that success can also be used to provide an original naturalistic theory of meaning in terms of information or some related notion. In particular, it argues that, although these models can teach us a lot about different aspects of content, at the moment they fail to support the idea that meaning just is some kind of information. As an alternative, I suggest a more modest approach to the relationship between the informational notions used in models and semantic properties in the natural world.

Comprehensive moderated mediation model of potential appraisal of employees

PurposePotential appraisal is the foremost indicator of employee's readiness to take higher responsibilities and used for multiple purposes in promotion, human resource development including training and development needs of employees. This study examines how construal level as psychological difference among employees (holistic–analytic differential in preference of thinking for various action domains among individuals) and meaningfulness of work is related to their readiness for development and responsibility. Combining meaning of work literature and cognitive psychology, the moderated mediation model is formed to examine the psychological process and social boundary conditions in the relationship between construal level and potential appraisal of employees.Design/methodology/approachData were collected from 1,494 working executives and their 297 reporting managers across companies operating in an industrial cluster situated in India. The proposed model considered “experienced meaningfulness” as mediator and contextual factors of psychological empowerment and supervisor feedback as moderators.FindingsUsing multi-variate analysis and after controlling for industry type and experience, supervisor potential appraisal ratings of employees are found to be statistically related to construal level, and this relationship is found to be partially mediated by “experienced meaningfulness” of work. Further, contextual factors are found to be significant as moderators.Originality/valueBy bringing the subjective interpretation of different aspects of meaning of work from work design literature to examine its role in relationship between aspects of cognitive psychology and potential appraisal of employees, this study bridges the gap between cognitive psychology of development, meaning of work literature and HRD literature. Further implications for academic literature and managers are discussed.

Cross-lingual word analogies using linear transformations between semantic spaces

The ability to represent the meaning of words is one of the core parts of natural language understanding (NLU), with applications ranging across machine translation, summarization, question answering, information retrieval, etc. The need for reasoning in multilingual contexts and transferring knowledge in cross-lingual systems has given rise to cross-lingual semantic spaces, which learn representations of words across different languages.With growing attention to cross-lingual representations, it has became crucial to investigate proper evaluation schemes. The word-analogy-based evaluation has been one of the most common tools to evaluate linguistic relationships (such as male-female relationships or verb tenses) encoded in monolingual meaning representations. In this paper, we go beyond monolingual representations and generalize the word analogy task across languages to provide a new intrinsic evaluation tool for cross-lingual semantic spaces. Our approach allows examining cross-lingual projections and their impact on different aspects of meaning. It helps to discover potential weaknesses or advantages of cross-lingual methods before they are incorporated into different intelligent systems.We experiment with six languages within different language families, including English, German, Spanish, Italian, Czech, and Croatian. State-of-the-art monolingual semantic spaces are transformed into a shared space using dictionaries of word translations. We compare several linear transformations and rank them for experiments with monolingual (no transformation), bilingual (one semantic space is transformed to another), and multilingual (all semantic spaces are transformed onto English space) versions of semantic spaces. We show that tested linear transformations preserve relationships between words (word analogies) and lead to impressive results. We achieve average accuracy of 51.1%, 43.1%, and 38.2% for monolingual, bilingual, and multilingual semantic spaces, respectively.

The Heart of an Image: Quantum Superposition and Entanglement in Visual Perception

We analyse the way in which the principle that ‘the whole is greater than the sum of its parts’ manifests itself with phenomena of visual perception. For this investigation we use insights and techniques coming from quantum cognition, and more specifically we are inspired by the correspondence of this principle with the phenomenon of the conjunction effect in human cognition. We identify entities of meaning within artefacts of visual perception and rely on how such entities are modelled for corpuses of texts such as the webpages of the World-Wide Web for our study of how they appear in phenomena of visual perception. We identify concretely the conjunction effect in visual artefacts and analyse its structure in the example of a photograph. We also analyse quantum entanglement between different aspects of meaning in artefacts of visual perception. We confirm its presence by showing that well elected experiments on images retrieved accordingly by Google Images give rise to probabilities and expectation values violating the Clauser Horne Shimony Holt version of Bell’s inequalities. We point out how this approach can lead to a mathematical description of the meaning content of a visual artefact such as a photograph.

Making school meaningful: linking psychology of education to meaning in life

There is little research about making instruction at school meaningful. This is surprising given that ample research suggests that many students do not find school a meaningful place, as documented by decline in interest during middle school, the frequency of boredom at school and decline in search for meaning among high school students. This article starts with an outline that considers both objective and subjective meaning in life. A review on different aspects of meaning in school, such as teaching meaning, purpose, identity, coherence, caring, aesthetics and agency, suggest that many ways to improve meaning in school have been underused and understudied. The inclusion of the philosophy of meaning in life extends the scope of research on interest by adding new components of objective meaning that may enrich school activities. This article will review both what has been done and what needs to be done. The article concludes that taking the perspective of meaning in life into account would open new avenues for empirical research in educational psychology.

Meaning in Life and its Vitality in the Praxis

This paper examines the different aspects of meaning in life from a theoretical perspective of philosophy and psychology. It deals mainly with the dynamism ofmeaning in life on the basis of contextual perspectives and its emergence from different sources. In this regard, religion plays an important role in the formation of meaning in life, especially in relation to its competence. Moreover, the praxis of meaning in life is processoriented and is different from the purpose of life. It also remains as a connector between the existential vacuum and the reality of life, promoting stability in life. The expression of meaning in life can be based on both low and high levels. Above all, meaning in life can be seen from two different aspects of presence of meaning and search for meaning, specifically from the empirical and Indian contexts.

Dialogue Interpreting and the Distribution of Responsibility

The sense-making work carried out by anyone in interaction can be described as based on different aspects of meaning, basically the propositional meaning of talk and the interactional or situated meaning of words spoken. Moreover, in a conversation involving three or more persons, sense is arguably made also on the basis of the participation framework (Goffman, 1981), continuously negotiated in and by talk. This composes a theoretical platform for the analysis of the distribution of responsibility in an interpreter-mediated encounter; responsibility for the substance and for the progression of talk. The paper suggests an interactionistic, non-normative, dialogical approach to studies of interpreter-mediated talk for a deepened, developed understanding of the interpreter’s role in face-to-face interaction.

Presuppositions are Fast, whether Hard or Soft - Evidence from the visual world

One focus of work on the processing of linguistic meaning has been the relative processing speed of different aspects of meaning. While much early work has focused on implicatures in comparison to literal asserted content (e.g., Bott & Noveck 2004, Huang & Snedeker 2009, among many others), the present paper extends recent efforts to experimentally investigate another aspect of meaning, namely presuppositions. It investigates the triggers again and stop using the visual world eye tracking paradigm, and provides evidence for rapid processing of presupposed content. Our study finds no difference in timing for the two triggers, which is of theoretical relevance given proposals for distinguishing classes of triggers, such as hard vs. soft (Abusch 2010). Whatever differences between these there may be are apparently not affecting the online processing time course. As a further comparison, again was also compared to twice, which expresses essentially the same meaning without a presupposition. Shifts in eye movements for these two cases also appear to be entirely on par, further supporting the notion that presupposed and asserted content are available in parallel early on in online processing.

Distinct neural correlates for pragmatic and semantic meaning processing: An event-related potential investigation of scalar implicature processing using picture-sentence verification

The present study examines the brain-level representation and composition of meaning in scalar quantifiers (e.g., some), which have both a semantic meaning (at least one) and a pragmatic meaning (not all). We adopted a picture-sentence verification design to examine event-related potential (ERP) effects of reading infelicitous quantifiers for which the semantic meaning was correct with respect to the context but the pragmatic meaning was not, compared to quantifiers for which the semantic meaning was inconsistent with the context and no additional pragmatic meaning is available. In the first experiment, only pragmatically inconsistent quantifiers, not semantically inconsistent quantifiers, elicited a sustained posterior negative component. This late negativity contrasts with the N400 effect typically elicited by nouns that are incongruent with their context, suggesting that the recognition of scalar implicature errors elicits a qualitatively different ERP signature than the recognition of lexico-semantic errors. We hypothesize that the sustained negativity reflects cancellation of the pragmatic inference and retrieval of the semantic meaning. In our second experiment, we found that the process of re-interpreting the quantifier was independent from lexico-semantic processing: the N400 elicited by lexico-semantic violations was not modulated by the presence of a pragmatic inconsistency. These findings suggest that inferential pragmatic aspects of meaning are processed using different mechanisms than lexical or combinatorial semantic aspects of meaning, that inferential pragmatic meaning can be realized rapidly, and that the computation of meaning involves continuous negotiation between different aspects of meaning.

Culture-Specific Meaning in Personal Narratives

Homo sapiens has been defined as the creature who “makes sense,”and social sciences and humanities are all preoccupied with different aspects of meaning. The anthropologist Ulf Hannerz emphasizes the importance of sense-making, which occurs constantly through experience, interpretation, contemplation and imagination. The study of culture for anthropologists, therefore, is above all the study of meanings which people create, and which create people as members of society [Hannerz 1992:3]. Linguists, studying meaning and sense in natural language, are also increasingly concerned with cultural aspects of meaning. The study of semantic phenomena is shifting its focus from the abstract analysis of meaning and sense-making to cultural facts that exist in people and for people [Frumkina 1999:4]. Cultural psychologists are engaged in determining the role of culture for people, viewing it as a vehicle shaping human capacities. They believe that humans build their understanding of the world through active engagement with it in specific contexts carrying a history in the particular culture [Smith 2001:133]. Our ability to interpret the meaning of particular contexts and situations

Sprache — Musik — Bild

Characteristic similarities and differences of language, music, and visual art are shown to depend to a large extent on the types of sign systems they rely on. Two major aspects of signs are explored: the nature of their physical signal and the relation between the signal and its meaning, characterized in terms of Peirce’s concept of iconic and symbolic signs. Language, music and pictures are all based on the possibility to combine constituent parts into signs of unlimited complexity. Their compositional principles are radically different, though. Physical signals of language and music are basically acoustic, time-dependent, and linear, while signals of pictures is visual, two-dimensional, and permanent. This has far-reaching consequences for the different combinatorial properties. Equally important are the differences deriving from the types of signs, with icons based on similarity between signal and meaning, and symbols relating signals to their meaning by convention. Natural languages must thus be conceived as combinatorial systems of symbols, which, because of their conventional character, have access to all aspects of conceptually organized experience. Music and visual art, on the other hand, are iconic systems, the meaning of which is subject to structural similarity with the signal representing it. Under this perspective, the meaning of music is to be construed as consisting of affective attitudes and processes structured by what might be called the Gestural Form, just as the meaning of linguistic expressions is made up from conceptually organized experiences structured by Logical or Semantic Form. The interaction of language and music is highlighted by looking at a short composition of Hanns Eisler. Finally, pictures must be seen as clearly iconic signs, involving two different aspects of meaning, however: referential meaning relates visual representations to largely external phenomena, while expressive meaning relates them to internal conditions, comparable to the affective attitudes represented in music. The proportion of these two aspects varies in different modes of visual art.

Histoires de livres et de volumes

The heterogeneity of the semantic aspects of a noun such as livre « book » is approached in this paper through a systematic comparison with the near synonym volume « volume ». The latter implies a partitive interpretation that warrants its reference to content and not only to the material support. This is in line both with our endeavours on part / whole relations as a structuring factor of lexical meaning, and of the meronymic integration principle. A metonymic relation integrates the different aspects of meaning of nouns such as livre and book, that cannot be separated as autonomous entities. The view demonstrated in several earlier publications is argued to provide a better account of new arguments by Croft and Cruse, and the sequence Two books in one supposes an access to both information and material shape.

Effects of Sentential Context on the Processing of Unambiguous Words by the Two Cerebral Hemispheres

The effect of sentence context on the processing of different aspects of meaning of unambiguous nouns by the two cerebral hemispheres was examined. Participants performed a lexical decision task on target words following two primes, an unambiguous noun preceded by an incomplete sentence. Priming sentences were consistent with either the dominant or the subordinate aspect of meaning of their final unambiguous word. Short and long SOAs were used. A principal finding of this study was that, when compared to unrelated aspects of meaning, for both the short and the long SOAs, the dominant and subordinate aspects of meaning of the unambiguous words were activated regardless of context in both hemispheres. However, the activation of the subordinate aspect of meaning of unambiguous words appears to be more sensitive to sentential context, especially when the unambiguous word is being processed by the left hemisphere.

Cancer and the experience of meaning: a group psychotherapy program for people with cancer.

Cancer illness affects people in many ways, physical, financial, and existential. In this paper, we describe a proposed group intervention for individuals with advanced disease who want help finding a sense of meaning at this critical juncture in their lives. This intervention has a brief, semi-structured format, and is informed by the work of Viktor Frankl, empirical findings in the area of meaning and trauma, and the empirical findings of other group interventions for cancer patients. Individual sessions focus on different aspects of meaning, including responsibility to others, creativity, transcendence, and ascertaining one's values and priorities. Having goals on which to focus and feeling like part of a larger whole are critically important to the ability to find meaning and cope with terminal illness. Such goals may be generated by a number of sources, including connectedness with others, or a sense of the temporal continuity of one's own life despite the disruption posed by severe illness. Didactic discussions and experiential exercises help to facilitate exploration of these various elements in group members' lives. The finite structure of the intervention may also highlight these issues, as people who are faced with similar issues work together in a limited time frame in order to accomplish the goals they set out for themselves.