Notion Of Symbol Research Articles

The role of valence and arousal for phonological iconicity in the lexicon of German: a cross-validation study using pseudoword ratings

ABSTRACT The notion of sound symbolism receives increasing interest in psycholinguistics. Recent research – including empirical effects of affective phonological iconicity on language processing (Adelman et al., 2018; Conrad et al., 2022) – suggested language codes affective meaning at a basic phonological level using specific phonemes as sublexical markers of emotion. Here, in a series of 8 rating-experiments, we investigate the sensitivity of language users to assumed affectively-iconic systematic distribution patterns of phonemes across the German vocabulary: After computing sublexical-affective-values (SAV) concerning valence and arousal for the entire German phoneme inventory according to occurrences of syllabic onsets, nuclei and codas in a large-scale affective normative lexical database, we constructed pseudoword material differing in SAV to test for subjective affective impressions. Results support affective iconicity as affective ratings mirrored sound-to-meaning correspondences in the lexical database. Varying SAV of otherwise semantically meaningless pseudowords altered affective impressions: Higher arousal was consistently assigned to pseudowords made of syllabic constituents more often used in high-arousal words – contrasted by less straightforward effects of valence SAV. Further disentangling specific differential effects of the two highly-related affective dimensions valence and arousal, our data clearly suggest arousal, rather than valence, as the relevant dimension driving affective iconicity effects.

The Ubiquity of Asia: Cai Guo-Qiang's Fireworks and Spectral Marxism

Asia is everywhere. Asia feels ubiquitous, from soft to hard power; from high to low culture; and from the Americas to Africa. In the American cycle of capital accumulation, under Giovanni Arrighi's schema, the overrepresentation of the United States was marked through representation-based and symbolic notions like Disneyfication (Jean Baudrillard) and “the ascendancy of whiteness” (Rey Chow). Under our contemporary Asian cycle of capital accumulation, this geographic area's affective ubiquity appears much like that of the US by saturating global public sentiment. However, considering that Asia's ubiquity emerges across sites like China, South Korea, India, and Japan, among others, what might we use to capture this sense of affective intensity and spread beyond representation-based frames? More specifically, how do we contend with geographic space within racial capital today, and how might we update our models for understanding race and capital so as to fully grapple with this transitional moment from American empire to Global Asia? Under the American cycle, representational frames like Orientalism and white supremacy emerged to understand Asian racialization. Can these frames still help explain the ubiquity of Asia today? This essay explores how we might discuss the subject beyond representation and in light of the ubiquity of Asia and what methods we deploy for Marxist analysis. This essay focuses less on Asian bodies and Asian spaces and turns toward aesthetic objects and practices that engage the affective sublime. More specifically, it examines the aesthetics of fireworks for what they might offer as a lexicon to contend with the transition in cycles of capital accumulation and changes in our ideas of space and race. The article thus turns to the artist Cai Guo-Qiang for insight on the subject amid contemporary racial capital and the methods available for critique.

Combating misinformation with internet culture: the case of Brazilian public health organizations and their COVID-19 vaccination campaigns

Purpose This study investigates the communication behavior of public health organizations on Twitter during the COVID-19 vaccination campaign in Brazil. It contributes to the understanding of the organizational framing of health communication by showcasing several instances of framing devices that borrow from (Brazilian) internet culture. The investigation of this case extends the knowledge by providing a rich description of the organizational framing of health communication to combat misinformation in a politically charged environment.Design/methodology/approach The authors collected a Twitter dataset of 77,527 tweets and analyzed a purposeful subsample of 536 tweets that contained information provided by Brazilian public health organizations about COVID-19 vaccination campaigns. The data analysis was carried out quantitatively and qualitatively by combining social media analytics techniques and frame analysis.Findings The analysis showed that Brazilian health organizations used several framing devices that have been identified by previous literature such as hashtags, links, emojis or images. However, the analysis also unearthed hitherto unknown visual framing devices for misinformation prevention and debunking that borrow from internet culture such as “infographics,” “pop culture references” and “internet-native symbolism.”Research limitations/implications First, the identification of framing devices relating to internet culture add to our understanding of the so far little addressed framing of misinformation combat messages. The case of Brazilian health organizations provides a novel perspective to knowledge by offering a notion of internet-native symbols (e.g. humor, memes) and popular culture references for misinformation combat, including misinformation prevention. Second, this study introduces a frontier of political contextualization to misinformation research that does not relate to the partisanship of the spreaders but that relates to the political dilemmas of public organizations with a commitment to provide accurate information to citizens.Practical implications The findings inform decision-makers and public health organizations about framing devices that are tailored to internet-native audiences and can guide strategies to carry out information campaigns in misinformation-laden social media environments.Social implications The findings of this case study expose the often-overlooked cultural peculiarities of framing information campaigns on social media. The report of this study from a country in the Global South helps to contrast several assumptions and strategies that are prevalent in (health) discourses in Western societies and scholarship.Originality/value This study uncovers unconventional and barely addressed framing devices of health organizations operating in Brazil, which provides a novel perspective to the body of research on misinformation. It contributes to existing knowledge about frame analysis and broadens the understanding of frame devices borrowing from internet culture. It is a call for a frontier in misinformation research that deals with internet culture as part of organizational strategies for successful misinformation combat.

Beyond Elimination and Construction

As Zen took root in the West over the past century, there emerged a number of differing interpretations of one of its key facets, namely the question of the relationship between language and enlightenment. The two camps which came to garner the most attention in philosophical circles are eliminativism, which understands enlightenment as the cutting off of linguistic and socio-cultural categories, accomplished by arbitrary means, and constructivism, which identifies satori with the exercise of certain linguistic and cultural conventions. In the present paper, we first lay out some of the most important criticisms of these two positions, arguing that the two accounts fall into the error of either demonizing or fetishizing language, respectively, before outlining a different approach to the relationship between practice and realization, drawing on the largely neglected work of perennialist thinkers and a phenomenologically informed notion of symbolism. By taking the idea of the symbol in its double meaning, namely as that which “casts together” the culturally conditioned particularities of Zen into a unified tradition, and yet points beyond them as a “sign” of something that itself transcends all description, we propose an interpretation that can do justice both to the crucial role played by concrete practices and to the transcendent nature of their soteriological “end”.

Stateless and Rule-Based Verification for Compliance Checking Applications

Underlying computational model has an important role in any computation. The state and transition (such as in automata) and rule and value (such as in Lisp and logic programming) are two comparable and counterpart computational models. Both of deductive and model checking verification techniques are relying on a notion of state and as a result, their underlying computational models are state dependent. Some verification problems (such as compliance checking by which an under compliance system is verified against some regulations and rules) have not a strong notion of state nor transition. Behalf of it, these systems have a strong notion of value symbols and declarative rules defined on them. SARV (Stateless And Rule-Based Verification) is a verification framework that designed to simplify the overall process of verification for stateless and rule-based verification problems (e.g. compliance checking). In this paper, a formal logic-based framework for creating intelligent compliance checking systems is presented. We define and introduce this framework, report a case study and present results of an experiment on it. The case study is about protocol compliance checking for smart cities. Using this solution, a Rescue Scenario use case and its compliance checking are sketched and modeled. An automation engine for and a compliance solution with SARV are introduced. Based on 300 data experiments, the SARV-based compliance solution outperforms famous machine learning methods on a 3125-records software quality dataset.

The Mistress of Dogs and warrior initiation at archaic Trebenishte

The paper analyses and interprets the symbolic meaning of an iconographic composition consisting of a central Gorgon flanked by two canines, present on a bronze tripod from the archaic necropolis of Trebenishte, near Ohrid (6th–5th centuries BC). After introducing and describing the subject of interest, the author goes on to analyse the Gorgon in the symbolic role of ‘Mistress of Dogs’, comparing it to similar representations from geographical and chronological aspects. This is followed by an overview of the symbolic role of canines in the prehistoric and ancient Balkans as part of a wider Indo-European cultural milieu. The observed findings are then analysed in relation to the archaeological context of the tripod itself, which was deposited, along with a complementary krater, in the ‘princely grave’ of a high-ranking male individual with a warrior identity belonging to the archaic community buried at Trebenishte. The final conclusions of the author are that the iconography of the tripod reflects symbolic notions of liminality and transformation, whereby the object was probably intended to be used in initiation rituals that derive from the Indo-European traditions of the ‘Männerbünde’.

Practice Theory in Industrial Design and Innovation: Materials, Meanings, and Competencies of Electric Wringer-Washers in Turkey from 1950 to the 2000s

According to practice theory, practices or “doings” that use designed products play a significant role in shaping daily life. Practice theory considers the workings of the dynamic two-way relationships between social structures and human agency. Accordingly, users’ routinized practices constitute a social structure that is commonly characterized by three elements: materials, such as tangible physical things, artifacts, and infrastructures; competencies, which include the know-how and “doing” of practice; and meanings, which encompass symbolic notions and emotions that are attached to the practices or artifacts. Adopting a practice theory approach, my article focuses on user practices around wringer-washers in Turkey, including materials, uses, meanings, and re-uses in the daily lives of Turkish women and families. Historical case studies of laundry practices with wringer-washers explicitly indicate how and under what circumstances user practices can emerge, endure, evolve, and transform into other practices. Prioritizing the involvement of designers, producers, and users in the coproduction of practice processes, I argue in this article that new designs and design innovations are inextricably linked with the user practices that they engender.

Touching the Sound, Sounding the Touch. The Tactile Experience in the Music of Santiago Diez-Fischer as a Presentational Symbol

The music of Argentinian composer Santiago Diez-Fischer places particular emphasis on the sense of touch. The sonic textures and the notations the composer use illustrate this. In several pieces, his writing indicates surfaces to rub, caress, and press. The resulting sound is complex, often on the edge of noise. In this article, I argue that the notion of presentational symbol as proposed by Susanne Langer serves to clarify how such music is an expression of tactile experience. I show how this notion relates to all music in general, and precisely because music is such a symbol that it can be understood and interpreted in its meaning through listening. I make the assumption that all music is presentational; however, such generality must be overcome by a more important requirement. Once we know that music is a presentational symbol, what does it symbolize? I think music symbolizes different things every time and it is possible to understand this, as long as you listen and bring your own experience into play. Here, I have tried to do this by referring to the work of Santiago Diez-Fischer. I argue then that the emotion of touch is then communicated as a specific and unique musical form. In this sense, Diez-Fischer’s music is paradigmatic.

Periodic Fourier integral operators in L p -spaces

In this note we give sufficient conditions for the L p boundedness of periodic Fourier integral operators. We also refer to them as Fourier series operators (FSOs). The main tool will be the notion of full symbol and the periodic analysis on the torus introduced by Ruzhansky and Turunen [34].

Ustalanie znaczeń symbolicznych w słowniku etnolingwistycznym

Determination of meanings in an ethnolinguistic dictionary
 The notion of symbol, though popular and commonly used, has not so far received a satisfactory operational definition, i.e. a methodology of description that would allow to assign specific symbolic meanings to images in a foreseeable, “controllable” way. This is revealed by the different symbolic meanings which dictionaries assign to the same images. The paper uses examples from the Lublin Słownik stereotypów i symboli ludowych ‘Dictionary of stereotypes and folk symbols’ to question the rules for determining symbolic meanings and the “linguistic and cultural proofs” connected with the assignment of those senses – the rules that link the sun with life, truth and perfection, fire with love and passion, light with the God and heaven, dew with life-giving force and male sperm, wind with life-giving spirit, rainbow with the sign of peace, &c. The article reveals that the symbolic sense is sometimes prompted by the etymology, metaphorical meanings, parallel constructions, equivalence, or may also result from the genre convention of the text (an erotic, a dream book, a wishing carol), or finally from the beliefs and practices of bearers of folk culture. Regardless of all those attempts at determining symbolic meanings, the formulation of such meanings remains a hypothesis of a kind. Texts, especially artistic ones (where also folk texts belong), contain an unclosed semantic potential and remain unsaid, open and susceptible to new symbolic readings.

Fiction, possibility and impossibility: three kinds of mathematical fictions in Leibniz’s work

This paper is concerned with the status of mathematical fictions in Leibniz’s work and especially with infinitary quantities as fictions. Thus, it is maintained that mathematical fictions constitute a kind of symbolic notion that implies various degrees of impossibility. With this framework, different kinds of notions of possibility and impossibility are proposed, reviewing the usual interpretation of both modal concepts, which appeals to the consistency property. Thus, three concepts of the possibility/impossibility pair are distinguished; they give rise, in turn, to three concepts of mathematical fictions. Moreover, such a distinction is the base for the claim that infinitesimal quantities, as mathematical fictions, do not imply an absolute impossibility, resulting from self-contradiction, but a relative impossibility, founded on irrepresentability and on the fact that it does not conform to architectural principles. In conclusion, this “soft” impossibility of infinitesimals yields them, in Leibniz view, a presumptive or “conjectural” status.

Peacebuilding, Structural Violence and Spatial Reparations in Post-Colonial South Africa

ABSTRACT Peacebuilding approaches have placed emphasis on the restoration of political relationships and symbolic notions of community reconciliation, paying limited attention to the material causes of violence. In South Africa, the historical structural economic violence has been maintained, and after the formal end of apartheid, a lack of equitable distribution of resources is ongoing. This article conceptually and empirically argues that distributive justice measures are a way of compensating those affected by structural economic violence and addressing structural inequalities. Spatial reparations, we argue, could support readjustment of the socio-economic causes and consequences of violence in conjunction with promoting social justice.

Шеллинг как предтеча эстетики символизма

The aesthetics of early Schelling constitutes the philosophical foundation of the po­etic consciousness of German Romantics and becomes one of the theoretical sources for symbolist aesthetics. The article accentuates proto-symbolist elements in Schelling’s aesthetics. It shows that the spiritual cosmos in Schelling – which is a world of ideas and gods that connects to the material world, in particular, through art – develops out of the Absolute. The universe itself is manifested in God as an absolute work of art. At the same time, art in its formation is based on mythol­ogy and realises itself as the unity of the “infinite and finite in the finite”, as an identity of the conscious and the unconscious, as a lack of distinction between the ideal and the real, as a depiction of the absolute in a particular. This accounts for a polysemantic understanding of a work of art. Schelling focuses attention on the aesthetic essence of art, which is founded on the principles of the beautiful and the sublime. He values beauty in art – as something that ascends from visible forms to prototypes – higher than natural beauty. He associates the sublime with size, “formlessness”, and chaos, and he classifies its expression in art (“the finite”) as symbolic. Schelling is interested in chaos as a potential for every kind of form, because the contemplation of the infinite – i.e., the Absolute as the highest “form in formlessness”, which can only be manifested to the world symbolically – is rooted in chaos. The notion of symbol occupies one of the central places in Schelling’s aesthetics, because it deals with the expression of the infinite in the finite, of the ideal in the real, and of the universal in the particular. The symbol marks and manifests an idea, and this is why the main point of artisticity lies within the symbol. Schelling understands language (speech) as a work of art, and for this reason he sees more symbolic potential in verbal than in pictorial arts. All these ideas in many ways form the foundation of symbolist aesthetics.

How Sicily Made Its Sweet Symbols Glocal Identity and Food

Food is an effective symbol capable of strongly evoking a cultural identity. In the case of Sicily, this role is mainly played by pastry, and in particular by two sweets: cannolo (the singular of cannoli) and cassata. But how does it happen that just these two preparations, rather than others, take on this value? What are their meanings and what determines them? Are cannolo and cassata the expression of a remote and spontaneous tradition as we generally like to believe? Semiotic analysis not only leads us to understand the complexity of these two pieces of a gastronomy, but also to reflect on the whole notion of symbol, rethinking its limits and possibilities.

The secondary passivity: Merleau-Ponty at the limit of phenomenology

This paper considers the move from passivity to a generative passivity in Merleau-Ponty’s ontology. In The Visible and the Invisible Merleau-Ponty calls this generative passivity a “secondary passivity” and in his passivity lectures he describes it as “passivity without passivism.” The paper argues that this secondary passivity must be understood in terms of an ecart within the phenomena. That is, in terms of a separation and distance which is matrixed and configured within what appears. This is the basis for Merleau-Ponty’s statement in his passivity lectures that “the touchstone of a theory of passivity,” is a “notion of oneiric symbolism,” and why for him passivity is intimately connected to a “primordial symbol.” If the symbolic is so associated with passivity, the symbolic also does not concern origins but is both the ontological limit and divergence in phenomena. This association forces Merleau-Ponty to consider what it means for phenomenological reflection retrace its steps back to an initial event of expression and even whether phenomenology is ultimately served by description. Finally, this paper considers Merleau-Ponty’s attitude toward the literary usages of language as a means of doing a phenomenology of the secondary passivity.

One does not simply … project a destination image within a participatory culture

This study examines how internet memes, as an increasingly relevant and conceptually distinctive type of user-generated content (UGC), represent Thailand's destination image and how such representation differs from established destination image sources. For this purpose, participatory culture is first proposed as an alternative conceptual framework, followed by empirical research, which upgrades visual content analysis (VCA) with semiotic analysis. The findings of VCA reveal that memes yield a markedly different representation of Thailand as they introduce an entire cluster of peculiar and controversial themes, which are not depicted on destination marketing organization (DMO) and TripAdvisor photos. Semiotic analysis, in addition, uncovers that memetic representation is evocative and conveys a layer of symbolic notions and alluding connotations. In this manner, findings attest that memes are a semantically rich format and genre of UGC, which expands existing knowledge about destination-image formation and representation on social media. Managerial implications, limitations, and recommendations for future research in this domain are also discussed. • Internet memes are a multimodal, intertextual and polysemic format of UGC. • Everyday culture is the most frequent theme through which memes represent Thailand. • UGC generated by online communities challenges existing frameworks of DI formation. • Managers are advised to use memes for analysis and dialogue with online communities.

Variant-based Equational Unification under Constructor Symbols

Equational unification of two terms consists of finding a substitution that, when applied to both terms, makes them equal modulo some equational properties. A narrowing-based equational unification algorithm relying on the concept of the variants of a term is available in the most recent version of Maude, version 3.0, which provides quite sophisticated unification features. A variant of a term t is a pair consisting of a substitution sigma and the canonical form of tsigma. Variant-based unification is decidable when the equational theory satisfies the finite variant property. However, this unification procedure does not take into account constructor symbols and, thus, may compute many more unifiers than the necessary or may not be able to stop immediately. In this paper, we integrate the notion of constructor symbol into the variant-based unification algorithm. Our experiments on positive and negative unification problems show an impressive speedup.

Os princípios macro hermenêuticos do santuário celestial e suas implicações – Parte I

Este artigo é o primeiro de um estudo de duas partes que trata dos princípios macro hermenêuticos do santuário celestial conforme reivindicados nas Escrituras Sagradas e identificáveis à luz da compreensãohistoricista do tema. Começa definindo a macro hermenêutica e lembra sua importante conexão com as realidades do santuário celestial. Segue reconhecendo a existência e significado dos princípios fundamentaisde correspondências ontológica, estrutural e funcional entre os santuários celestial e terrestre – conforme estabelecidos na Bíblia e reafirmados nos escritos de Ellen G. White – enfatizando o papel macro hermenêutico desses princípios para a constituição e manutenção do sistema teológico adventista do sétimo dia. Na segunda parte, à luz dessa perspectiva por vezes chamada de literal, se destaca a emblemática coexistência das noções metafórica e simbólica acerca do santuário celestial que vêm ganhando espaço no meio adventista, notando-se as implicações e desafios de tais proposições para a teologia e a prática da Igreja Adventista.

The Texture of Type: Nabokov’s Sensory Perception of Alphabetical Letters: The Semanticized Graphic Form

ABSTRACT My paper investigates how Nabokov’s synesthetic perception of typographic letters as images was expanded into a special letter-coding semanticizing practice and discusses the important questions raised by this strategy with regard to the theory and practice of literary analysis. I argue that Nabokov reconceives and expands his biologically determined binary (letter-with-color) synesthetic associations in a cross- and self-referential system of motifs permeating the whole oeuvre. Consciously controlling his personal experience of his synesthetic mind, Nabokov extrapolates it by adding images and objects and how in this artistic method he attaches symbolic or emblematic notions to letters through color- and object-associations. This complex meaning of letters can be unfolded from supporting codes, metaphors and motifs that trigger adequate contextual interpretations. His prose invites the same meticulous text-decoding methodology demanded by Symbolist and avant-garde prose art that helps to discover a similar segment in the theory of art of these two literary tendencies reputed as antithetical. 1 1 The article was written in the framework of the project “The Border Zone Paradigm: Crossroads in Culture” (2018–2020) funded by the Russian Foundation for Fundamental Research (No. 18–512–23002).

Youth nightlife at home: towards a feminist conceptualisation of home

ABSTRACT This paper explores home as a space of youth nightlife and drinking through a feminist lens. It draws on feminist geographical scholarship on home and 40 semi-structured interviews with young people aged 16–25 in Switzerland in the context of a larger interdisciplinary study. We find that the home figures as a central space of nightlife for young people beyond pre-drinking or home parties. At the same time, privacy and intimacy are important to young people when drinking alcohol outside of the home. We suggest that this preference of privacy when going out indicates an interweaving of private and public spheres in young people’s nightlives. The paper argues that the home is both a central concrete space and an important symbolic notion in young people’s nightlives. In so doing, it empirically complicates the public/private dualism and contributes to feminist geographical conceptualisations of home in the context of youth nightlife.