ABSTRACT This paper critically examines the ambiguous concept of symbolic legislation. Within the field, three distinct but overlapping approaches can be identified: those focusing on the expressiveness, inconclusiveness, and deceitfulness of legislation. In this light, symbolic legislation appears as a concept that cannot be captured by a single definition specifying necessary and sufficient conditions for categorising a statute as ‘symbolic’. Instead, it should be viewed as a prototypical category. Drawing on prototype theory and the notion of family resemblance, the paper explores the fluid boundaries and varying degrees of typicality within symbolic legislation. Although a full unification of the various approaches appears unfeasible, it is nevertheless worthwhile to examine what they share without overlooking their differences. For example, symbolic legislation generally operates against the associations that people attach to law, and its symbolic features are not entirely within the legislator’s control. The paper calls for continued integrated analysis across traditions, suggesting that symbolic legislation reveals more about the nature of legal communication than its critics often allow.

I claim that it is the variability of collocations rather than their restrictedness that makes it a challenge for foreign learners to acquire them and for researchers to categorize them (1.1.) and argue that a usage-based approach drawing on notions from functional and cognitive linguistics makes it possible to account for collocations as a dynamic and flexible language resource. The functional and cognitive framework that I propose for the categorization of collocations is one of several lines of investigation within Usage-based linguistics, an approach evolving since the 1980s as a challenge to the top-down approach of structuralist and generative linguists who study the language system separately from language use (Langacker [2000: 91-93], Herbst, Schmid & Faulhaber [2014], Diessel [2017: 1]). I use corpus data in a qualitative approach based on the theory and methodology developed in Poulsen [2022]. Frequency, which is a complex phenomenon (Geeraerts [2017: 158]), is part of the description of the data while function is considered more important for analysis. In the introduction to the first part of this paper, I give a brief example of the usage-based framework that I intend to introduce before giving an overview of previous approaches that include insights converging on a usage-based approach. In the second part, an alternative functional and cognitive approach is outlined, which is subsequently tested, in the third part, by means of an exemplary study of the noun joke. Using examples from the study of joke, I argue that verbs in conventional and entrenched collocations make up a functional domain and can be construed as a lexicogrammatical prototype category of support verbs.

This study investigates the semantic clustering of distinctive collexeme verbs in the iterative construction "v qian v hou" based on the BCC corpus using collostructional analysis. By incorporating prototype category theory and image schema, the study explores the prototypical semantics and extension mechanisms of this construction. The research reveals that the prototypical meaning of this construction is " (the subject) repeated and continuous movement forward and backward", with motion verbs being the prototype verbs, carrying the meanings of repetition and continuity. Through spatial image schemas, metonymy, metaphor, and other mechanisms, the semantic extension to "universal meaning" and "modal meaning" is achieved. The semantic structure of the construction “v qian v hou” is formed under the influence of dual internal factors. On one hand, it generates prototypical and extended semantics through mental scanning methods of sequential and summary scanning; on the other hand, from a cognitive perspective, it combines factors such as encyclopedic knowledge and construction context to jointly form the semantic structure of this construction.

摘要：本文运用原型范畴理论对“斋”字进行深入分析，旨在探索“斋”字原型语义的特征及其语义范畴体系，并从中将关于“斋”字的研究成果融入国际中文教育的文化教学课程和词汇教学中。研究成果显示，已明确“斋”的原型特征包括身心的净化、虔诚的表达以及特定的仪式。基于这些原型特征，“斋”形成了一个由典型范畴成员和边缘范畴成员构成的复杂语义范畴体系。典型范畴成员紧密围绕祭祀和宗教仪式，充分展现了“斋”的原型特征。而边缘范畴成员则是在语义演变过程中基于原型特征的语义延伸，涵盖了场地建筑、饮食、职称头衔以及别名等多个领域。这一语义范畴体系的构建，为我们理解“斋”在不同语境下的语义变化提供了清晰的框架。因此，我们把“斋”的研究成果融入国际中文教育的应用。在文化教学方面，可以通过开设专题课程、举办模拟祭祀和斋戒活动、制作斋菜以及开展跨文化比较等实践活动。而在词汇教学方面，以原型范畴理论为基础，通过有针对性的读写训练，可以剖析词汇的语义关系，构建起词汇网络。关键词：国际中文教育，斋，原型范畴理论，历史演变Abstract:The prototype characteristics of "Zhai" have been clearly defined, including the purification of the body and mind, the expression of piety, and specific rituals. Based on these prototype characteristics, "Zhai" has formed a complex semantic category system composed of typical and marginal category members. The typical category members closely revolve around sacrificial and religious rituals, fully demonstrating the prototype characteristics of "Zhai". The marginal category members are semantic extensions based on the prototype characteristics during semantic evolution, covering multiple fields such as venue architecture, diet, professional titles, and aliases. The construction of this semantic category system provides a clear framework for us to understand the semantic changes of "Zhai" in different contexts. Therefore, we integrate the research results of "Zhai" into the application of international Chinese education. In cultural teaching, practical activities such as offering special courses, holding simulated sacrificial and fasting activities, preparing vegetarian dishes, and carrying out cross-cultural comparisons can be carried out. In terms of vocabulary teaching, based on the prototype category theory, through targeted reading and writing training, the semantic relationships of words can be analyzed, and a vocabulary network can be constructed.Keywords:International Chinese Language Education, Zhai (ritual purification), Prototype Theory, historical evolution

Treatment of Polysemous Modal Auxiliary Verbs in Chinese–French Dictionary Based on Prototype and Schema. Based on the theories of prototype and schema, this paper constructs a suitable processing framework for polysemous modal auxiliary verbs in Chinese–French dictionary according to characteristics of modal auxiliary verbs, and elaborates specific improvement measures from the following three aspects: (1) prototypical annotation of word class, i.e., labelling the most typical cases with 动 [aux. modal] and adding word class properties; (2) selection and arrangement of the senses, equivalents and examples based on prototype and schema, i.e., gradually extending senses, equivalents and examples around modal type; (3) discrimination within the prototype category, i.e., strengthening the synonym discrimination within the same lexical category through boxes and other forms. Finally, the optimised cases presented at the end of the paper. Keywords: prototype, schema, polysemous modal auxiliary verbs, Chinese–French dictionary, learner's dictionary

For multimodal magnetic resonance (MR) brain tumor segmentation, current methods usually directly extract the discriminative features from input images for the tumor subregion category. However, information aliasing caused by the mutual inclusion of tumor subregions is often ignored. Moreover, existing methods usually do not take tailored efforts to highlight the single tumor subregion features. To this end, a multimodal MR brain tumor segmentation method with tumor prototype-driven and multiexpert integration is proposed. It could highlight the features of each tumor subregion under the guidance of tumor prototypes. Specifically, to obtain the prototypes with complete information, we propose a mutual transmission mechanism to transfer different modal features to each other. Furthermore, we devise a prototype-driven feature representation and fusion (PFRF) method, which implants the learned prototypes into tumor features and generates corresponding activation maps. With the activation maps, the subregion features consistent with the prototype category can be highlighted. A key information enhancement and fusion strategy with multiexpert integration is designed to further improve the segmentation performance. The strategy can integrate the features from different layers of the extra feature extraction network and the features highlighted by the prototypes. Experimental results on three competition datasets prove the superiority of the proposed method. The source code can be available at <uri xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">https://github.com/Linzy0227/PDMINet</uri>.

Due to the limited sample size caused by preventive maintenance and the variable data distribution caused by environmental factors, the performance of well-trained laboratory models has decreased significantly when confronted with actual industrial bearing fault diagnosis. The existing domain adaptation methods using cross-domain labeled samples for classification make it difficult to resist the influence of outliers on the overall matching, which leads to a negative transfer problem. Given the above issues, a dynamic weight-optimized prototypical contrastive network is proposed. Primarily, domain adaptation is assisted by the discriminative information the classifiers convey during the prediction process. The model is prompted to find the source data that matches the distribution, removing the effect of distribution variability. Furthermore, the sample-aware weighting term evaluates the difficulty of the sample classification and suppresses the performance degeneration of domain adaptation. Subsequently, the in-domain prototypical contrastive learning evaluates dynamically the intensity of feature distribution around each prototype. The features from the same category are inspired to move closer to the prototype to enhance the consistency and discrimination of intra-class features. Meanwhile, cross-domain instance-prototype learning reduces the distribution inconsistency of the corresponding category data in the source and target domains to enable fine-grained inter-domain alignment and mitigate the negative transfer problem. Through numerous comparative experiments, this method shows superior effectiveness and engineering diagnostic feasibility under cross conditions with limited data resources. Note to Practitioners—This article addresses the cross-domain distribution variability and few-shot bearing limitation. Existing research on intelligent bearing fault diagnosis is based on the unattainable assumption that fault samples are sufficient and homogeneously distributed. Moreover, domain-adaptive methods using cross-domain labeled samples for classification are too coarse to resist the effect of the outlier of bearing operational data, leading to the negative transfer problem. In this article, a dynamic weight-optimized prototypical contrastive network is proposed. Primarily, a feature-level cross-domain alignment module pre-trains the feature extractor to generate unique features for disparate bearing fault signals. After pre-training, the model can find source data that matches the distribution, removing the effect of distribution variability. Among it, the sample-aware weighting term, which dynamically weights the samples according to their classification difficulty, prevents the model performance from degrading on the cross-domain task. Then, the prototypical contrastive learning module can construct prototypes, representing typical features of bearing faults. Each category of features is approached with similar prototypes, pushing away from disparate categories of prototypes. Relying on the prototypes to be aligned with disparate domain instances to weed out the effects of outliers. Not only does it achieve cross-domain alignment of underlying features, but it also aligns semantic structures in a shared cross-domain space. Through numerous experiments, it has been proved that the method can not only solve the cross-domain problem and the few-shot problem, but is also more applicable to the fault diagnosis of real industrial systems. Furthermore, its performance is much higher than the existing methods.

自问世以来，刘易斯·卡罗尔的《爱丽丝漫游奇境记》一直深受读者喜爱，在中国更是广受欢迎。层出不穷的中译本不仅展现了儿童文学翻译的繁荣景象，也让我们对如何创作符合儿童认知特点的优秀译本有了更深的理解。本文探讨了认知语言学中的原型范畴理论在儿童文学翻译中的应用，以《爱丽丝漫游奇境记》的三个中译本(赵元任、黄健人、吴均陶)为例，分析了不同译本的语言特征和翻译策略。作者总结出三种翻译策略：译语原型与源语原型匹配、弱化源语原型或强化译语原型，以及译语原型对源语原型的替换。并认为原型范畴理论可以帮助译者更好地理解儿童的认知特点，从而选择更合适的翻译策略，创作出更符合儿童认知习惯和审美偏好的译本。Since its publication, Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland has captivated readers worldwide, with its popularity in China being particularly remarkable. The abundance of its Chinese translations not only reflects the vibrant growth of the translation of children’s literature, but also deepens our understanding of what makes a translation resonate with children’s cognitive needs. This paper discusses the application of the prototype category theory in cognitive linguistics to children’s literature translation. Taking the three Chinese translations of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (Yuanren Zhao, Jianren Huang, and Juntao Wu) as examples, the author analyzes the linguistic features and translation strategies of the different translations. The author summarizes three translation strategies: matching the translated prototype with the source prototype, weakening the source prototype or strengthening the translated prototype, and substitution of the translated prototype with the source prototype. The author also argues that the prototype category theory can help translators better understand children’s cognitive characteristics, so that they can choose more appropriate translation strategies and create translations that are more in line with children’s cognitive habits and aesthetic preferences.

The acquisition of English polysemous words is an important theory regarding category division in cognitive linguistics. It emphasizes that the boundaries of categories are fuzzy, the status of members within a category is unequal, with a distinction between the center and the periphery. This paper conducts an in-depth exploration of the acquisition process of English polysemous words from the perspective of cognitive linguistics, analyzes the cognitive connections and evolution mechanisms among the various senses within polysemous words. By introducing the prototype category theory and metaphor theory, this paper reveals the cognitive motives for the generation and development of polysemous words and explores the applications of these theories in English vocabulary teaching. Research shows that the acquisition of English polysemous words not only depends on the improvement of memory, but more importantly, it links known concepts with unknown concepts through cognitive means such as metaphor and metonymy, thereby expanding and enriching the meaning network of vocabulary.

In order to mitigate the shuttle effect of lithium polysulfides in lithium-sulfur batteries, we propose a yttrium-metal-organic framework-carbon nanotube (Y-MOF-CNT)-derived Y2O3-C@CNT composite for modifying the separator in this study. The Y-MOFs, comprising yttrium (Y) rare earth metal and terephthalic acid, exemplify a prototypical category of metal-organic framework (MOF) materials. They manifest the advantageous attributes associated with MOFs while concurrently possessing distinctive catalytic traits ascribed to rare earth elements. In this study, Y-MOF nanoparticles were synthesized on carbon nanotube (CNT) substrates via a facile aqueous solution method, succeeded by high-temperature carbonization to yield Y2O3-C@CNT composite materials. These composites were subsequently employed as coatings on one side of polyethylene (PE) separators. The resultant Y2O3-C@CNT composite inherits the particle-like morphology and porosity from its precursor Y-MOF, alongside the inherent conductivity in carbon-based materials. This amalgamation is conducive to polysulfide capture and catalytic conversion processes within lithium-sulfur batteries. The application of the Y2O3-C@CNT-coated PE separator effectively mitigated polysulfide shuttle effects and significantly enhanced the battery electrochemical performance. At a sulfur loading level of 3 mg cm-2 under a 0.5 C rate, an initial discharge specific capacity of 900 mAh g-1 was achieved. After 400 cycles, the discharge specific capacity remained at 483.85 mAh g-1 with a capacity retention rate of 53.7%. Upon increasing sulfur loading to 5 mg cm-2, the discharge specific capacity at a lower rate (0.1 C) reached 817.8 mAh g-1; even after 100 cycles, it maintained a value of 700 mAh g-1 with a capacity retention rate of 85.6%. Notably, our modified Y2O3-C@CNT separator demonstrated exceptional cycling stability, even under conditions involving high sulfur loading.

Face-to-face teaching remains for many teachers the golden standard in education. However, learning is always emergent, dependent on the socio-material context. Sharing a physical space is one option, but with new digital technologies, alternative assemblages can create new and exciting learning environments and experiences. Based on the community of inquiry model, I consider cognitive, social, and teaching presence as central to a valuable educational experience in higher education. The aim of this research is to look at what presence could look like in the distance university of the future. Traditional research methods, whether quantitative or qualitative, focus on what is and on linear causal effects. However, education is open, recursive, nonlinear, and new environments introduce new actors, human and material, that affect the learning and teaching. In this research, I experiment with a speculative design method to see if it can lead to opening up new possibilities and to their critical evaluation. In six speculative design workshops, teachers developed prototypes of what presence and affective closeness could look like when students and teachers were spatially and temporally distant. I present the three main categories of prototypes that answer the needs of distance teaching creating social interactions, offering feedback, or re-creating a virtual classroom. These all show how presence can be enacted at a distance, including asynchronously. From a science-based and data-driven approach to the Virtual Reality University, via a live course map and the connected coffee cup, each prototype offers a different view of education with its opportunities, but also challenges. The prototypes also highlight how difficult it is to change our perception of what presence could look like in higher education. I use Bourdieu’s concept of habitus to help explain the difficulty of moving away from the face-to-face experience, and how a revolutionary view rather than a marginal approach to change requires a return to the fundamental questions of how students learn, the purpose of education and the role of the teacher.

The researcher , in the current study , studies one of the human categorization theories which is known as ‘ prototype theory’ . He sets a questionnaire to fourth class students at Kirkuk university by using the prototype theory . A good number of every days’ expressions is used as data . The students are required to choose one of the tabulated expressions and give the reason of choosing that expression as well . The reasons ( factors) are the taxonomy of the used model . Two analysis methods namely qualitative and quantitative are followed to arrive at the desired results . The aims of the study are ( 1) showing what can influence the typical member . (2) Showing how people are distinct in creating the prototype. Its hypotheses are (1) each individual has his / her own prototype . (2) The social factors like ( age , religion , one’s background knowledge , etc …) have roles in the formation of the prototype . The study is concluded with points like the context has a well-built relation with the process of creating the prototypical category member .

The Sichuan dialect word ba is widely used and has a high frequency of occurrence within the dialect area. It is characterized by its rich semantic meanings and diverse parts of speech, making it one of the most representative common words in Sichuan dialect. However, existing dialect dictionaries have issues such as incomplete definitions, unclear interpretations, and uncertain grammatical properties, which call for further careful revisions. Cognitive linguistics, one of the current research hotspots in linguistics, can fundamentally explain the intrinsic mechanisms and external manifestations of lexical semantic formation. This paper, based on the cognitive perspective and within the macro-framework of Prototype Category Theory, employs the theories of metaphor, metonymy, and image schema to conduct a micro-level analysis and clarification of the original meaning and extended meanings of the Sichuan dialect word ba. It attempts to provide cognitive reasoning for interpreting the meanings of dialect words in dictionaries, as well as to offer new perspectives and cases for exploring the semantics of dialect words.

The prototype category serves as the foundation for polysemy which is extended via metonymy and metaphor. As cognitive linguistics advances, it has become apparent that metaphor and metonymy are not merely poetic embellishments for language. Rather, they constitute a mode of thought and a form of cognition, by which we gain comprehension of new concepts. Due to the fact that the head is the most significant portion of the human body, it is frequently used in linguistic expressions. This study adopts qualitative descriptive study through the framework of prototype theory, metaphor, metonymy, and iconicity to make an analysis of the polysemous Chinese character “头” (head), which contributes to our understanding of the intricate interplay between language, cognition, and cultural associations.

The study proposes a cognitive-and-semantic approach to the study of the category ‘urodstvo’ (‘ugliness’). This approach allowed, using a component analysis of the meanings of words - denote main lexical representatives of the category of ugliness in the Russian language, and establish a set of features of the category relevant to the basic level. Several prototypical features of ugliness have been identified: ‘the carrier of the feature is a living organism (human, animal, plant)’; ‘abnormality in the structure’; ‘innate abnormality’; ‘its physical (anatomical) character’. An exemplary representative of a category has all the prototypical features in contrast to non-exemplary representatives. Blurring of prototypical features in non-ideal representatives of the category is carried out in the process of development and expansion of the semantics of the words urodstvo (‘ugliness’), bezobraziye (‘deformity’), nekrassivost’ (‘unattractiveness’) in Russian.

Abstract The present study investigated the impact of occasional erroneous feedback on category learning. Subjects were presented with exemplars from multiple prototype categories, where the exemplars were novel on each learning block (nonrepeat) or were continuously recycled through learning (repeat). In training, selected training instances were associated with a label different from other members drawn from the same prototype category. After learning, subjects received a common transfer test requiring either the classification of novel instances (Experiment 1) or the discrimination of old from new instances (Experiments 2 and 3). The major results were that as expected, learning was more accurate in the repeat condition, with subjects learning to accurately classify both the correct and incorrect feedback patterns by the terminal learning block; learning in the nonrepeat condition was worse, with subjects misclassifying the erroneous feedback patterns at an increasing rate through learning; nonetheless, classification and recognition transfer were somewhat higher after nonrepeat learning; and subjects readily discriminated old from new after repetition training but not after nonrepetition training. Overall, the enhanced classification and recognition after nonrepeat training mirrored our results reported in a similar paradigm that used only correct feedback. Formal modeling suggested that a pure prototype model could not predict learning or transfer after repetition training, whereas a prototype model was superior at capturing results after nonrepetition learning.

In recent years, internet buzzwords have attracted increasing attention from researchers. However, there is currently relatively little research on the semantics of buzzwords. By organizing the development trends of prototype category theory at home and abroad, this article provides a theoretical basis for semantic analysis in the following text. Based on the analysis of some 2022 Chinese internet buzzwords in terms of prototype meaning, new meaning, and semantic construction process, this article believes that the semantics of internet buzzwords are derived from new meanings through metonymy, metaphor or phonetic metaphor, irony metaphor, and other means of prototype meaning, and some prototype constructions will also emerge. Its semantic construction is a process centered around the prototype and constantly expanding its scope.

Este estudo trata da investigação de morfemas da língua Guajá cuja função é categorizar o mundo em domínios relevantes para seus falantes construindo a referência do nome ou definindo o escopo do evento a partir de uma categoria prototípica baseada em traços de propriedades determinados pela cosmovisão dos Awa Guajá. Utilizando os conceitos de categorização linguística e protótipo, analisamos esses morfemas como constituindo um conjunto de sufixos que definem entidades e eventos em termos do quanto se distanciam ou se aproximam de um protótipo no que diz respeito à dimensão/intensidade (-hu e -ˈi) ou a semelhanças não expressas descritivamente (-rỹ) ou mesmo no que se refere a seus traços autênticos quando contrastados com referentes ou eventos similares (-te).

The time course of category-based attentional template pre-activation depends on the category framework

Abstract This paper explores the conceptualization differences between the prototypical categories of six basic emotions (anger, disgust, fear, joy, sadness, surprise) in English and Polish lexicalizations of these concepts in noun, verb, and adjective forms. Measures of valence, arousal, and dominance were collected and analyzed across the six semantic categories, between parts of speech and depending on the gender of the study participants for both languages. The results indicate that the basic emotion prototypes in both languages have common characteristics hinging broadly on valence but have unique language-specific patterns of valence, arousal, and dominance across individual emotion categories. Conceptualizations of emotions were found to be different between men and women and across languages, while language-specific patterns were found in part-of-speech effects. These results have serious implications for future study designs and research methodology at the intersection of cognition, emotion, and language and in cross-linguistic contexts.