Semantic Poles Research Articles

Qualitative Characteristics of Life in the Poetic Discourse of M.I. Tsvetaeva

The work is aimed at studying the semantics of the concept of life in Russian poetic discourse. The purpose of this article is to identify the features of the semantic content of the lexical representative life within the group of qualitative
 characteristics based on the work of M.I. Tsvetaeva.
 The study identifies, confirms with examples and analyzes from a semantic point of view the following main subgroups of the qualitative characteristics of life: 1) «belonging»; 2) «duration»; 3) «correlation with the present moment»; 4) «direct assessment»; 5) «togetherness»; 6) «closeness to the standard»; 7) «taste sensations»; 8) «personalized quality»; 9) «degree of wealth, opportunities»; 10) «the elements»; 11) «simple – complex»; 12) «color».
 The conclusions reflect the following features of M.I. Tsvetaeva’s poetic discourse: 1) the prevalence of qualitative characteristics and the diversity of sectors of figurative comprehension of life; 2) expansion of the semantics of epithets due to interaction with the immediate context; 3) the opportunity to be close to
 the object of love as an indicator of quality of life; 4) a shift in semantic poles within the evaluative category «good – bad»; 5) variability in assessing quality of life in chronological terms.
 The results of the study can be used in research and teaching activitiesrelated to the study of Russian poetic discourse.

Semantic Parameters, Cognitive Models, and Mental Units

Abstract The paper explores the relationship between the linguistic and the conceptual system. The author argues for two main types of information that are vital for linguistically mediated communication. These are cognitive models and frames, and semantic parameters. Cognitive models and frames are rich coherent non-linguistic bodies of knowledge that are generally associated with open-class items. On the other hand, semantic parameters are bundles of schematic information that constitute part of the semantic pole of a symbolic unit and might be divided into conceptual and linguistic. The paper illustrates the two main types of information and seeks a unified account of their conceptual relations.

Are Puns Mere? Christine Brooke-Rose's Amalgamemnon

This article will explore the relationship between linguistic puns and knowledge, in particular puns in Christine Brooke-Rose's work, and what they tell us about knowledge: secret knowledge; encoded knowledge; latent knowledge that remains latent; and the refusal of knowledge. My title is an allusion to Frank Kermode's 1967 essay ‘Objects, Jokes, and Art’, where he puzzles away at his own difficulty with distinguishing avant garde writing and art, especially what he calls the ‘neo-avant garde’ of the 60s, from jokes. ‘I myself believe’, he writes anxiously, ‘that there is a difference between art and a joke’, admitting that ‘it has sometimes been difficult to tell.’ Brooke-Rose, whose work Kermode admired, is a perfect example of this. Her texts revolve around the pun, the surprise juxtaposition between semantic poles, the unexpected yoking together of disparate elements. Puns, for Brooke-Rose, sit at the juncture between the accidental and the overdetermined. So what is funny about the pun? Not much, I propose, or rather, it provokes a particular sort of ambivalent laughter which becomes folded into the distinctive character and affective potency of late modernism itself: its deadpan silliness; its proclivity to collision and violence; its excitability and its melancholy. Brooke-Rose's humour is thus of the difficult sort, that is, humour that reveals itself at the moment of its operation to be not all that funny. The unsettling laughter, I propose, that exposes literature's own incommensurability with itself. For Jacques Rancière, the novel must illuminate somehow the ‘punctuation of the encounter with the inconceivable’, in the face of which all is reduced to passivity. The pun, in particular, forces the readers’ passivity, and exposes us to limits of what can be known.

Semantic oscillations of supporting music of the ancient cult as the foundation of metamodernism elements in the works of contemporary opera directors

In recent decade, modernism as one of the varieties of post-postmodernism, draws interest of the researchers. It is suggested that modern culture has transgressed the situation of postmodernism, gravitating towards conceptual and semantic sustainability. As a language of self-description of the new era, the foundations of metamodernism are reflected in various forms of art. The opera house, overcoming the inertia of conservatism, perceives these trends, refracting them in a characteristic oscillation between the extreme semantic poles, which formed during the period of antiquity. The subject of this research is the correlation between the ancient musical heritage and metamodernistic trends in the modern opera theater. It is determined that translation of the principles of musical score of the ancient cult within the framework of the works of modern opera directors implies the characteristic to the supporting music of the cult forms of Ancient Greece and Rome oscillation between the poles of monophony – polyphony, instrumentality of accompaniment – a cappella, improvisational – preset of musical pieces. Paradigmatic assimilation of the fluctuations inherent to the cult of antiquity, as well as the absence of intentionality in their manifestations (which partially reflects the religious-ecstatic procedurality of art), largely determine the specific attributes of metamodernism, emphasized in the works of R. Castellucci, P. Sellars, R. Wilson, and D. Chernyakov.

METAMODERNISM MAN IN THE WORLDVIEW DIMENSION OF NEW CULTURAL PARADIGM

Purpose. The research is based on the comprehension of the anthropological tendencies of the metamodernism, which presupposes the consistent solution of the following tasks: a) explication of the content of post-postmodernism in modern philosophical literature; b) identification of the ideological basis of metamodernism anthropology; c) characteristics of the problem field of metamodernism anthropology and the state of man in the modern era. Theoretical basis. Anthropology of the metamodernism for the first time defines socio-cultural context through the hesitative state between the values of modernism and their rejection by the postmodernism, which makes it possible to formulate the peculiarity of the time as a desire to reconstruct a Holistic Man, impartial to the dominant worldview attitudes of a social nature. Anthropology of the metamodernism is presented as the individualization of the socio-cultural space in the form of human self-reconstruction at all anthropological levels. An era without an unambiguously expressed moral guideline is based on the ethics of all-acceptance, the only justification of which is the existence of a universal right to beingness. Digitalization as a process of digital transformation of society creates conditions for the value realization of the free choice of metamodernism man, through which a Holistic Man is accomplished. Originality. It is substantiated that metamodernism as a descriptive position of the modern cultural dominant of the digitalized era is characterized by a state of hesitation between the values of modernism and postmodernism. The anthropology of the metamodernism manifests itself in the form of the reconstruction of the holistic man and the self-reconstruction of the inner man. The peculiarities of the human metamodernism are recognized as the mutual complete determinability of the individual and the mass. Conclusions. Metamodernism is the formulation of the problem of a man in a new perspective: what to be and how to survive between the extremes of semantic poles, without losing dignity and unique intrinsic value. Proceeding from this, the fate of a metamodernism man is determined in pursuit of the endlessly receding horizons of the anthropology of incompleteness, which is carried out through post-irony, naive sincerity, optimistic openness to the world.

Construções nominais de referência genérica: uma abordagem experimental em gramática cognitiva

Sob a ótica da Gramática Cognitiva (LANGACKER, 1987; 1991), este trabalho investiga o polo semântico de duas construções nominais de referência genérica do português brasileiro: [Artigo + Nome Singular] (“O gato é voluntarioso”) e [Ø + Nome Singular] (“Gato é voluntarioso”). Propõe-se que, apesar da identidade extensional, as duas construções não são semanticamente equivalentes. Especificamente, sustenta-se que o padrão com artigo, mas não o padrão sem artigo, facultaria a conceptualização de um conjunto de tipos não perfilados no interior de um Espaço de Tipo. Para verificar essa hipótese, desenvolveu-se um experimento de julgamento de aceitabilidade no qual os participantes avaliaram a naturalidade de sentenças contendo SNs singulares genéricos em contextos contrastivos nas condições com e sem artigo definido. Os resultados mostraram diferença significativa de aceitabilidade entre as duas condições (p = 0,0014), o que fornece evidências em favor da hipótese de que os padrões construcionais investigados, de fato, evocam representações mentais distintas.

The Conceptualization of Space: Places in Signed Language Discourse.

We examine the conceptualization of space in signed language discourse within the theory of cognitive grammar. Adopting a Places view, we define Place as a symbolic structure that associates a schematic semantic pole and a schematic phonological pole. Places acquire full contextual meaning and a specific spatial location in the context of a usage event. In the present article, we analyze the referential function of Places in different grammatical constructions throughout a selection of videos produced by deaf Argentine Sign Language signers. Our analysis examines Places, which are associated with entities in the surrounding spatial environment as well as Places that are created or recruited in discourse without reference to surrounding physical entities. We observe that Places are used in pointing, placing, and other grammatical constructions in order to introduce and track referents in ongoing discourse. We also examine the use of conceptual reference points, by which Places afford mental access to new related concepts that are the intended focus of attention. These results allow us to discuss three related issues. First, for signed language discourse, space is both semantically and phonologically loaded. Signers’ semantic and phonological choices for Place symbolic structures are motivated by embodied experience and the abstraction of usage events. Second, Places occur along a continuum from deixis to anaphor, united by the same conceptual system and differing in extent of phonological subjectification. Third, we suggest developmental implications of our Place analysis.

Образы Марии Египетской, Марии Магдалины и Клеопатры в русской литературе: христианское и языческое

<p><span lang="EN-US">The article examines the orthodox tradition of paying homage to Venerable Mary of Egypt. The perception of the image of Mary of Egypt is compared with that one of Mary Magdalene in the West-European World, particularly in literature and art. The different forms of interaction between the hagiography of Mary of Egypt and Russian literature are traced: adaptation of the plot, allusions, insertion of the motif of a repented whore. The plot of Cleopatra, as of an impenitent whore, is opposite to a hagiographic plot (by its semantic pole of attraction). Two female images symbolize two divergent paths — to spiritual rebirth and to the ruin. As a result of the analysis of the works of A. Pushkin, I. Aksakov, N. Leskov, V. Bryusov, A. Remizov it is deduced that both plots turned out to be productive for Russian literature of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, namely because of their paired relationship.</span></p>

Goodbye (Chinese) Shadow Banking, Hello Market‐based Finance

ABSTRACTShadow banking in developing and emerging countries (DECs) oscillates between two semantic poles. One definition is typically deployed by scholars for the narrow analysis of non‐bank financial intermediation as a viable alternative to banking. The other, more recent, definition circulates in the policy world to capture a new agenda of engineering (securities) market‐based finance. This article argues that this second definition captures the essential but neglected aspect of shadow banking in DECs. The ‘shadow banking into market‐based finance’ narrative reaffirms the celebratory tone of the financial globalization cum liberalization thesis dominant before the global financial crisis. It seeks to depoliticize contentious debates about capital flows and the constraints that financialized globalization poses to development, instead asking DECs to encourage portfolio flows, relax the regulatory grip on shadow funding markets and tap into the growing global demand for securities that marks the new age of asset management. China illustrates this argument well. In joining the global push for market‐based finance with the ambition to further its RMB internationalization agenda, China underestimates the (Minsky‐type) fragilities involved.

ГЕОГРАФИЧЕСКОЕ МЫШЛЕНИЕ, КУЛЬТУРНАЯ ГЕОГРАФИЯ И ДИКАЯ ПРИРОДА, "Известия Российской академии наук. Серия географическая"

Humanities appears now in the “endowed” human being significant and meaningful knowledge as the appropriate meaning of the content of reality. The embodiment of the world picture occurs in multivalued association of signs, symbols, representations and images, where the geography are the only “embedded” in this kind of quickly current processes. Nature was never to humans, it always exists “in itself” and “for itself”, and the man validly “read” and convey its meaning turns out to be possible discourse, while its understanding borders their own limitations of knowledge. In this paper the author’s position are considering via appropriate mapping and interpretation of the opposing “semantic poles” – a wilderness and cultural landscape. In contrast, dichotomous theoretical manifestation of this kind concluded the transcendental meaning of sensory associations (imagery) and rational (logical) cognitive styles of geographical thinking. The concept of the existence the wilderness continuum demonstrates the existing still areas of traditional nature use of indigenous peoples of the Asian part of Russia and those, which modified by anthropogenic development within territory of Siberia.

The Loss of Grammatical Gender and Case Features Between Old and Early Middle English: Its Impact on Simple Demonstratives and Topic Shift

AbstractIn this paper we examine the relation between the loss of formal gender and Case features on simple demonstratives and the topic shifting property they manifest. The examination period spans between Old English and Early Middle English. While we argue that this loss has important discourse-pragmatic and derivational effects on demonstratives, we also employ the Strong Minimalist Hypothesis approach (Chomsky 2001) and feature valuation, as defined in Pesetsky & Torrego (2007), to display how their syntactic computation and pragmatic properties have come about. To account for the above innovations yielding the Early Middle Englishϸe(‘the’), we first discuss the formal properties of the Old English demonstratives which distinguish number, gender, and Case features. This inflectional variety of forms allows the Old English demonstratives to be used independently and to show the anaphoric and discourse-linking properties of topics. Crucially, the same properties characterise also German and Dutch demonstratives that manifest Case and/or gender morphology overtly, which shows that the syntactic distribution of LIs and their morphological richness should be considered as intertwined. The above properties are then confronted with the determiner system in Early Middle English, whose forms undergo inflectional levelling producing the invariantϸe/ðeform that loses its distributional independence and acquires the article status. The levelling process in question is argued to stimulate the shift of the [+ref/spec] feature from the formal to the semantic pole. This suggests that the Early Middle Englishϸeform no longer counts as an appropriate anaphor in topic shift contexts owing to its indeterminacy of Case, gender, and φ-features, which means that it cannot satisfy the Full Interpretation requirement at the interfaces.

Language: A fresh concept to integrate syntactic and semantic information in life sciences

Several fields in biology tend to view the concept of information from one or the other of two extreme positions. Exclusionists base their stance of total rejection on gene-centrism and gene-determinism, typified by the recently-established endo-Darwinist school of life sciences. At the other end of the spectrum, there is total acceptance, as in the newly developed information-centred paradigms that populate biosemiotics. We propose in this paper to split the informational concepts into two irreducible (but linked) poles: the syntactic (concerned with the quantification of the information structure or complexity in a system), and the semantic (concerned with the organization rules and causality weights of interactions in a system). We claim that the past and present uses of the concept could then be classified as various degrees of oscillation between the two poles. The concept of language presents itself as a good tool with which to bridge the syntactic and the semantic poles, combining as it does the form-related and the meaning-related aspects of information, while methodologically supporting formal grammatical models in life sciences. We aim to show, at the same time, that neither of these poles alone can suffice to efficiently and holistically describe, model, and predict natural phenomena.

Form-meaning correspondences in multiple dimensions: The structure of Hungarian finite clauses

AbstractThe paper combines the assumptions of Langacker’s Cognitive Grammar, Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar and Dependency Grammar, arguing for an analysis of clauses as multi-dimensional networks. The semantic pole of each dimension is a network of semantic relations, which stands in correspondence to formal aspects of clause structure such as case morphology, word order and prosody. The proposed approach is applied to the study of core phenomena of Hungarian. The D1 dimension of Hungarian finite clauses is concerned with frame semantic (“thematic”) relations and their coding (primarily by morphology) on the formal side. The D2 and D3 dimensions pertain to speech function and contextualization, respectively, with the semantic relations marked by word order and prosody. It is hoped that the proposed account of Hungarian may inform both cross-linguistic comparisons and theory development in cognitive linguistics.

The semantic poles of Old English: Toward the 3D representation of complex polysemy

This article explains some aspects of the verbal polysemy of Old English by means of the concept of semantic pole, an area of semantic space that represents a core meaning. It draws on the semantic primes of the natural semantic metalanguage, the theoretical constructs of semantic space, and force dynamics as well as semantic maps based on graph theory. In the semantic map, graphs link poles to definiens and lexical nodes, in such a way that the centrality of the poles is indicated, quantitatively, by the number of edges and, qualitatively, by the distance between the pole that exerts the centrifugal force and the pole to which such a force is directed. The conclusion is reached that the semantic poles MOVE, BE, and SAY constitute the core of the verbal lexicon of Old English, considering the semantic space that they occupy and the centrifugal and centripetal forces that produce polysemy originating in these semantic poles. © The Author 2017. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of EADH. All rights reserved.

Essentials of cognitive grammar by Ronald W. Langacker

Reviewed by: Essentials of cognitive grammar by Ronald W. Langacker Laura A. Janda Essentials of cognitive grammar. By Ronald W. Langacker. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Pp. 269. ISBN 9780199937356. $26.95. Ronald W. Langacker and his cognitive grammar (CG) have earned a privileged position within cognitive linguistics. L’s books (Langacker 1987, 1991a,b, 2000) have given us the core concepts that define the framework of cognitive linguistics and continue to steer the research of most scholars in the field. In a sense, the current book is one that L has been writing all through his career. A distillation of his previous books, and a foreshortened version of Langacker 2008, Essentials of cognitive grammar is the first resource I would send a student or colleague to for a definitive, concise introduction both to L’s work and to the entire field of cognitive linguistics. The book is divided into two parts devoted to meaning (Part I, Chs. 1–3) and grammar (Part II, Chs. 4–8). The first part explores the essential role of meaning in language, motivating the ‘content [End Page 738] requirement’, which states that ‘the only elements ascribable to a linguistic system are (i) semantic, phonological, and symbolic structures that actually occur as parts of expressions; (ii) schematizations of permitted structures; and (iii) categorizing relationships between permitted structures’ (Ch. 1, p. 25). The content requirement keeps all linguistic analysis in CG close to the language itself, avoiding purely theoretical constructs that lack grounding in language use. What the content requirement does permit is the identification of symbolic structures that link a semantic pole with a phonological pole, complexes of such structures (called ‘symbolic assemblies’), and schematic abstractions based on these structures. Symbolic structures, both simple and complex, are the relevant units of analysis for CG. Chs. 2 and 3 present the way in which meaning is grounded in human minds and experience and then extended and manipulated by means of metaphor, blending, and construal. The semantic poles of most symbolic structures are as a result polysemous, yielding networks of meanings in which some are prototypical and others more peripheral. The concatenation of symbolic structures into assemblies does not involve a mere accretion of meanings, but rather an interaction. Compositionality fails as a means for interpreting compounds such as lipstick or redcoat, which require reference to cultural practices and meanings that are quite peripheral to those of the components (lip, stick, red, coat). L here foreshadows the conclusion he draws in Ch. 8 that the meaning of a complex expression ‘cannot be computed from lexical meanings and compositional patterns … but is more accurately seen as being prompted by them’ (245). Construal gives the language user the ‘opportunity to vary the way in which content is portrayed along various scales such as specificity, focusing (figure vs. ground), prominence (profiling a trajector against a landmark), and perspective (with variations in the degree to which the focus is on the subjective viewer). The viewing arrangement for the construal of a given scene makes it possible to scan mentally along the temporal dimension, and summary scanning progressively builds up a detailed conception. A particular type of scanning that is relevant to grammar is the ‘reference point relationship’, which ‘directs attention to a perceptually salient entity as a point of reference to help find some other entity’ (83), as, for example, in possessive constructions (where the possessor is the reference point and the possession is the target) and perfect constructions (which involve a reference point in time). Part II bridges the gap between the conceptual semantics in Part I and the structure of languages. Ch. 4 opens with the claim that grammatical classes (categories), such as ‘noun’ and ‘verb’, are definable in terms of meaning. The meaning that is most relevant for these classes is, however, the profiling that is facilitated by construal. L makes it clear that CG does not adhere to the narrow definitions of the traditional parts of speech (since these are subject to a certain amount of crosslinguistic variation), and that ‘what determines an expression’s grammatical category is not its overall conceptual content, but the nature of its profile in particular’ (98). L’s example...

Plaisir de la connaissance comme émotion intellectuelle chez Hugues de Saint-Victor

In Hugh of St Victor the pleasure of knowledge is seen as an ‘intellectual emotion’, in that it exists at the intersection between affectivity and rationality. This is clear from various texts: from the De fructibus carnis et spiritus to the De quinque septenis and the Sententiae de divinitate, gaudium is seen as the intellectual emotion par excellence, as it is an ‘inner’ joy, a jucunditas spiritalis that produces happiness. From an anthropological point of view, joy and pleasure combine with knowledge to help men abandon the pleasures of the body and devote themselves to those of the spirit. This is linked to Hugh of St Victor’s ‘hedonistic’ pedagogy, which holds that docet quod scire delectet, in that one learns more easily what is pleasant. Similarly, limited, restricted knowledge does not produce as much pleasure as extensive, wide-ranging knowledge. The essay sets these analyses in a table of Hugh’s terminology that is organized in four semantic poles: 1) pleasure and desire (delectatio, voluptas, oblectamentum, desiderium, libenter); 2) joy (iucunditas, laetitia, laetari, gaudium); 3) happiness (felicitas, beatitudo); 4) love (dilectio, dilectus adj, dilectus subst).

From primary metaphors to the complex semantic pole of grammatical constructions

abstractThe main aim of the present work is to demonstrate that the semantic pole of ditransitive constructions manifests itself as a multidomain matrix, consisting basically of a set of conceptual metaphors integrated through the mechanism of blending. The metaphors that participate in these multidomain matrices are, in principle, metaphors that already exist in our conceptual structure. As we shall demonstrate in the course of the analysis, these often involve primary metaphors, conceived of as metaphors that have a direct, independent, experiential base. In other cases, the starting point for the construction of such multidomain matrices is complex metaphors already existing in our conceptual structure, understood as an autonomous conceptual complex of a metaphorical nature, created through the integration of various primary metaphors. Our concrete object of analysis consists of the semantic pole of different types of ditransitive constructions. The data analyzed include examples from Romance (Catalan, French, Brazilian Portuguese, and Spanish) and Germanic (English and German) languages.

Cognitive Approach to Word Formation

Structural approach to word formation in Lithuanian is still dominant, meanwhile cognitive insights have not been applied yet. The object of this paper is the aspects of cognitive grammar to word formation. In the article, cognitive semantic notions and their application to the morphological analysis of cognitive grammar are introduced.In the cognitive theory of grammar, symbolicity plays a significant role. The essence of cognitive grammar is based on the idea that language units are bipolar language signs. A linguistic unit consists of phonological and semantic poles which are linked by a symbolic structure.A category is a network of meanings of a derivational morpheme, which, as in the case of lexical category, is structured in terms of prototype and periphery. The prototype of a category is considered to be the most typical member, whereas other senses of the prototype comprise the periphery.Morphological expressions are closely related to each other and comprise cognitive domains. A domain is perceived as knowledge in terms of which derivational morphemes can be interpreted.Compositionality is a process when the composite structure is determined by the meanings of its constituents. This process plays an integral part in understanding the senses of new morphological expressions. Full and partial compositionality types are typical of morphological expressions. In compounding, full compositionality is endocentric, meanwhile partial compositionality is exocentric.A large number of units are pertinent to each other by schema and instance relations. A schema is defined as a general model made of instances. The schema reflects the general meaning of instances. Due to further elaboration the instance becomes a basis for a new schema and its elaborating elements become new instances.

주의 이론에 기초한 한국어의 주어 연구

Cognitive Grammar suggests that trajector/landmark organization provides the conceptual basis for the grammatical notions subject and that object appling the knowledge of attention (the metaphor of spotlignt) to trajector/landmark organization. It has been generally accepted that trajector/landmark organization corresponds to figure/ground organization, but there seems to be no authentic ground for this idea. Furthermore, we are now facing new theories of attention that is able to fix the problems of spotlight theory. The research of Attention has made noticeable progress since shullman et al's(1979) spotlight theory. It has been viewed within Feature Integration Theory (Treisman and Gelade 1980), as an object-based phenomenon (duncan 1984), and as Biased Competition (Desimone and Duncan 1995). This study attempts to apply the refined knowledge of attention theories to the subject phenomenon of Korean Grammar. The primary result reveals that '-nun' marks endogenous attention and '-ka' marks exogenous attention. It sounds plausible that the distinction between endogenous and exogenous attention is marked by grammatical organization, because within the framework of Cognitive Grammar, grammar is symbolic, and not distinct from semantics, but rather incorporates semantics as one of its two (semantic and phonological) poles.

On the Nature of Lexical Concepts

This paper addresses the nature of lexical concepts, a theoretical construct in LCCM Theory (Evans 2006, 2009b). The hallmark of LCCM Theory is its claim that linguistically-mediated communication relies on knowledge found in two distinct representational systems: the conceptual system and the linguistic system. The linguistic system is comprised of symbolic units, which involve a symbolic relation holding between a phonological pole and a semantic pole. Lexical concepts represent a means of modelling the semantic pole. This paper provides an overview of the main properties and characteristics of lexical concepts. It also provides a methodology for identifying and so distinguishing between lexical concepts. The latter is important when dealing with cases, such as polysemy, where a related form is paired with distinct lexical concepts.