Universal Tendency Research Articles

Sacred Naturalism and Cosmic Unity: Seeking Harmony in the Midst of Chaos

Abstract This article argues for a version of sacred naturalism within the framework of a processual metaphysics that characterizes the cosmos as an interplay between Chaos (disunity) and Logos (unity). I argue that although creativity is highly valuable from the perspective of life and humanity, at a cosmic scale it is overshadowed by the universal tendencies toward conservation and destruction. Within this metaphysical picture I develop a naturalist notion of the sacred as a phenomenological object inspiring particularly intense feelings of inner harmony but functioning eudaemonically to strengthen mind, body, and soul against forms of Chaos, whether anomie, stress, or personal conflict. After developing some criteria for a sacred but immanent meta-unity in contrast to the transcendental unities of traditional religion, I describe how the unity of the cosmos might be experienced as a sacred object by emphasizing its heterarchical, aesthetic and life-affirming dimensions.

Grammatical gender universalities underlying uniform mental representations of the world: Myth or reality?

The subject of grammatical gender and cognition has been continuously examined in psycholinguistics, wherein findings show essential support for gender congruency effects, suggesting that grammar lends matrices for speakers’ mental representations. Based on these psycholinguistic data, this study offers an innovative vista of investigation that combines typological and cognitive linguistic approaches. Its purpose lies in determining whether grammatical gender patterns sanction cross-linguistic universality in conceptualising entities as male or female, and whether grammatical gender universalities have semantic motivation. This research reveals universal tendencies in grammatical gender affiliation of the analysed nouns in 32 two and three gender languages belonging to different groups of the Indo-European, Indo-Iranian and Afro-Asiatic language families. From a cognitive perspective, these findings testify to the identical mental images of the entities denoting artefacts, natural phenomena and abstract concepts in speakers of the languages under consideration. Furthermore, grammatical gender universalities manifest certain semantic dimensions involving the motives associated with masculine or feminine and symbolic suggestions of the Woman archetype. As per the data from cognitive poetics, grammatical gender universalities become objects of special stylistic choices emerging as personified images of symbolic relevance in gender and non-gender languages.

“Philosophical suicide” during the climate crisis: how belief influences the response to climate change

When approaching the climate crisis, there appears to be a universal tendency towards philosophical suicide. When faced with the sheer scale of the problem at hand, falling for the façade of easy solutions seems to be an expected response. However, this tendency towards philosophical suicide may complicate the fight against the climate crisis by drawing attention away from the problem at hand. To approach this problem, the overarching purpose of this article is to determine how the change in the philosophical approach to the absurd may assist in framing the fight against climate change. During the investigation into this problem, it was found that philosophical suicide is a real problem that may be chosen when easy solutions are offered for a problem that sufficiently threatens the individual’s state of existence. Furthermore, this philosophical suicide threatens the fight against climate change due to it leading individuals to believe lies perpetrated through strategies like greenwashing. This is of crucial importance since philosophical suicide threatens the fight against the climate crisis by not allowing individuals to consciously approach the problem. However, there does appear to be some hope. If the newer generations are sufficiently educated on the topic, there may be a chance that philosophical suicide, as well as the prevailing sense of dread that appears to be rampant in the younger generations, can be countered. In this way, educating individuals may enable them to consciously approach the absurdity of the climate crisis and, in doing so, revolt against it.

The physics of the urge to have freedom

Freedom, safety, and ease of movement are innate human urges attributed to conscience along with many other preferences such as attractiveness (beauty), economy, and life. This article addresses the physics basis of the innate urge to have freedom. It unveils the connection between animal freedom and the universal (constructal) tendency toward easier movement and greater access in all evolutionary systems throughout nature (animate & inanimate). The demonstration is made with a model of lack of freedom in animal movement: a man who walks his dog on a leash. When two animals are coerced to move at the same speed, their combined effort (the spent power) is greater than when they move freely, and independently. When the speed of the couple is dictated by the big body (man), the big one walks freely, and the small one must run. Participants in organized movement (life, society) are not equal. All participants move with less effort when they are not coerced to move the same way. The implications of this part of physics (nature) are numerous and help unify the animal realm with the design and evolution of human society. If you want diversity, give the population freedom, not prescriptions.

The colexification of vision and cognition in Mandarin: controlled activity surpasses uncontrolled experience

Abstract Given the colexification of perception and cognition, Georgakopoulos et al. (2022. Universal and macro-areal patterns in the lexicon: A case-study in the perception-cognition domain. Linguistic Typology 26(2). 439–487) claim that uncontrolled experience rather than controlled activity has a direct linkage to cognition. To test whether this is a universal tendency, this study conducts a contrastive behavioral profile analysis of two basic vision verbs in Mandarin: kàn, a controlled activity verb, and jiàn, an uncontrolled experience verb. The results show that (i) both kàn and jiàn colexify visual activity and cognitive senses; (ii) kàn is able to express a wider range of cognitive meanings, i.e., know, understand, and think, whereas jiàn only extends into know; and (iii) visual and cognitive meanings have more proximal relationships in the colexification pattern of kàn than that of jiàn. The study confirms the universality of the colexification between vision and cognition while providing counterexamples to the above-mentioned large data-based findings. Accordingly, a dichotomy of controlled activity versus uncontrolled experience is proposed for the colexification of vision and cognition in cognitive typology.

The order of OVX and the argument-adjunct distinction

As for the order of verb (V), object (O), and oblique (X), Dryer (with Gensler) (2013) finds the asymmetry between VO and OV languages in terms of the position of X: VO languages are almost exclusively VOX, and OV languages are of all three types (XOV, OXV, and OVX). Hawkins (2008) argues that “[t]he OVX languages should be more head-initial and have head ordering correlations more like those of VO” (e.g., preposition: OVX 33%, VO 86%). However, we claim that high percentages of OVX languages have head-final orders unlike VO languages in complement-head orders (e.g., postposition: OVX 67%, VO 14%). We also claim that OVX languages have more head-initial orders than XOV and OXV languages in head-adjunct orders (e.g., Noun-Adjective: OVX 100%, XOV 56%, OXV 67%). We propose the universal tendency to complement-head-adjunct order.

An eastern feminist perspective on the ‘woman question’: the activity, thought and writing of ‘A‘isha Taymur & Malak Hifni Nasif

ABSTRACT In nineteenth-century Egypt, the ‘Women Question’ reflected a battle over the cultural content of the nation in the production of a ‘New Woman’. Eastern feminists were entangled in the complexities of colonial and local discourses on women. ‘A‘isha Taymur & Malak Nasif engaged in discussions and debates with male-counterparts on these. Their thought centered on ushering new ways of thinking through the formation of an alternative Eastern feminist project that retained indigeneity and benefited from universal tendencies. They offered their own interpretations, and expressed the viability of multiple notions/discourses and complex realities in the formation of a new woman.

Does Pollyanna hypothesis hold true in death narratives? A sentiment analysis approach

Pollyanna hypothesis claims that human beings have a universal tendency to use positive words more frequently and broadly than negative words. The present study aims to test Pollyanna hypothesis in medical death narratives at both lexical and text levels by using sentiment analysis and emotion detection methods, and to qualitatively analyze the contextual use of emotion words to deepen the understanding of doctors' emotions. Sentiment analysis showed a strong token-based linguistic positivity and a weak type-based negativity bias at the lexical level, and a general positivity bias at the text level, despite the gender of the doctors. Emotion detection discovered three prominent emotions of “joy”, “sadness”, and “anger”, and a greater diversity of negative emotions in contrast to positive emotions in medical death narratives. Contextual analysis revealed that emotion words associated with joy were primarily observed in contexts related to doctors' actions and behaviors aiming to benefit others and promote social wellbeing. Emotion words associated with sadness and anger were chiefly employed to describe situations involving patients' death and doctors' attitudes towards death. The results confirm Pollyanna hypothesis at both token-based lexical level and text level and falsify the hypothesis at type-based lexical level. Possible explanations are explored by contextual analysis, and theoretical analysis from the perspectives of cognitive linguistics and social psychology. The findings are expected to enrich the understanding of Pollyanna hypothesis as well as the junior doctors' emotional responses to clinical deaths.

Selecting the Optimal Thermal Insulation Material for a Residential Building Envelope in Cairo in Consideration of The Thermal Comfort and Energy Consumption

As a result of the current global energy crisis, there is a universal tendency towards energy-saving in the housing sector. In Egypt, mega housing projects such as "Dar Misr" are established to provide apartments for middle-income families. The envelopes of those buildings play a significant role in the increased heat gain of indoor spaces. Therefore, this study aims to assess the thermal performance and calculate the energy savings of five thermal insulation materials available in the market; (Vermiculite, Rockwool, Phenolic Foam, Extruded Polystyrene (XPS), and Polyethylene). The assessment is for those materials installed in the apartment's external walls to find the optimal material that achieves the most extended annual indoor thermal comfort hours and the highest annual energy-saving. An apartment in a typical floor was modeled by DesignBuilder software to calculate the indoor thermal comfort hours and energy consumption for the five alternatives. The results show that thermal insulation materials inside the external walls are pivotal in reducing heat gains and extending comfort hours. The optimal insulation material is XPS which achieved thermal comfort for 33% of the year compared to 28% and 29% by the Phenolic Foam and Rockwool, respectively. Moreover, the XPS saved 9.27% of the annual energy consumption, which is the highest energy-saving ratio compared to Polyethylene (6.21%) and Vermiculite (2.4%).

Intrinsic vowel pitch in Hamont Dutch: Evidence for If0 reduction in the lower pitch range

This study investigated Intrinsic Vowel Pitch (If0) in the Belgian Limburg dialect of Hamont. Its main aim was to investigate a potential correlation between If0 and f0, which has been attested in previous research, especially on contour tone languages. The Hamont dialect is particularly interesting because it has a pitch accent distinction, but also because the vowel system has a high and low vowel contrast in the front and the back dimension of the vowel space. The results of this study are generally compatible with If0 research on many languages but adds some new insights. Firstly, it was found that If0 in the Hamont dialect is comparatively large (1.97 semitones). Secondly, it was confirmed that the front–back distinction in vowel articulation has no significant effect on If0. Thirdly, when If0 is expressed on a semitone scale, no significant differences in If0 were found between male and female speakers of the dialect. The most important finding of the paper is the significant positive correlation between f0 and If0 in that If0 is smaller in the lower pitch range and bigger in the higher pitch range. This phenomenon in Hamont Dutch is much the same to what is observed in contour tone languages that have been examined for this. There are indications that a similar tendency exists in register tone languages and intonation languages. Although the cause of this progressive If0 reduction is not entirely clear, its wide distribution across prosodic systems seems to point towards a universal tendency.

Guest Editorial: Mythical Identities, Scientific Realities, and Search for Transpersonal Meaning

Myths weave in and out of historical context, even as dreams do relative to daily life, functioning in the modern world much as they did in earlier times, operating at both the personal and cultural levels. This essay discusses three special difficulties in appreciating the power of myth and understanding its reasons for being: (a) the nearly universal tendency to situate myth as the opposite of fact and truth, (b) the problem of identifying prevailing myths in culture and private life, and (c) the challenge of acknowledging myth as more than a personal intellectual construct or a cultural construction. Transpersonal theory offers a way forward in addressing these difficulties by placing personal and cultural myths and their relationship to historic–scientific fact in a greater context that endows them with greater meaning and reason for being than ordinarily appreciated by orthodox, mainstream Western psychology. Let us explore this premise detail.

Cross-linguistic conditions on word length.

Based on a dataset representing close to ¾ of the world's languages we investigate differences among languages and between items on the Swadesh list with regard to mean word length from a linguistic typological point of view. Mapping the world-wide distribution of word length shows convergence at a continent-wide level, a Pacific Rim signature, and a tendency for large word length averages to be a recessive trait. The amount of data, which is unparalleled in previous, related studies, allows us to provide more solid estimates and accounts for the interrelationships between word length, phoneme segment inventory size, and population size than was previously possible. Word length differences between items exhibit robust, universal tendencies, which are discussed in relation to other quantities, including stability, synonymy, and attestation.

James E. Talmage and the Selenite Crystals

James E. Talmage and the Selenite Crystals

Historia pojęcia „solidarność”

Solidarity as a polysemous (ambiguous) concept is a multicultural or supra-cultural value rooted in ethics all over the world. It refers primarily to human community life and the universal tendency to support each other in dangerous situations, a tendency that is written in our genes. This concept is currently experiencing a renaissance, appearing in new areas of human life, e.g. in connection with the Covid-19 pandemic, climate disasters, the war in Ukraine; in scientific research; in new technologies (artificial intelligence); or in microbiology – where it is solidarity discovered in the natural world (e.g. the world of fungi), and thus also an introduction to the synonyms of solidarity and the concept of symbiosis. The concept of solidarity includes the obligation to care for those in need and the responsibility to continue living in the „global village“ as an expression of solidarity with future generations.

Refining explanation in Evolutionary Phonology: macro-typologies and targeted typologies in action

AbstractIn this paper, we highlight the role of typology in providing an empirical basis for explanation within Evolutionary Phonology with a focus on rare sound patterns and extra-phonetic explanation. Broad typological surveys of sound patterns or macro-typologies that include phonetic detail may, at once, support universal tendencies and document rare sound patterns, offering arguments for theories in which universal tendencies based on phonetic explanation are emergent properties of markedness-free grammars. However, in order to explain rarity and explore extra-phonetic factors, targeted typologies, narrowed by specific structural properties or contact histories, may be necessary. In this study, the complementary roles of broad and targeted typologies are illustrated through recent case studies of three basic components of phonological systems—sound inventories, alternations, and phonotactics—, with a focus on non-phonetic explanations that have enhanced the predictive power of the Evolutionary framework.

Determining the cognitive biases behind a viral linguistic universal: the order of multiple adjectives

When people are asked to create a phrase with the elements {blue, earrings, beautiful}, they produce ‘beautiful blue earrings’. Several theories have been proposed about the origins of this universal tendency to order multiple adjectives in a specific way: an innate universal hierarchy with designated positions for each category of adjectives, sensitivity to the definiteness of the adjectival denotation, availability and psychological closeness of the adjective attributes to the speaker, the encoding of subjective vs. objective properties, and the adjective’s phonological weight. Although these theories have strong descriptive power, they often focus on what happens at the phenotypic level without explaining what cognitive needs trigger this behavior. Through a timed task that measures acceptability in ‘Adjective-Adjective-Noun’ sequences that either comply with the universal order or violate it, we adduce evidence for the high acceptability of the violating orders, whose processing did not take longer than that of the compliant orders, as should have happened if the former were non-canonical. The results suggest that ordering preferences exist but are not invariable, as one would expect if a strong linguistic universal was involved. We track the origin of adjective ordering preferences to the synergistic interplay of three cognitive biases: Zipf’s Law, Intolerance of Ambiguity, and Novel Information Bias. Last, we show that the linguistic manifestation of these preferences is sensitive to the statistical distribution of the input data, resulting to variation even among speakers of the same language.

Why Can’t We Be Friends? John of Salisbury, Thomas Becket and the Discourse of Amicitia

There has been an almost universal tendency to treat Thomas Becket as a personal—even close and intimate—friend of John of Salisbury, based on their decades-long association. Evidence for this position has rested, for example, on the fact that the two writings that have primarily sustained John’s intellectual reputation through the centuries—the Policraticus and the Metalogicon—he chose to dedicate to Becket. During the Middle Ages, however, addressing a book to powerful and well-placed people did not necessarily suggest endorsement of their behaviour. Indeed, a dedication might indicate criticism or rebuke rather than affection or gratitude, as it does today. John’s actual attitude towards Becket cannot be separated from appreciation of the relationship between friends as understood in the twelfth century. John stood at or near the centre of a large friendship circle that encompassed mainly monks and secular clergy—a network held together by copious correspondence as well as face-to-face interaction. Such circles functioned as important means of constructing common intellectual and political agendas among literate but otherwise far-flung figures. Becket received no such expressions of friendship status from John of Salisbury.

The linguistic concept of phraseological units denoting the personality inner world in the modern Ukrainian and English languages

The article is devoted to the definition of the peculiarities of the metaphorization of phraseological units to denote the inner world of a person in the Ukrainian language. The main purpose of the article is the definition of the peculiarities of phraseological units which denote the inner world of a person in the Ukrainian and English languages.The object of the investigation is the phraseological units expressing the feelings and emotions of a person (emotional phraseological unit).The methodology of the study was based on the cognitive-pragmatic and structural approaches, the descriptive method was used in the work, which made it possible to single out the studied units in the phraseological system of the Ukrainian and English languages and carry out their systematization. The linguistic study has demonstrated that, phraseological units (PhU) expressing human emotions and feelings (emotional phraseological units) in Ukrainian and English represent one of the most significant and expressive groups of phraseological fund units in the language system. Due to the linguistic ambiguity and diffuseness of emotions, one and the same phraseological unit can denote two or more subgroups, but this is not characteristic of all phraseological units. Thus, in the phraseological field "Emotions and human feelings" there are diffuse zones, the units of which are included in different semantic groups.The authors proved, that phraseological units based on physiological sensations, gestures, and facial expressions are generally similar in the two languages due to the weak fate of control on the part of the human, the universally felt nature, and the universal tendency to phraseologize metaphorical word combinations that call these sensations and gestures.

O kierunkach rozwoju prawa karnego na ziemiach polskich w dobie średniowiecza wobec tradycji i tendencji europejskich

The publication is an attempt to look at the history of law in Poland from the perspective of the development of European legal culture. The choice of the subject matter to be explored determined the author’s methodological instruments, ultimately prompting him to consider comparative legal studies as the basis for his research. At the outset, emphasizing the topicality of the problem in the context of the progress of European integration, the author strove to present the history of criminal law in medieval Poland, highlighting both the original developmental features and the way in which they fit into universal tendencies, represented in the legal systems of other contemporary countries of the Old Continent. In his final conclusions, he drew attention to the tendencies that emerged at the end of the Middle Ages and at the beginning of the modern era, pointing to the growing discrepancies in the directions of further development of law in Polish lands against the tendencies that began to dominate more and more clearly in the laws of most European countries at that time. The author’s intention was not to discover America a few hundred years after Columbus, but to synthesize a multifaceted problem that could serve historical-legal reflection.

Third World feminist agrarian struggles and the colonial question for transnational feminist solidarity

abstract Third World agrarian feminists have, through debates and struggles over the course of at least nine decades, explored the meanings of liberation – directly through involvement in land and agrarian struggles, and indirectly through solidarity with movements against raising other related social justice questions. The link between feminist agrarian movements and the broader movements is partly based on a common historical concern with gender as a colonising substructure. In the still largely agrarian south, for instance, the gender question to class would highlight the regimes of gendered labour which fracture solidarity among working people, and ask whether feminist resistance can undermine the basic gendered structure of reproduction that stabilised the colonial/capitalist mode of accumulation. To ethnicity, the question would be the extent to which feminist movements can overcome reactionary nationalisms in order to reach for global Black solidarities on the basis of shared transnational histories. To race, the question would be the extent to which Black feminists can overcome the universalising tendencies of empire in order to retain a structural critique of the ways in which structural racism aids capitalist exploitation of gendered labour. Drawing on these concerns, this article examines various contemporary feminist agrarian questions from a global south vantage point, highlighting the limitations which these questions present to the (de)colonial present, and possibilities that exist in articulating a position in which the colonial question is core to gender and Black feminist solidarities.