Spatial Terms Convey Distance Information

2000 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eric S. Covey ◽  
Laura A. Carlson-Radvansky
1994 ◽  
Vol 29 (3) ◽  
pp. 177-185 ◽  
Author(s):  
L. Eugene Thomas

Beliefs and feelings about death are excerpted from interviews conducted with elderly English men and women, who were viewed as spiritually mature by those in their community. Respondents reported a wide range of beliefs about death, reflecting their personal experience, but none reported fear of death. Subtle sex differences were noted: men tended to picture death in spatial terms, of moving into a new dimension, while women tended to describe death in terms of relationships. Overall the respondents indicated that they placed a positive value on death, viewing it as a continuation of, and source of meaning for their present life.


Urban History ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 1-21
Author(s):  
Asif Siddiqi

Abstract This article recovers the early history of the Soviet ‘closed city’, towns that during the Cold War were absent from maps and unknown to the general public due to their involvement in weapons research. I argue that the closed cities echoed and appropriated features of the Stalinist Gulag camp system, principally their adoption of physical isolation and the language of obfuscation. In doing so, I highlight a process called ‘atomized urbanism’ that embodies the tension between the obdurate reality of the city and the goal of the state to obliterate that reality through secrecy. In spatial terms, ‘atomized’ also describes the urban geography of these cities which lacked any kind of organic suburban expansion.


2020 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Francesco-Alessio Ursini

AbstractIn many languages, it is possible to describe the location of any entity with respect to a landmark object without specifying the exact place that the locatum occupies (e.g. English at in at home). Such vocabulary items usually contrast with items that belong to the same categories but have more restricted senses (e.g. on top of in on top of the shelf). Thus, the degree of “abstractness” that such spatial case markers can convey usually depends on the organization of the lexicon and grammar of spatial terms in each language. The goal of this paper is to explore these properties across a small sample of languages and offer an account of this variation that is connected to previous theories of spatial case markers (e.g. adpositions). Our key proposal is that the morpho-syntactic structure of spatial case markers and their phrases can license a clear division of labour between functional and lexical spatial senses. However, intermediate solutions blurring categories and semantic boundaries are shown to be possible. We formalize this proposal via a fragment of Lexical Syntax, and show that degrees of distinction between ‘functional’ and ‘lexical’ sense types and categories can be modelled via a unified account.


1998 ◽  
Vol 59 (3) ◽  
pp. 212-218
Author(s):  
Harold Billings

Changes in the information world are resulting in new concepts of resource sharing, new practices in the management of library resources, and an expanding role for libraries in the educational process. However, such concepts have not necessarily been identified, named, and defined in the language of contemporary librarianship. Although librarians and their associates in the information and educational processes need to be made aware of these subtle, but powerful, new issues, discussions cannot easily proceed until there is a shared understanding of them in the language of review and debate. This paper introduces three themes that encompass these issues: distance information, managed information, and transformational budgeting.


Behaviour ◽  
2004 ◽  
Vol 141 (8) ◽  
pp. 935-958 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sandra Blumenrath ◽  
Torben Dabelsteen

AbstractSongbirds living in temperate forests experience great seasonal changes in habitat acoustics during the part of the breeding season when singing activity is high. These changes, which are brought about by accelerated vegetation growth and leaf burst in spring, affect sound propagation and potentially render vocal communication more difficult as the total number of scattering and absorbing obstacles increases. We investigated this in a sound transmission experiment in which representative great tit (Parus major) songs were broadcast in a typical forest habitat before and after foliation. Speaker and microphone were placed at natural separation distances and in typical sender and receiver positions. For each song note we quantified several aspects of sound degradation and found that they all increased considerably when leaves were present. Before foliation the same amount of degradation would only be obtained by doubling the transmission distance, i.e. foliage shortens the active space of great tit song. This inevitably alters distance information, provided that distance-dependent, structural changes of received songs are used as ranging cues. Moreover, sender and receiver positions within the canopy become unfavourable compared to heights just below the canopy when the aim is to maximise song propagation distances. Altogether, the presence of foliage greatly affects the potential for vocal information transfer in great tits and requires behavioural and/or perceptual adjustment of the communicating individuals to counteract or reduce the impact of foliage on signal degradation.


Author(s):  
S. A. Gourley ◽  
M. A. J. Chaplain

In this paper we study travelling front solutions of a certain food-limited population model incorporating time-delays and diffusion. Special attention is paid to the modelling of the time delays to incorporate associated non-local spatial terms which account for the drift of individuals to their present position from their possible positions at previous times. For a particular class of delay kernels, existence of travelling front solutions connecting the two spatially uniform steady states is established for sufficiently small delays. The approach is to reformulate the problem as an existence question for a heteroclinic connection in R4. The problem is then tackled using dynamical systems techniques, in particular, Fenichel's invariant manifold theory. For larger delays, numerical simulations reveal changes in the front's profile which develops a prominent hump.


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