Reaching for Meaning

2009 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 213-233 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jens Brockmeier
Keyword(s):  
Language Use ◽  
Meaning Making ◽  
Human Agency ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
The Other ◽  
Construction Site ◽  
Narrative Imagination ◽  
Jerome Bruner ◽  
Constructive Dimension ◽  
Human Potentials

In this paper I am exploring meaning and meaning constructions as forms of human agency. Drawing on notions of meaning, agency, and subjectivity by Jerome Bruner and Klaus Holzkamp, my discussion emphasizes the human potentials to act, choose, and imagine as integral to the human condition. Against the backdrop of this discussion, I am particularly interested in the meaning-making resources of language, especially, of two forms of language use. One is agentive discourse—the discourse of agency—because it brings to the fore the constructive dimension of language. The other is narrative, because it is the most complex and comprehensive construction site of human imagination. I suggest that narrative imagination plays a central role in probing and extending real and fictive scenarios of agency.

The Literary Geography of Meaning in the Maqāmāt of al-Hamadhānī and al-Ḥarīrī

2018 ◽  
pp. 63-80
Author(s):  
Sarah R. bin Tyeer
Keyword(s):  
Law Enforcement ◽  
Language Use ◽  
Meaning Making ◽  
Legal Framework ◽  
The Other ◽  
Legal Geography ◽  
Legal Geographies ◽  
Literary Geography ◽  
The Stability ◽  
The City

 This chapter proposes that the city plays a meaning-making role in the maqāmāt of al-Hamadhānī and al-Ḥarīrī, offering interpretative strategies through their literary geographies.  Both the semantic and legal geographies in the work of these two authors are highlighted through two main foci. I propose that al-Hamadhānī's featured cities belong to the geography of the “familiar,” where the language use of the protagonist, al-Iskandarī, would be comprehensible as the linguistic play that it is inside the Arabic literary geography he inhabits. In this respect, the space of the familiar becomes a metonymy of semantic stability and the tools of adab. On the other hand, I argue that the literary geography acts as a frame to both moral and legal stability in the maqāmāt of these authors. The protagonist of al-Ḥarīrī’s maqāmāt, al-Sarūjī, abuses the stability of the city’s legal geography for his benefit. While the legal framework of the city may not be productive for al-Iskandarī, the protagonist of al-Hamadhānī’s maqāmāt, the city and its laws are conducive to al-Sarūjī’s plans. The city therefore acts as a border in the maqāmāt for both semantic as well as moral and legal stability and law enforcement.  

LANGUAGE USE BETWEEN MALE AND FEMALE HOST IN HITAM PUTIH TALK SHOW

2018 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Nurmaliana Sari ◽  
Sumarsih Sumarsih ◽  
Busmin Gurning
Keyword(s):  
Language Use ◽  
The Other ◽  
Male And Female ◽  
Talk Show ◽  
Dominant Language ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
Domestic Activities ◽  
Female Host ◽  
Negative Connotation ◽  
Descriptive Qualitative

This study discusses about language use occurred by male and female host in Hitam Putih talk show. The method of this research is descriptive qualitative. The subjects of this study are male and female host in Hitam Putih talk show. The data are the utterances produced by male and female host in Hitam Putih talk show. This research focuses on the show broadcasted on October 2016 by taking 4 videos randomly. The objective of this study is to describe kinds of the language use uttered by male and female host in Hitam Putih talk show. The findings showed that the kinds of language use consist of 6 parts. The dominant language use uttered by male host is expletive, because male’s utterances are frequently stated in a negative connotation. On the other hand, female host utterances are found in specialized vocabulary as the most dominant because female host has more interest in talking family affairs, such as the education of children, clothes, cooking, and fashion, etc. Women also tended to talk about one thing related to the home and domestic activities. However, the representation of language use uttered by male and female are deficit, dominance and different. Keywords: Language Use, Gender, Talk Show

Marginalia as narratives of ordinary lives: Shaughnessy Bishop-Stall’s Down to This

2021 ◽  
pp. 002198942098111
Author(s):  
Silvia Julia Caporale-Bizzini
Keyword(s):  
Public Perception ◽  
Life Stories ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
The Other ◽  
Political Issues ◽  
Personal Journey ◽  
The Public ◽  
Big City ◽  
The Human Condition

This article examines Canadian author Shaughnessy Bishop-Stall’s 2004 memoir Down to This: Squalor and Splendour in a Big-City Shantytown through the notions of marginalia and the ordinary in order to question dichotomic representations of homelessness. It explores how the author moves beyond binaries, interrogating the dichotomy ordinary/out of the ordinary lives by narrating his ethical encounter with the other (Butler, 2004). The text is written as a journal where Bishop-Stall describes his personal journey through homelessness; and more importantly, it gives a voice to the other down-and-out people in notorious Toronto’s Tent City. The characters’ unreliable and fragmented storytelling uncovers the lives of the faceless others. I contend that in Down to This individuals’ life stories are connected to realities which question binaries through the re/mapping of ordinary experiences and affects; they disintegrate the opposition materiality vs abstraction, or as I argue, exclusion vs inclusion (out of the ordinary/ordinary). Down to These bridges the private details of the residents’ life stories, and the public perception of the problem of homelessness, illustrating how everyday moments of precarity intersect with wider political issues. In the process, the narrative also questions the binary attitudes of exclusion (disfranchisement) and inclusion (privilege). This literary strategy gives the constellation of stories a profound illuminating vision of the human condition. I show my point by drawing on the of marginalia (Kistner 2014), and by analysing the characters’ narratives of precariousness through the notions of editing and affective assemblage (Gerlach, 2015; Hamilakis, 2017).

Touching the Past to Remember the Past

2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (4) ◽  
pp. 389-397
Author(s):  
Meghan J. Dudley ◽  
Jenna Domeischel
Keyword(s):  
Social Memory ◽  
Special Section ◽  
Daily Basis ◽  
Public Archaeology ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
The Other ◽  
Archaeological Theory ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Past ◽  
Introductory Article

ABSTRACTAlthough we, as archaeologists, recognize the value in teaching nonprofessionals about our discipline and the knowledge it generates about the human condition, there are few of these specialists compared to the number of archaeologists practicing today. In this introductory article to the special section titled “Touching the Past to Learn the Past,” we suggest that, because of our unique training as anthropologists and archaeologists, each of us has the potential to contribute to public archaeology education. By remembering our archaeological theory, such as social memory, we can use the artifacts we engage with on a daily basis to bridge the disconnect between what the public hopes to gain from our interactions and what we want to teach them. In this article, we outline our perspective and present an overview of the other three articles in this section that apply this approach in their educational endeavors.

Deutsch als schwächere Sprache bei deutsch-polnisch bilingualen Kindern: Studie zur Negation- und Verbstellung

2020 ◽  
Vol 48 (2) ◽  
pp. 269-297
Author(s):  
Aldona Sopata ◽  
Kamil Długosz
Keyword(s):  
Second Language Acquisition ◽  
Language Development ◽  
Language Use ◽  
The Other ◽  
Bilingual Children ◽  
Striking Difference ◽  
Final Position ◽  
Development Characteristic ◽  
Processing Mechanisms ◽  
Constrained Input

AbstractThis article examines the acquisition of German as the weaker language in the cases of German-Polish bilingual children. Focusing on negation and verb position, phenomena that have frequently been taken as diagnostic when distinguishing between the course of language development characteristic for first (L1) and second language acquisition (L2), we analyse experimental and productive data from six simultaneously bilingual children. Due to the constrained input, German is their weaker language. The results in Forced Choice and Grammaticality Judgements tasks are compared with the results of monolingual children. We show that in the area of negation the acquisition of German as the weaker language resembles L1, and in the area of inversion and verb final position the development of the weaker language is delayed. The striking difference between bilinguals’ results in the experimental vs. productive tasks points to specific processing mechanisms in bilingual language use. In narrative contexts of the production tasks the language of the performance is activated, while the other is inhibited, which leads to a target-like performance. Structural properties of the stronger language tend to be activated, however, in the experimental tasks involving the weaker language, resulting in non-target-like responses.

BEYOND THE HUMAN CONDITION: DURATION AND VIRTUALITY IN HERACLITUS

Ramus ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 49 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 41-69
Author(s):  
Richard Ellis
Keyword(s):  
Human Condition ◽  
The Other ◽  
Felix Guattari ◽  
Henri Bergson ◽  
Philosophical Method ◽  
The Human Condition

Gilles Deleuze's engagement with Heraclitus is long-standing, going back to his early work on Nietzsche, and persisting through the collaborative volumes produced with Félix Guattari in which Heraclitus becomes a key exemplar of their own philosophical method, whereby thought and nature are said to fold into one another in creative configurations. For Deleuze, as before him for Nietzsche, Heraclitus’ conception of universal becoming and of the constitutive flows across codes—be they ontological, epistemological, political, or ethical—demands a radical re-evaluation of the place of the human in time, and of the boundaries of subjectivity. Elsewhere, Deleuze states that the very meaning of philosophy is ‘to go beyond the human condition’ by opening us up to the other durations—inhuman and superhuman—with which, and by which, we are disclosed. A further key interlocutor here is Henri Bergson, whose work on time as duration, with psychological and ontological import, is central to the development of many of Deleuze's philosophical positions, including those subsequently nuanced by his work with Félix Guattari. Before attempting to map the plane of affiliations upon which these thinkers move, it is necessary to begin from Heraclitus’ own words on philosophical method and the opposition he draws between the correct, though elusive, practice of νόος (‘thought’, ‘understanding’) and the inadequate model of πολυμαθίη (‘much learning’) adopted by his intellectual predecessors.

scholarly journals Language Use in a Multilingual Class: a Study of the Relation Between Bilingual Students’ Languages and Their Meaning-Making in Science

2017 ◽  
Vol 48 (5) ◽  
pp. 1027-1048 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zeynep Ünsal ◽  
Britt Jakobson ◽  
Bengt-Olov Molander ◽  
Per-Olof Wickman
Keyword(s):  
Language Use ◽  
Meaning Making ◽  
Bilingual Students ◽  
Class A

Return to the ancestral land: The semiotic map of the Mapuche people

2021 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 258-269
Author(s):  
Camila Pérez ◽  
Giuseppina Marsico
Keyword(s):  
Meaning Making ◽  
The Other ◽  
Indigenous Group ◽  
History Of ◽  
Territorial Claim ◽  
Mapuche People ◽  
Territorial Claims ◽  
Von Uexküll ◽  
Over Time

Indigenous territorial claims are a long-standing concern in the history of Latin America. Land and nature have profound meaning in indigenous thinking, which is neither totally understood nor legitimized by the rest of society. This article is aimed at shedding light on this matter by examining the meanings at stake in the territorial claims of the Mapuche people. The Mapuche are an indigenous group in Chile, who are striving to recover their ancestral land. This analysis will be based on the concept of Umwelt, coined by von Uexküll to refer to the way in which species interpret their world in connection with the meaning-making process. Considering the applications of Umwelt to the human being, the significance assigned to land and nature by the Mapuche people emerges as a system of meaning that persists over time and promotes interdependence between people and the environment. On the other hand, the territorial claim of the Mapuche movement challenges the fragmentation between individuals and their space, echoing proposals from human geography that emphasize the role of people in the constitution of places.

Autonomy and Addiction

2006 ◽  
Vol 36 (3) ◽  
pp. 427-447 ◽  
Author(s):  
Neil Levy
Keyword(s):  
Moral Responsibility ◽  
Human Agency ◽  
The Other ◽  
Reasons Responsiveness ◽  
Extended Agency ◽  
Conception Of The Good ◽  
Autonomous Agency ◽  
The Way

Whatever its implications for the other features of human agency at its best — for moral responsibility, reasons-responsiveness, self-realization, flourishing, and so on—addiction is universally recognized as impairing autonomy. But philosophers have frequently misunderstood the nature of addiction, and therefore have not adequately explained the manner in which it impairs autonomy. Once we recognize that addiction is not incompatible with choice or volition, it becomes clear that none of the Standard accounts of autonomy can satisfactorily explain the way in which it undermines fully autonomous agency. In order to understand to what extent and in what ways the addicted are autonomy-impaired, we need to understand autonomy as consisting, essentially, in the exercise of the capacity for extended agency. It is because addiction undermines extended agency, so that addicts are not able to integrate their lives and pursue a Single conception of the good, that it impairs autonomy.

The Influence of Roman Law

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Donald R. Kelley
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twelfth Century ◽  
Civil Law ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
The Other ◽  
Roman Law ◽  
Christian Doctrine ◽  
The Law ◽  
Civil Science

Centuries of Roman jurisprudence were assembled in the great Byzantine collection, the Digest, by Tribonian and the other editors. Roman law became more formal when during the Renaissance of the twelfth century it came to be taught in the first universities, starting with Bologna and the teaching of Irnerius. The main channels of expansion were through the Glossators and post-Glossators, who commented on the main texts and on later legislation by the Holy Roman Emperors, which included “feudal law,” but also by notaries and other proto-lawyers. Christian doctrine also became part of the “Roman” tradition, and canon and civil law were taught together in the universities as “civil science.” According to the ancient Roman jurist Gaius, “all the law which we use pertains either to persons or to things or to actions,” three categories that exhaust the external human condition—personality, reality, and action. In the nineteenth century, the study of Roman law lost its ideological power and became part of philology and history, at least so concludes James Whitman.

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