scholarly journals Categorization of Memes

2017 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Laura Ambrus

Nowadays a huge amount of communication is performed in an online environment. This tendency facilitated the realization of certain digital elements specific to online interfaces. Generally speaking, it can be stated that a new genre appeared in the past few years – the memes, which are a combination of pictorial and textual elements, created and shared online. Richard Dawkins and Susan Blackmore, who provided the traditional meme definition, argue that a meme is what travels from brain to brain. Digital meme has a narrower interpretation, since it focuses on the textual-pictorial elements. According to the Cognitive Linguistic point of view, the conceptual metaphors, metonymies and blends are used in our everyday conceptualization processes (based on Lakoff and Johnson’s Metaphors We Live By, 1980 and Fauconnier–Turner’s The Way We Think, 2002). So it can be assumed that these digital elements also operate exploiting cognitive devices like metaphors and blends. Yet many questions arise: how can memes be categorized? Can a prototypical meme be identified? How do cognitive processes take place in the conceptualization? What is the source of humor? Based on the analysis performed, it can be concluded that there are prototypical memes, but different aspects have to be taken into account; and that the complexity of cognitive processes a meme operates with is strongly related to the viability of the topic that a particular meme is related to.

Author(s):  
Raymond W. Gibbs, Jr

An important reason for the tremendous interest in metaphor over the past 20 years stems from cognitive linguistic research. Cognitive linguists embrace the idea that metaphor is not merely a part of language, but reflects a fundamental part of the way people think, reason, and imagine. A large number of empirical studies in cognitive linguistics have, in different ways, supported this claim. My aim in this paper is to describe the empirical foundations for cognitive linguistic work on metaphor, acknowledge various skeptical reactions to this work, and respond to some of these questions/criticisms. I also outline several challenges that cognitive linguists should try to address in future work on metaphor in language, thought, and culture.


Open Theology ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Oleg Bychkov

AbstractOver the past two decades, the debate has intensified over the nature of John Duns Scotus’s (meta) ethics: is it a purely voluntarist “divine command” ethics or is it still based on rational principles? The former side is exemplified by Thomas Williams and the latter by Allan Wolter. Scotus claims that even the divine commandments that are not based on natural law are still somehow “in harmony with reason.” But what does this mean? Richard Cross in a recent study claims that God’s reasons for establishing certain moral norms are “aesthetic.” However, he fails to show clearly what is “aesthetic” about these reasons or why God’s will would follow “aesthetic” principles in legislating moral norms. This article clarifies both points, first, by painting an up-to-date picture of what constitutes “aesthetic” principles, and second, by providing a more accurate model of the way the human volitional faculty operates and addressing the problem of the “freedom of the will” from a present-day point of view.


1957 ◽  
Vol 77 (2) ◽  
pp. 220-229 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. Diamantopoulos

The humour of the passage in the Frogs (1419 ff.), in which the tragic poets reply with riddles on burning political issues, is explicable: research on the Eumenides shows that in this play Aeschylus projected political notions in much the way that he is presented by Aristophanes speaking in the Frogs: concentrating the attention of the spectator on the past of the Areopagus and on the circumstance of its foundation, he touches directly on the question which arose in 462–1 through the abolition of the political competence of this body, but he replies to it through a parable which is enigmatic for us. It is obviously such an expression as this that Aristophanes had in mind. It rests with philological and historical criticism to show whether in surviving tragedies other than Eumenides themes of an immediate public interest are put forward under the cover of myth, themes which, through ignorance of the date or of the exact conditions of the composition of the plays, have so far not been revealed. This essay examines from this point of view the Danaid tetralogy of Aeschylus.The subject of the Danaid tetralogy is taken from the story of Danaos and his daughters. For this, Aeschylus could draw on both a literary source, the Danais, and probably also on Argive traditions.Very little is known about the Danais. It did, however, include an account of the events which took place in Egypt between the houses of Danaos and Aigyptos, and it is likely, therefore, that it traced the course of this quarrel from the beginning.


2017 ◽  
Vol 73 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ernest Van Eck

Marcus Borg, one of the most prominent New Testament scholars in the past four decades, is considered by many in the Netherdutch Reformed Church of Africa as a liberal scholar. His understanding of the origin of the Bible, the way he interprets the Bible, and what he sees as the status and function of the Bible, should therefore be dismissed. A comparison of Borg’s point of view on these topics with that of the points of view of the Netherdutch Reformed Church of Africa, however, indicates that Borg’s understanding of these matters differs not even marginally from that of the Netherdutch Reformed Church of Africa. In a certain sense, Borg could therefore be described as a theologian who fits the mould of what is understood in the Netherdutch Reformed Church of Africa as a responsible approach to and interpretation of the Bible.


Semiotica ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 2017 (219) ◽  
pp. 273-291 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alain Rabatel

AbstractThe present article reviews the concepts of enunciation in Greimas’s and other semioticians’ works; it examines the way in which these latter revisit Benveniste, the reorientations they propose or the aspects they leave aside, such as the distinction between speaker (as the source of an actualized utterance) and enunciator (as the source of a point of view in a propositional content composed of a modus and a dictum), distinction which, though not present in Benveniste’s work, has been developed afterwards. The article discusses: the link between enunciation and phenomenology, sensoriality and passions; the cognitive processes engaged in the subject’s confrontation to the world which have played a major role in the “post-Greimas” trend and especially in the case of an enunciative praxis that goes beyond narrativity. Nevertheless, this unquestionable enlargement of the notion of enunciation contradicts neither Greimas’s earlier concepts, nor a textual and essentially semiotic approach, due to the attention paid to the structures and to an overall analysis of the materiality of discourse.


2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 556-562
Author(s):  
S. A. Popova ◽  

Introduction: the article is devoted to the study of religious ideas and events of one of the periods of the Mansi people’s life, which is designated by Sheshkin as nāy sānyt jis ‘the ancient time of fire [stored] in a box’. The article presents information about the family and public fire storage, construction of the box, the use of fire in different situations, its keepers. Ideas about fire are considered from the point of view of its personification (Fire-Mother, Fire-Woman); embodiment (it is alive, can talk, visit, revenge); mythologization (deity, special spirit of fire voytyl); object of veneration (holy mothers, dedication, sanctuaries). Folklore plots reflecting the ideas about «living» fire are revealed. Objective: to reconstruct the events and ideas of the northern Mansi group about fire in the era nāy sānyt jis. Research materials: handwritten texts of P. E. Sheshkin, published materials of the XIX–XXI centuries. Results and novelty of the research: the analysis reveals historical information on the way of life and organization of the Mansi during the period «the time when the Mansi kept fire in the nāy sānyt ‘box of fire’». The features of storing and using of family and collective fire are analyzed. The awareness of fire as a value is transmitted in the ideas of its supernatural essence, in the veneration of the Fire-Mother. The past fire, lost by people, is perceived as a super-fire (more powerful in brightness and heat, it lives together with a man and takes care of him). The attitude to fire as a shrine is reflected in the prohibitions, the dedication of it to animals (cat, frog), the construction of temples (sanctuaries). The novelty lies in the introduction into scientific circulation of the traditional ideas of the Mansi about the early stage of their ethnic history


2017 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 241
Author(s):  
Matthias Dreyer

Taking into account the intertwining of the theory of tragedy on the one hand and theatrical work on ancient tragic texts on the other, the paper explores the way in which tragedy poses the question of history. This is especially the case in conceptions of tragedy as an interruption in a continuum. Hölderlin’s idea of caesura, its reflection in Benjamin’s understanding of tragedy as a revision of myth are in the center of a critical dramaturgy of this kind. By analysing Brecht’s work on Antigone as well as the stagings of critical theatre makers that came after Brecht (Einar Schleef, Dimiter Gotscheff), the paper shows the consequences of the concept ‘tragedy as caesura‘ on the level of the aesthetics of the theatre, unclosing in a radical way the temporality of the tragic process. From this point of view, tragedy is understood as a site of encounter with the persisting powers of the past; as reflexive rupture in the transition between times, that undermines the established order, but without, however, arriving at a new one. Although in the history of theatre and thought tragedy has been too often associated with the universal and timeless, how is it possible to think of historicity in a way negating submission under the universal without losing the genre of tragedy itself?


2016 ◽  
Vol 21 (3) ◽  
pp. 233-241
Author(s):  
Yannis Kyriakides

Over the past few years, I have developed a form of composition – which I callmusic–text–film –in which I explore the dynamics between sound, words and visuals. In this article I will attempt to explain how meaning is constructed in the interplay between these layers of media. Taking as an example three of my works,Subliminal: The Lucretian Picnic,Dreams of the BlindandThe Arrest, I analyse and discuss aspects of narrative, point of view, metaphor and cross-modal perception, as a way of understanding how multimedia art, specifically in the audiovisual domain, is experienced. One of the issues that arose out of these pieces was the question of location of the ‘voice’. It is as if a state of limbo is created between the narrative voice of the text and the implied voice of the music, due to the absence of a conventional focal point to pin it on – an actor or a singer. I would like to suggest that because of this vacancy and the way the projected word takes the place of the sung or spoken voice, the inner voice of the audience becomes activated. This then becomes a vital immersive dimension in the performance, as the inner voice of the audience finds its place within the space of the composition.


1982 ◽  
Vol 109 (3) ◽  
pp. 319-357 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bernard Benjamin

1. This paper originated with a sense of irritation at the way in which the graduation of age rates of mortality has become more and more complicated by the apparent determination to assume some underlying law of mortality, a law which could not possibly be deduced from observations in the past or present man-made conditions of dangerous living. It then developed into a consideration of graduation from a less frequently adopted point of view, i.e. a look at the distribution of lengths of life (the so-called curve of deaths). This led inevitably to a review of the long-pursued controversy as to whether or not there is a predetermined biological maximum to the human lifespan under ideal conditions and beyond that to a review of the biological evidence for this maximum and the possibility of extension by environmental or medical intervention. Finally, this led to the likely results of such environmental and medical advances and to some experiments in mortality projection.


2017 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 283-287 ◽  
Author(s):  
PETER PETRÉ

In her article ‘Connecting the past and the present’, Meike Pentrel examines the order of main clause and adverbial clause introduced by before or after in Samuel Pepys's diary from the point of view of the cognitive literature on processing constraints. The thread that is shared by all contributions of this special issue is that of the hypothesis of uniformitarianism, which states that cognitive processes have remained constant in the documented history of humanity. Pentrel aims at corroborating this hypothesis by testing if the processing constraints found at work in this seventeenth-century ego-document examined by her are similar to those that have been observed in contemporary language.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document