The Grammar of Well-Being

Ways of talking about diseases, ailments, convalescence, and well-being vary from language to language. In some, an ailment 'hits' or 'gets' the person; in others, the sufferer 'catches' an ailment, comes to be a 'container' for it, or is presented as a 'fighter' or a 'battleground'. In languages with obligatory expression of information source, the onslaught of disease is treated as 'unseen', just like any kind of internal feeling or shamanic activity. Different stages of disease — covering its onset, progression, wearing off, recovery, and cure — form ‘the trajectory of well-being’. Our main focus is on grammatical means employed in talking about various phases of disease and well-being, and how these correlate with perception and conceptualization of disease and its progression and demise. I offer a brief taxonomy of grammatical schemas and means employed across the languages of the world. I then turn to a study of terminologies and grammatical schemas employed in the trajectory of well-being in Tariana, an Arawak language from north-west Amazonia (Brazil), with special focus on cultural and cognitive motivations. The emergence and spread of the COVID-19 pandemic has affected ways of speaking about this disease among the Tariana, especially with regard to the origins and the onset of this affliction.

A Cognitive Study of the NP+de(的)+VP Structure in Mandarin

The article presents a cognitive account of the NP+de(的) +VP structure in Mandarin. By making its syntactic functions and cognitive motivations explicit, it shows that the relationship between the constituents of the structure is subject-predicate rather than modifier-head as claimed by previous studies. Based on the new proposals that the structure is exocentric and the particle de is a nominalizing infix, the article offers a possible solution for the long-debated contradiction between the overall nominal functions of the structure and its constituents’ verbal part of speech. We conclude that a cognitive linguistic approach to analyzing structures in Mandarin can be useful in producing a picture of the formation of the structures and revealing how they are cognitively motivated. This study contributes to the development of cognitive studies on Chinese grammar and sheds light on Chinese language instruction in the long run.

The profane sphere of All Saints’ Day and the social aspects of cemeteries

The modern pop-culturization of All Saints’ Day has encouraged the author to explore the profane sphere of this festival, using selected examples from Łódź cemeteries, as well as to write a short comparative description of a Latin American festival honouring the dead celebrated in early November. In the 20th century, visiting cemeteries in Poland on 1st November acquired some attributes of recreation and cultural tourism, visible in the atmosphere of a country fair and the ludic character of the cemetery surroundings, as well as the visitors’ commemorative, contemplative and cognitive motivations. Due to cultural changes, All Saints’ Day is increasingly perceived as a tourist event or even a cultural tourism product. The article presents a comparative description of the All Saints’ Day celebrations in Poland and the Day of the Dead in Latin America, and an analysis of visitors at selected Łódź cemeteries along with a description of the cemetery surroundings on 1st November 2019. The author has used unpublished research results from 2004, as well as discussing the secular and recreational aspects of All Saints’ Day.

The origins of information processing preferences in politics: Examining parental influence

Cognitive motivations (e.g., need for cognition and need to evaluate) and decision strategies (e.g., rational choice vs. heuristic-based) importantly shape political understanding, evaluations, and vote choice. Despite the importance of these cognitive factors, few studies have examined their origins. Adopting an exploratory framework with a primary focus on parental influence, we uniquely address this research gap by identifying potential pathways through which parents can affect this development. Using a convenience sample of college students who participated in a 10-week panel study with their parents, we reveal that, unlike many other political characteristics, there is little parent-child similarity in cognitive motivations and decision strategies. We, however, find some similarity in the information search behaviors parents and children exhibit during the mock election campaign. The findings highlight the need to further investigate not only additional parenting behaviors, but also the socializing role of the information environment itself.

Studying How Innate Motivations Can Drive Skill Acquisition in Cognitive Robots

In this paper, we address the problem of how to bootstrap a cognitive architecture to opportunistically start learning skills in domains where multiple skills can be learned at the same time. To this end, taking inspiration from a series of computational models of the use of motivations in infants, we propose an approach that leverages two types of cognitive motivations: exploratory and proficiency based, the latter modulated by the concept of interestingness as an implementation of attentional mechanisms. This approach is tested in an illustrative experiment with a real robot.

The Resistance to Change-Beliefs Scale: Validation of a New Measure of Conservative Ideology

The motivated social cognition (MSC) model of conservative ideology posits there are two core facets of conservative political ideology—endorsement of hierarchies and resistance to change. The present research tested the validity and reliability of a scale developed to measure resistance to change. Five studies support the validity, reliability, and factor structure of the Resistance to Change-Beliefs (RC-B) scale. Scores on the RC-B scale correlated with social and cognitive motivations as well as self-identified conservatism. RC-B also predicted more conservative stances on political issues and factor analyses supported the predicted internal structure of the RC-B scale. This provides the field with a validated instrument that avoids problems inherent in previous measures, can be used to test predictions from the MSC model, and has potential applications beyond political psychology.

Chinese L2 acquisition of sense relatedness for shàng “to go up”

This paper examines the relations between the senses of the Chinese polysemous verbshàng“to go up”, in an effort to understand how the various senses of polysemous words are organized in the L1 and L2 lexicons and to shed light on the role they might play in L2 polysemy acquisition. To this end, we analyzed the senses of shàng at the conceptual level, then used these findings to inform an empirical study of the sense relatedness as perceived by L1 and L2 participants. A developmental pattern is identifiable across the L2 proficiency groups. Specifically, the sense relations identified by the L2 groups increasingly approximate those identified by L1 as their proficiency level grows. Both native speakers and learners base their perceptions of sense relatedness on purported conceptual metaphors as well as other factors such as transitivity, function and concreteness – though the two groups apply these concepts in different ways. These findings suggest that learners can access the same conceptual tools as native speakers, but are using these tools in a way that differs from native speakers. Conclusions support the cognitive motivations behind polysemous senses and teaching-oriented findings that overlap in L1 and L2. Conceptual universals should be helpful in L2 vocabulary acquisition.