“On Healing”: Paul Tillich’s Contribution to Current Research on Resilience

This article discusses how Tillich’s psychologically informed re-interpretation of dogmatic and biblical narratives may offer ways to cope with complex experiences of adversity that are characterized by a pressing need for resilience, along with extreme difficulties in communicating meaningfully. In tandem with the focus on the practical applications of Tillich’s theology, the source material comprises Tillich’s sermons (cf. The Shaking of the Foundations [1948]; The New Being [1955]; The Eternal Now [1963]). The analysis concentrates on three aspects of Tillich’s treatise on healing, namely (a) Tillich’s discussion of the healer’s capability to heal “in spite of”; (b) his understanding of “in spite of” and the connected semantics of fighting; (c) his (implicit) approach to re-examining the idea of healing as narratively mediated, which allows to further the discourse on resilience in regard to semantic representations and narrations.

Novel metaphor translation is modulated by translation direction

Previous translation process research has pointed to an increased cognitive load when translating metaphoric compared to literal language. Yet, studies conducted thus far have not examined the role of translation direction (i.e., L1–L2 vs. L2–L1) in novel metaphor translation and have not tested whether and how this process might be modulated by the linguistic form of a novel meaning. In the present study, Polish (L1) – English (L2) translation students translated novel nominal metaphors (A is B), novel similes (A is like B), and literal sentences, in either L1–L2 or L2–L1 translation directions, while their translation behavior was recorded using a keystroke logging method. The results revealed longer translation durations for both metaphors and similes relative to literal utterances. Furthermore, we found slower translation times for novel nominal metaphors compared to novel similes and literal sentences, yet only in the L2–L1 translation direction. Such results might indicate that novel meaning translation is more cognitively taxing in the case of novel nominal metaphors, which require a more robust activation of comparison mechanisms, relative to novel similes. Importantly, this effect might be stronger when translating in the direction in which access to semantic representations is potentially more automatic (i.e., L2–L1 translation).

Lexical-Semantic Representations at the Time of the Coronavirus Pandemic

This paper examines some cases of lexical adaptation and innovation in present-day English resulting from changed communicative needs brought about by the current coronavirus pandemic. The data analysed consists of 15 lexical items retrieved in the NOW Corpus, a web-based collection of newspapers and magazines freely accessible online. The study shows that certain already existing words and expressions tend to be used more frequently in coronavirus-related discourse than in other contexts prior to the current crisis; others appear to be undergoing a re-adaptation of their semantic range, while new ones seem to have emerged and to be making their way into dictionaries. At the same time, there are certain free-word combinations built “on the fly” whose stability is still uncertain.

Insights into Early Word Comprehension: Tracking the Neural Representations of Word Semantics in Infants.

Infants start developing rudimentary language skills and can start understanding simple words well before their first birthday. This development has also been shown primarily using Event Related Potential (ERP) techniques to find evidence of word comprehension in the infant brain. While these works validate the presence of semantic representations of words (word meaning) in infants, they do not tell us about the mental processes involved in the manifestation of these semantic representations or the content of the representations. To this end, we use a decoding approach where we employ machine learning techniques on Electroencephalography (EEG) data to predict the semantic representations of words found in the brain activity of infants. We perform multiple analyses to explore word semantic representations in two groups of infants (9-month-old and 12-month-old). Our analyses show significantly above chance decodability of overall word semantics, word animacy, and word phonetics. As we analyze brain activity, we observe that participants in both age groups show signs of word comprehension immediately after word onset, marked by our model's significantly above chance word prediction accuracy. We also observed strong neural representations of word phonetics in the brain data for both age groups, some likely correlated to word decoding accuracy and others not. Lastly, we discover that the neural representations of word semantics are similar in both infant age groups. Our results on word semantics, phonetics, and animacy decodability, give us insights into the evolution of neural representation of word meaning in infants.

Polyadic quantification in hybrid coordination

The aim of this paper is to provide a syntactico-semantic analysis of hybrid coordination, in which what is coordinated are phrases bearing different grammatical functions and different semantic roles. The proposed account improves on previous HPSG analyses by giving up the assumption that all conjuncts are dependents of the same head and, more importantly, by taking into account the syntax–semantics interface and providing semantic representations. This aspect of the analysis builds on and generalizes previous HPSG work on polyadic quantification.