How Many Emotions Does Film Studies Need?

A look at current emotion research in film studies, a field that has been thriving for over three decades, reveals three limitations: (1) Film scholars concentrate strongly on a restricted set of garden-variety emotions—some emotions are therefore neglected. (2) Their understanding of standard emotions is often too monolithic—some subtypes of these emotions are consequently overlooked. (3) The range of existing emotion terms does not seem fine-grained enough to cover the wide range of affective experiences viewers undergo when watching films—a number of emotions might thus be missed. Against this background, the article proposes at least four benefits of introducing a more granular emotion lexicon in film studies. As a remedy, the article suggests paying closer attention to the subjective-experience component of emotions. Here the descriptive method of phenomenology—including its particular subfield phenomenology of emotions—might have useful things to tell film scholars.

Deriving Arabic verbal "templates" without templates

Much of the recent OT-based literature on Arabic root-and-pattern morphology has identified prosodic constraints as a main driver of the language’s verbal "templates". I argue instead that the system is governed by non-prosodic (morpho)phonological constraints (in the spirit of McCarthy 1993). Following much recent work, this approach views Arabic’s root-and-pattern system as garden-variety morpheme concatenation that is subject to unusual complications in the phonology and/or at the (morpho)syntax-phonology interface. This paper outlines an integrated analysis of the morphophonological properties of the Arabic verbal system without CV templates or prosodic constraints.

Whatever His Arguments, Whatever Relatives Are Not Free Relatives: A Reply to Caponigro’s Reply

This is a reply to Caponigro 2019, which argues that the phrase structure theory proposed by Donati and Cecchetto (2011; 2015) falls short of accounting for the attested patterns of free relative clauses. Caponigro questions the reliability of the data supporting D&C’s hypothesis that ever-relatives introduced by a phrase ( ever+NP relatives) should not be assimilated to free relatives. This paper reports the results of 4 controlled experiments in English and Italian and discusses five properties that set apart free relatives from full relatives (occurrence with a complementizer, occurrence with a relative pronoun, infinitival use, absolute use, adverbial use). Crucially, ever+NP relatives do not pattern like free relatives in any of these five domains, either in Italian or in English. This clearly shows that ever-relatives are not a counterexample against D&C’s phrase structure theory. Another potential counterexample, Romanian free relatives, is also discussed. As for the analysis of ever+NP relatives, in Italian they are shown to be garden variety headed relatives, while in English they are headed relatives that involve a D to D movement which is responsible for the syntactic formation of the complex determiner what+ ever.

Affects

This final chapter, a complement to Chapter 5, considers music “after emotion,” shaped by theories of affect. Affect attends to the microscopic nuances of feeling not captured by the “garden variety” emotional categories. I consider varieties of affect through stages of European modernism (from Debussy, Stravinsky, and Schoenberg to Boulez, Stockhausen, and Lachenmann), the neo-realism of “American Cool” (including Copland, Reich, and Cage), and then within a range of contemporary popular music (including Radiohead, Eminem, Beyoncé, and music for gaming). Regarding theories of affect, the chapter contextualizes these musical styles within two diverging “lines of flight” emanating, respectively, from the vitalism of Bergson and Deleuze, and the phenomenology of Husserl, Heidegger, and Sartre. The chapter, and the book, concludes by asking why interest in musical emotion is so current.

Folk Psychology and Proximal Intentions

There is a longstanding debate in philosophy concerning the relationship between intention and intentional action. According to the Single Phenomenon View, while one need not intend to A in order to A intentionally, one nevertheless needs to have an A-relevant intention. This view has recently come under criticism by those who think that one can A intentionally without any relevant intention at all. On this view, neither distal nor proximal intentions are necessary for intentional action. In this paper we present the results of two studies that explore folk ascriptions of proximal intentions and intentional actions in garden-variety, non-moral cases. Our findings suggest a very tight relationship between the two. We argue that the results from these two studies cohere with the Single Phenomenon View and give theorists who reject this view on conceptual grounds reason to worry.

Innovation matters: creative environment, absenteeism, and job satisfaction

PurposeWhile there has been an abundance of research on the positive outcomes of creative environment, little work has been done on how creative environment influences the general work outcomes of noncreative specialist workers. The paper aims to fill this void by examining the influence of creative environment on absenteeism among garden variety workers and the mediating role of job satisfaction.Design/methodology/approachThe paper uses cross-sectional data of 116 noncreative specialist workers to empirically test the hypotheses. The authors used covariance-based structural equation modeling (SEM) through the lavaan package for the statistical software R.FindingsResults found that, for a cross section of noncreative specialist workers, a one standard deviation increase in a worker's creative environment would decrease that worker's absenteeism by 0.447 standard deviation. The creative environment also explained 11.3% of the variance in absenteeism. Subsequent analysis showed that job satisfaction fully mediated the relationship between the creative environment and absenteeism and that the results were resistant to omitted variable bias.Originality/valueThe study contributes to theory and practice by showing empirically that creative environment leads to positive work outcomes, despite the innovation level required by the job. This study advances research on creative environment by targeting the garden variety workers, underscores the importance of cultivating a creative environment and calls attention to the complexity of the creativity–job affect link.

Score Compliance Authenticity

Score compliance authenticity in performance is that way of being faithful to a work that consists in obeying the instructions for performing it accurately, as these are recorded in the work’s score. However, scores can be understood only if they are interpreted in light of a set of notational conventions and performance practices. This is usually taken to entail that score compliance authenticity amounts to historical authenticity: on this view, the conventions and performance practices against which scores must be read are those in place at the time of composition; and so accurate performance becomes a matter of performing the work as it would have been performed, under ideal conditions, in the composer’s own time. This historicization of score compliance authenticity is controversial, however: the conventions and practices in terms of which we interpret period scores could be those in place at the time of performance, rather than those with which the composer was familiar. Abstracting away from this issue, the chapter then makes the case that score compliance authenticity is a performance value and, indeed, one that is more fundamental than garden-variety such values. This is because it is valued in performance for its own sake.

SEMANTICS FOR OBRATNO: A RE-ENTRY INTO A DISCONTINUED STATE

This paper explores the meaning and distribution of obratno, one of the Russian repetitive and restitutive morphemes. We identify three essential characteristics of obratno: obligatoriness of the restitutive reading, narrow scope with respect of indefinites, and incompatibility with eventuality descriptions that entail a result state in the sense of [Kratzer 2000]. We argue that like garden-variety repetitive and restitutive morphemes (e.g., Russian opjat’), obratno denotes a partial identity function with a presupposition. Unlike such morphemes, however, the presuppositional content of obratno involves a return to the same state in which an entity had been before. We capture this characteristic relying on [Landman’s 2008] notion of crosstemporal identity of eventualities and the derivative notion of a cross-temporal substate. This makes the repetitive reading of obratno unavailable, forces identity of the holders of a state, deriving the narrow scope effect, and guarantees that obratno is only compatible with target state descriptions.