Embodiment is not the answer to meaning: a discussion of the theory underlying the article by Carina Rasse and Raymond W. Gibbs, Jr. in JLS 50(1)

This article offers a critical response to the discussion in Carina Rasse and Raymond W. Gibbs, Jr. article in JLS 50(1) entitled, Metaphorical Thinking in Our Literary Experiences of J.D. Salinger’s “The Catcher in the Rye”. My paper reconsiders how different the paradigm of cognitive linguistics, particularly in the tradition of conceptual metaphor research, is to that of discourse linguistics, especially in the hermeneutic tradition. Do the two approaches aim at irreconcilable objectives, particularly as cognitive linguistics is focussed on what happens in people’s heads and/or bodies when creating an utterance, whereas I argue that as language is social, it is about the communication of meaning. Discourse linguistics explores what it takes to make sense, to consciously interpret utterances in their contexts, as what an utterance means is how it is intertextually linked to other related utterances. In other words, the meaning of any segment of an utterance of a text, is the sum of the ways in which this segment has been paraphrased in related occurrences. In this paper, I present the two frameworks from my own, strongly biased, perspective.

'La Vérité emphatique du geste dans les grandes circonstances de la vie' : Baudelaire, Barthes and the Hysterical Gesture

To associate Baudelaire and Barthes may seem a somewhat unlikely gesture. Barthes wrote about Baudelaire in a sustained way only once and with reference to a marginal part of the poet’s work, namely his failed theatrical projects. Yet Baudelaire remains a point of reference across the entire span of Barthes’s career, in particular as the author of a frequently cited quotation from ‘Exposition Universelle’ (1855): ‘la vérité emphatique du geste dans les grandes circonstances de la vie’. This phrase punctuates Barthes’s published work throughout, from one of his earliest essays to his very last book on photography, and is closely associated with another persistently recurring motif: the concept of numen, a term used to designate a static gesture expressing divine authority. The aim of this article is to examine the significance of Baudelaire for Barthes by investigating how he deploys the quotation from the ‘Exposition Universelle’ essay and the intertwined concept of numen. Its guiding questions are: what does Baudelaire mean for Barthes? And what does that tell us in turn about Baudelaire? Answering these questions involves tracing the intersecting trajectories of quotation and concept across Barthes's work, with a particular focus on the value to be attributed to exaggeration or excess in the communication of meaning through gesture and language, a phenomenon that both Barthes and Baudelaire associate with hysteria, as either something to be ironically assumed (Baudelaire) or ambivalently exorcized (Barthes).

Arūnas Sverdiolas and the Phenomenological Philosophy of Culture

The article deals with the relationship of hermeneutics and phenomenology in Arūnas Sverdiolas’s philosophy of culture. Firstly what is discussed is the problem of the separation between culture and nature, and then the concept of cultural activity and creation is analyzed. In cultural philosophy it is not enough to reflect on the cultural act of creation. Creation is the discovery of the world’s essential forms of expression. Ideas need to be discovered and only then they can be materialized and communicated to others in such an objective way. Therefore, culture must be understood as the communication of meaning. Cultural objects refer not only to the actions that create them, but also to the demands placed on potential perceivers.

تعليم الترجمة في ضوء نموذج كايزر ) )Keiser’s Model وتطبيقه في مركز لسان عربي للترجمة

Translation is the communication of meaning from one language (the source) to another language (the target). Translation refers to written information, whereas interpretation refers to spoken information.The purpose of translation is to convey the original tone and intent of a message,taking into account cultural and regional differences between source and target languages.Translation is very necessary to get information from any resources in foreignlanguages. Therefore, translation is the way of the translator who has the ability to understand the method and the process to establish the information from foreign language.Lisan Arabi for translation, one of the language publishers, endeavors to be an inner cicle for learners and advisor of translation. The aim of this program is to produce the good translation that is able to be published and distributed to academics and scholars.

Interpreting the concept of sedimentation in Husserl’s Origin of Geometry

In the influential text Origin of Geometry, Edmund Husserl argues that even the invariant meaning found in theoretical disciplines like geometry has a historical becoming: through gradual abstraction and stabilization, ending in a completely rational discipline. This is a process which Husserl proposes is due to language and other symbolic systems. In the absence of a system allowing for stable communication of meaning, geometry or any other tradition would constantly have to begin anew. At the same time Husserl also sees the historical process of meaning stabilization in linguistic form as detrimental. It allows for a reception of an established meaning, which simultaneously entails the forgetfulness of the experiential basis and intuitive knowledge that made ideality possible in the first place. Husserl calls this Janus-faced dialectical process between discovery and forgetfulness sedimentation. This paper analyzes this concept in Origin of Geometry and places it in the context of Husserl’s thought more generally. In contrast to Husserl’s negative view of the effects that sedimentation has for an authentic meaning, I discuss four interpretations of sedimentation that provide more constructive perspectives on the concept. These interpretations also differ considerably from one another, a fact which speaks both to the richness and the tensions in Origin of Geometry.

Hearing and Believing: Listening Experiences as Religious Experiences in Nineteenth-Century British Methodism

This article uses Jeff Astley's concept of ordinary theology (Jeff Astley, Ordinary Theology: Looking, Listening and Learning in Theology (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002)) to examine and interpret listening experiences from nineteenth-century Methodist sources. It argues that the participatory experiences of singing together with fellow believers were crucial to the development and sustenance of personal faith, and that believers shared accounts of such experiences in ways that they knew would be understood by their readers as indicative of the depth and sincerity of their spirituality. It further contends that the widely recognized importance of hymnody in Methodism demands attention to its practice as well its content, and that while the lyrics of hymns set out Methodist theology and doctrine, the participative experience of communal singing was itself invested with meaning and value by many lay Methodists. Ordinary theology provides a framework through which common features of these accounts are identified and discussed, emphasizing the importance of various forms of life writing in understanding the ways in which religious practice shaped the lives and interactions of individual believers. The article also explores differences between different types of published and unpublished life writing. While examples are drawn from different branches of nineteenth-century Methodism, it is argued that hymnody's potential for creating spiritually intense experiences was commonly recognized and affirmed across them. This article contributes to the wider discussion of the significance of listening experiences by emphasizing music's vital role in the construction and communication of meaning between individuals on matters of deeply personal value.

A dialectical approach to the systematic analysis of geovisual communication using Bertin’s visual variables

<p><strong>Abstract.</strong> This presentation presents a dialectical approach for the analysis and synthesis of geovisual communication systems using the graphic variables of Jacques Bertin as the primary analytical structure. This approach to studying geovisual communication accounts for its dynamics and interaction. It builds primarily on semiotic concepts advanced by Roland Barthes and Umberto Eco that emphasize the interactions between author and reader and the cultural circulation of knowledge. It relies on a Kantian critical epistemology to move beyond an instrumental description of a graphics-based system of communication. The visual system of affordances made and understood with a geovisualization produces situative meaning involving signification and interpretation, which is neither static nor discrete, but transforms what is known and what can be known. These conclusions lead to theoretical insights related to prior discursive concepts of visual communication and raise some questions for future research about the socio-cognitive affordances of cartographic visualization. A practical example shows the empirical approach and initial validation.</p><p>Visual Variables Structure Communication</p><p>The seminal contributions of Roland Barthes point to the process of embedding visual meaning regarding sign, signifier, signified, sign and concept as an extension to Saussure's dyadic approach as two semiological systems, which accounts for the importance of Saussure's bar in the communication of meaning. The two systems code the knowledge of communication, accounting for the situatedness of meaning and its discursive making that connects a sign to a cultural context. Umberto Eco goes beyond Pierce’s icon, index, and symbol trichotomy of a sign through an ongoing chain of interpretative referrals. This approach starts with an active collaboration between creator and reader. It can involve multiple circumstances, cultural aspects and evolve. Visual variables structure communication in an ongoing process.</p><p>The signification of a visual variable is analogous to an atom in a communication process. The analysis of the visual variables of a graphic element in a communication systems sense commences with an analysis of these visual variables related to individual elements and complex symbols. Barthes’ functions, actions, and narrative offer a valuable framework. A synthesis follows that considers the epistemological aspects of a partial system and what its functions purport to do and what they actually do. The analytically determined relationships can be synthesized into webs of explicit and implicit meanings associated with Barthes' structure. This combination and visual intermingling of graphic representations in a geovisualization broaden then to consider their interactions and associations with creator and reader. The visual encompasses the semiotic communication of meaning. The dialectical and critical consideration of the relations and the structure of the communication leads to an improved comprehension of the affordances manifest in the graphical communication system. It also begins to account for mental aspects of perception.</p><p>A model of geovisual communication?</p><p>The theory and methods of this semiotic approach involve considering Bertin’s graphical variables as elements of a model that corresponds to the communication system. Further, the structure of the geovisualization can be modeled symbolically to take up the questions how coding and decoding take place and made reliable given the dynamics of communication and the reliance on conventions in most cartography. This presentation closes with a summary of the benefits of a semiotic approach to the analysis and teaching of geovisual communication.</p>

Neuferts Oktametersystem – eine neue ›Regola‹ im 20. Jahrhundert?

As a result of his highly successful publication Bauentwurfslehre (1936), Ernst Neufert presented a system of measurement that he claimed had universal validity, his so called octameter system in 1941. Every necessary dimension is expressed as a multiple or a fraction of the basic unit of 12.5 cm. He stated that once the design process, the schedules of rooms and many other parameters would become rational and efficient.Moreover, the question is to what extent the octameter system constitutes a set of rules in the sense of Vitruvian order. Can architecture become legible in the mechanisms of form-making that the system practices? Is the octameter system useful in the communication of meaning or criticism, or is its effectiveness limited to simplifying construction procedures by pursuing standardization and serialization of architectural production?Neufert’s system became widely disseminated. The architecture faculty building at the University of Innsbruck is an example: it demonstrates how thoroughly Neufert’s octameter division was applied to the finest detail, as a universal frame of reference. Thereby it becomes clear that Neufert’s norm is indeed in a position to transfer formal origination into the realm of cultural action.

Encoding and decoding of meaning through structured variability in intonational speech prosody

Speech prosody, the rhythm and intonation in particular, plays an important role in communication of meaning. Rising vs. falling intonation contours signaling the speaker’s indented communicative meanings (i.e., asking a question vs. making a statement) has been widely recognized as a primary example of such prosody. However, what appears to be a straightforward mapping between acoustic features of prosody and hypothesized meanings in fact presents a challenge to the human perceptual and computational mechanisms. Perceptible features of prosody vary across contexts (e.g., talkers), creating ubiquitous ambiguity in the mapping. Here, we first characterize the structured nature of the variability in intonational speech prosody used to signal a question vs. a statement in English. We then demonstrate that the listener can learn to adapt their expectations about the prosody-meaning mapping according to an inferred underlying structure of the environmental input. We argue that the rich and dynamic representations of the prosodic input allow listeners to infer the mapping that is most likely given characteristics of a current context.