Embodied Songs: Insights Into the Nature of Cross-Modal Meaning-Making Within Sign Language Informed, Embodied Interpretations of Vocal Music

Embodied song practices involve the transformation of songs from the acoustic modality into an embodied-visual form, to increase meaningful access for d/Deaf audiences. This goes beyond the translation of lyrics, by combining poetic sign language with other bodily movements to embody the para-linguistic expressive and musical features that enhance the message of a song. To date, the limited research into this phenomenon has focussed on linguistic features and interactions with rhythm. The relationship between bodily actions and music has not been probed beyond an assumed implication of conformance. However, as the primary objective is to communicate equivalent meanings, the ways that the acoustic and embodied-visual signals relate to each other should reveal something about underlying conceptual agreement. This paper draws together a range of pertinent theories from within a grounded cognition framework including semiotics, analogy mapping and cross-modal correspondences. These theories are applied to embodiment strategies used by prominent d/Deaf and hearing Dutch practitioners, to unpack the relationship between acoustic songs, their embodied representations, and their broader conceptual and affective meanings. This leads to the proposition that meaning primarily arises through shared patterns of internal relations across a range of amodal and cross-modal features with an emphasis on dynamic qualities. These analogous patterns can inform metaphorical interpretations and trigger shared emotional responses. This exploratory survey offers insights into the nature of cross-modal and embodied meaning-making, as a jumping-off point for further research.

COMMUNICATIVE FUNCTIONS AND THE MEANINGS OF SLOGANS IN PUBLIC SERVICE ADVERTISEMENTS

This research aims at describing the communicative functions and the meaning of Slogans in Public Service Advertisements (PSA). This is a descriptive-qualitative research. The data derived from 20 PSA videos downloaded from Youtube. Then, they are collected through document analysis and analyzed with content analysis. There are only four types of meaning stated by Leech (1985) e.i 12 slogans with conceptual meanings, 7 slogans with connotative meanings, 7 slogans with affective meanings and 1 slogan with social meanings. Based on the Illocutionary acts, some communicative functions found in PSA slogans are 1) to invite society to do something, 2) to inform people, 3) to report or to state something important, 4) to express emotion, and 5) to convince people doing something in the future. Keywords: PSA slogans, communicative functions, language meaning, illocutionary act, speech act

From Knowing to Feeling

Visual and auditory processes represent sensory information, but do not evaluate its importance for survival or success. Interactions between perceptual/cognitive and evaluative reinforcement/emotional/motivational mechanisms accomplish this. Cognitive-emotional resonances support conscious feelings, knowing their source, and controlling motivation and responses to acquire valued goals. Also explained is how emotions may affect behavior without being conscious, and how learning adaptively times actions to achieve desired goals. Breakdowns in cognitive-emotional resonances can cause symptoms of mental disorders such as depression, autism, schizophrenia, and ADHD, including explanations of how affective meanings fail to organize behavior when this happens. Historic trends in the understanding of cognition and emotion are summarized, including work of Chomsky and Skinner. Brain circuits of conditioned reinforcer learning and incentive motivational learning are modeled, including the inverted-U in conditioning as a function of interstimulus interval, secondary conditioning, and attentional blocking and unblocking. How humans and animals act as minimal adaptive predictors is explained using the CogEM model’s interactions between sensory cortices, amygdala, and orbitofrontal cortex. Cognitive-emotional properties solve phylogenetically ancient Synchronization and Persistence Problems using circuits that are conserved between mollusks and humans. Avalanche command circuits for learning arbitrary sequences of sensory-motor acts, dating back to crustacea, increase their sensitivity to environmental feedback as they morph over phylogeny into mammalian cognitive and emotional circuits. Antagonistic rebounds drive affective extinction. READ circuits model how life-long learning occurs without associative saturation or passive forgetting. Affective memories of opponent emotions like fear vs. relief can then persist until they are disconfirmed by environmental feedback.

Nobody cares for men anymore: Affective-discursive practices around men’s victimisation across online and offline contexts

Men’s victimisation is a central topic in online discussions, particularly in the manosphere, where its emphasis is often combined with a strong anti-feminist stance. This article examines the interplay of affects and discourse in meaning-making around men’s victimisation both in online discussions and among social and crisis workers asked to comment upon meanings circulating online. By using the concept of affective-discursive practice, the analysis shows how this meaning-making reiterates socially shared interpretative repertoires and positionings that mobilise affects based on sympathy, anger and hate. Furthermore, the article demonstrates how the practitioners respond to these affective meanings by adopting positions of responsibility, while also redirecting and neutralising online affect. The article contributes to knowledge on the interaction between online and offline meaning-making around men’s victimisation, and to building an understanding of affects and discourse in seemingly moderate meaning-making around this topic that however resonates and links with the more extreme anti-feminism of the manosphere.

Colexification Networks Encode Affective Meaning

Colexification is a linguistic phenomenon that occurs when multiple concepts are expressed in a language with the same word. Colexification patterns are frequently used to estimate the meaning similarity between words, but the hypothesis that these are related is still missing direct empirical validation at scale. Here, we show for the first time that words linked by colexification patterns capture similar affective meanings. Using pre-existing translation data, we extend colexification databases to cover much longer word lists. We achieve this with an unsupervised method of affective lexicon extension that uses colexification network data to interpolate the affective ratings of words that are not included in the original lexicon. We find positive correlations between network-based estimates and empirical affective ratings, which suggest that colexification networks contain information related to affective meanings. Finally, we compare our network method with state-of-the-art machine learning, trained on a large corpus, and show that our simple linguistics-informed unsupervised algorithm yields comparable performance with high explainability. These results show that it is possible to automatically expand affective norms lexica to cover exhaustive word lists when additional data are available, such as in colexification networks.

Age-Related Differences in Affective Norms for Chinese Words (AANC)

Information on age-related differences in affective meanings of words is widely used by researchers to study emotions, word recognition, attention, memory, and text-based sentiment analysis. To date, no Chinese affective norms for older adults are available although Chinese as a spoken language has the largest population in the world. This article presents the first large-scale age-related affective norms for 2,061 four-character Chinese words (AANC). Each word in this database has rating values in the four dimensions, namely, valence, arousal, dominance, and familiarity. We found that older adults tended to perceive positive words as more arousing and less controllable and evaluate negative words as less arousing and more controllable than younger adults did. This indicates that the positivity effect is reliable for older adults who show a processing bias toward positive vs. negative words. Our AANC database supplies valuable information for researchers to study how emotional characteristics of words influence the cognitive processes and how this influence evolves with age. This age-related difference study on affective norms not only provides a tool for cognitive science, gerontology, and psychology in experimental studies but also serves as a valuable resource for affective analysis in various natural language processing applications.

Inside the Mind and Heart of Homo Aedificator •

While the reasons that lead to the current crisis of the heritage preservation sector in Hungary are manifold, it is worth looking into what might be done to draw attention to some issues that may help consolidate the ground of common values; the foundation, upon which a meaningful dialogue can be constructed, leading to the appreciation of and willingness to care for the historic environment by all actors. There seems to be a hidden conflict between the values of conservation experts and those of laypeople. Possessing thorough knowledge about the nature of historical and architectural values and trained to easily identify these, we are bound to focus more on people, their meanings and values. Much can be learned from pervious, human-centred architectural theory and practice, some of which are reviewed in the study, with special attention to the work of Gyula Hajnóczi. Referring to his space theory and ideas about the perception of space, we are especially grateful for his term homo aedificator suggesting that architecture satisfies material and spiritual needs universal to all human beings. Recognizing the challenges that stem from the differences between architects and non-architects, and likewise, heritage professionals and laypeople, the concepts of environmental psychology can help us show the way to universal values. We look into the method of the semantic differential scale to identify the affective meanings of built historic environments. The first steps of an empirical psychological research allow us to see into the minds and hearts of heritage professionals by assessing how they qualify the subject of their daily expertise. While these preliminary results are definitely intriguing, shedding light on how professionals tend to give meaning, our research continues with the aim to reveal the attitudes and meanings people associate with built historic heritage and find viable tools to mitigate the discrepancies between the profession and the general public.Miközben a magyarországi műemlékvédelem jelenlegi válságának számos oka lehet, érdemes figyelmet fordítanunk arra, hogy mit tehetünk azért, hogy megerősítsük a közös értékek talaját; azt az alapot, amire olyan értelmes párbeszédeket építhetünk, melyek a történeti környezet értékelése és törődése iránti hajlandósághoz vezetnek. Egyre gyakrabban üti fel a fejét az a rejtett ellentét, ami a műemlékes szakértők és a laikusok értékei között feszül. Szakértőként, átfogó ismerettel a történeti és építészeti értékekről, melyeket megtanultunk könnyen azonosítani, hasznos lehet a figyelmünket az emberekre, az ő jelentésadásaikra és értékeikre fordítanunk. Sokat okulhatunk a korábbi, ember- központú építészetelméleti és gyakorlati példákból, melyek közül néhányat tanulmányunkban átte- kintünk, kiemelve Hajnóczi Gyula munkásságát. Térelméletére és térészlelési gondolataira hivat- kozva, különösen hálásak vagyunk a homo aedificator fogalmáért, utalva arra, hogy az építészet minden emberi lény anyagi és szellemi igényeit kielégíti. Felismerve az építész–nemépítész és ehhez hasonlóan a műemlékes szakember–laikus közötti különbözőségek kihívásait, a környezetpszicholó- gia segíthet az univerzális értékek felé vezető út megtalálásában. A szemantikus differenciál módsze- rét hívjuk segítségül az épített történeti környezet érzelmi jelentésének feltárására. Empirikus kutatá- sunk első lépéseivel betekintést nyerünk a műemlékes szakemberek vélekedéseibe, pontosabban abba, hogy hogyan minősítik szakértelmük tárgyát. Bár már ezek az előzetes eredmények is – melyek rávilágítanak arra, hogy a szakemberek hogyan értelmezik a műemlékeket – érdekesek lehetnek, kuta- tásunk azzal a céllal folytatódik, hogy általánosságban feltárjuk az emberek vélekedéseit és a történeti épületeknek tulajdonított jelentéseket. Eredményeinkkel használható eszközöket kívánunk nyújtani a szakmabeliek és a laikusok közötti ellentétek feloldására.

A probabilistic pragmatics for English singular some

When English some combines with a singular NP, the resulting phrases reliably convey affective meanings not shared by variants with a(n) or plural NPs. Prior research has traced these effects to semantic properties of some that entail that the speaker cannot identify a unique referent for the phrase. In this paper, we present attested examples that conflict with this generalization. In addition, we argue that semantic accounts miss an important generalization: some is reliably affective only if a is available as an alternative. These facts suggest a pragmatic source for the relevant meanings. To capture them, we argue that a given context can make different modes of identification for entities relevant and that singular some signals a lack of engagement with these modes. We analyze the pragmatics of this signaling using the "lexical uncertainty" version of the Rational Speech Acts model and show how it can be used to characterize the observed affective meanings.

Emotionality effects in ambiguous word recognition: The crucial role of the affective congruence between distinct meanings of ambiguous words

There is substantial evidence that affectively charged words (e.g., party or gun) are processed differently from neutral words (e.g., pen), although there are also inconsistent findings in the field. Some lexical or semantic variables might explain such inconsistencies, due to the possible modulation of affective word processing by these variables. The aim of the present study was to examine the extent to which affective word processing is modulated by semantic ambiguity. We conducted a large lexical decision study including semantically ambiguous words (e.g., cataract) and semantically unambiguous words (e.g., terrorism), analysing the extent to which reaction times (RTs) were influenced by their affective properties. The findings revealed a valence effect in which positive valence made RTs faster, whereas negative valence slowed them. The valence effect diminished as the semantic ambiguity of words increased. This decrease did not affect all ambiguous words, but was observed mainly in ambiguous words with incongruent affective meanings. These results highlight the need to consider the affective properties of the distinct meanings of ambiguous words in research on affective word processing.

Visual affect in films: a semiotic approach

This study investigates affective meanings expressed in facial expressions and bodily gestures from a semiotic perspective. Particularly, the study focuses on disentangling relations of affective meanings and exploring the meaning potential of facial expressions and bodily gestures. Based on the analysis of over three hundred screenshots from two films (one animation and one live-action film), this study proposes a system of visual affect, as well as a system of visual resources involved in the expression of visual affect. The system of visual affect makes a further step in the investigation of affective meanings afforded by facial expressions and bodily gestures, and can provide methodological insights into the examination of affective meanings expressed visually. The system of visual resources provides a more meaning-motivated framework for systematic tracking of the visual resources, which may be applied to the analysis of other visual media apart from films.