Observers use gesture to disambiguate contrastive expressions of preference

We present two studies exploring how participants respond when a speaker contrasts two ideas, then expresses an ambiguous preference towards one of them. Study 1 showed that, when reading a speaker’s preference as text, participants tended to choose whatever was said last as matching the speaker’s preference, reflecting the recent-mention bias of anaphora resolution. In Study 2, we asked whether this pattern changed for audio versions of our stimuli. We found that it did not. We then asked whether observers used gesture to disambiguate the speaker’s preference. Participants watched videos in which two statements were spoken. Co-speech gestures were produced during each statement, in two different locations. Next, an ambiguous preference for one option was spoken. In ‘gesture disambiguating’ trials, this statement was accompanied by a gesture in the same spatial location as the gesture accompanying the first statement. In ‘gesture non-disambiguating’ trials, no third gesture occurred. Participants chose the first statement as matching the speaker’s preference more often for gesture disambiguating compared to non-disambiguating trials. Our findings add to the literature on resolution of ambiguous anaphoric reference involving concrete entities and discourse deixis, and we extend this literature to show that gestures indexing abstract ideas are also used during discourse comprehension.

Conclusions: Cultural Literacy in Action

In this chapter, the authors emphasize how even very young children can deal with complex and abstract ideas and emotions through creative practices and how the differences between people are not an issue for children. The analysis indicates that children have a multifaceted capacity for empathy. The authors stress that image-making is an important mode of communication through which children and young people shape their understanding of the world. This is a constructive and dialogic process of thinking in action. It allows children and young people to develop their imagination, emotional responses, personality, and position in the community, in relationship with others, and with the external world. The “dialogic chain of thinking” occurs not only in linguistic, but also in visual communication.

STOICISM AND ITS METAPHORS IN EARLY MODERN EMBLEM BOOKS

The moral and social doctrine of Stoicism, well known among Early Modern humanists, was popularized in the emblem books of the time. The tool of this popularization was the visual metaphor capable of conveying abstract ideas through concrete images. The main stoic notions (such as virtue, apatheia as a complete freedom from passions, constancy, patience, etc.) have found extremely diverse metaphorical equivalents in the visual language of emblems, where inanimate objects (e.g. rock, flint, anvil, tongs, cube, scales) as well as living creatures (kingfisher, turtledove, bear) could equally function as metaphors. Emblematics, being a kind of ars inveniendi, acted as a mechanism for inventing new metaphors to express old meanings. However, some traditional metaphors dating back to antiquity (for example, Plato’s comparison of the human soul to a chariot pulled by two horses – “reason” and “emotion”) were also rethought in the spirit of the Stoic doctrine.

The Nature of Metaphor

Metaphors are ubiquitous features of spoken and written language that permit us to experience one thing in terms of another. “Seeing is believing” helps us understand the abstract concept of belief in terms of the concrete sense of sight. Derived from two Greek words that mean “to transfer,” metaphors transfer certain attributes from the source domain, in our example, Seeing to the target domain of Believing. The chapter explores how metaphors have cognitive properties and allow us to learn new things and to express abstract ideas and complex relations. Metaphors are a powerful trope of figurative language and commonly appear in both formal medical writings and the informal daily interactions of doctors, patients, and the public more generally. The chapter describes how metaphors connect abstract and concrete domains and offers an array of examples that helps us decipher how metaphors originate from human experiences and how they evolve. It explores how metaphors frame perceptions and shape reality and their potency in the language of the clinic.

Vocalizations in dance classes teach body knowledge

Language is believed to be a central device for communicating meaning and knowledge between humans. It is superb in its capacity to code abstract ideas and displaced information, which can be conveyed from person to person, sometimes across centuries. When it comes to instructing a bodily skill in co-present situations, language is used along with other multimodal resources. This paper focuses on the role of vocalizations in dance teaching, syllables that express simultaneous body movement rather than abstract lexical content. While being essentially a vocal resource, the meaning of vocalizations arises in the simultaneously moving bodies. By carrying indexical and only partially conventionalized meaning, vocalizations constitute a puzzle for linguistic theory that preferably targets the arbitrary, symbolic and conventionalized aspects of human vocal production. The meanings conveyed from one body to another through a vocalization are experiential rather than intellectual. Vocalizations provide a solution to the problem of transferring body knowledge from one autonomous organism to another, and can even be embedded in syntax. The analysis is based on an occasion of teaching a jazz routine to a larger group of students.

Socjalistyczny nihilizm prawny w Polsce Ludowej i drogi przezwyciężania tej koncepcji

<p>After World War 2 in Poland, the process of building a new order began. Marxism, as interpreted by Lenin and Stalin, was adopted as the foundation. The creation of a system consistent with the official ideology required the implementation of abstract ideas in practice. One of the main tools used by the communists was law. It was an example of the practical implementation of legal nihilism, accompanying the construction of a totalitarian state. After 1956, a process began in Poland, aimed at overcoming the forcefully imposed order covering many areas of culture and science. The article provides the presentation of selected ideas from the field of law theory in communist Poland, the development of which reduced the influence of Marxism-Leninism in law. The main thesis of the article assumes that the process of de-Stalinization of Polish legal sciences had progressed gradually since 1956. The research objective of the article is to verify the hypothesis that the changes in Polish legal sciences related to overcoming the tenets of the Marxist-Leninist ideology took place in a manner similar to other areas of cultural and academic life. The issue has not yet been addressed in the way presented in the article, so the study can provide a useful material for research on the period of the Polish People’s Republic.</p>

Explaining Solidarity Through Metaphors: Two Examples From a Romanian Textbook

Solidarity is a complex, abstract, multifaceted concept that may be unpacked and used in a variety of situations, ranging from socio-economic and political contexts to the currently salient pandemic context. Defining solidarity, either in theory or in practice, requires connections to other less abstract ideas, which are more familiar to people. In this paper, I examine the way in which the concept of solidarity is defined and explained in a Romanian social studies textbook for 6th graders. My analysis focuses on two metaphorical framings of solidarity found in the textbook, namely ‘solidarity as exchange’ and ‘solidarity as assistance’. I discuss these examples of metaphors of solidarity in the context of broader discussions surrounding the construction of the intercultural society (of which solidarity is a crucial value) in textbooks.

The Ramist Context of Berkeley’s Philosophy

Berkeley’s doctrines about mind, the language of nature, substance, minima sensibilia, notions, abstract ideas, inference, and freedom appropriate principles developed by the sixteenth-century logician Peter Ramus and his seventeenth-century followers (e.g. Alexander Richardson, William Ames, John Milton). Even though Berkeley expresses himself in Cartesian or Lockean terms, he relies on a Ramist way of thinking that is not a form of mere rhetoric or pedagogy but a logic and ontology grounded in Stoicism. This chapter summarizes the central features of Ramism, indicates how Berkeley adapts Ramist concepts and strategies, and chronicles Ramism’s pervasiveness in Berkeley’s education, especially at Trinity College Dublin.

Berkeley and Locke’s Substance–Person Distinction

Especially in his post-1720 works, Berkeley focuses his comments about Locke on general abstract ideas. He warns against using metaphysical principles to explain observed regularities, and he extends his account to include spiritual substances (including God). Indeed, by calling a substance a spirit, he emphasizes how a person is simply the will that ideas be differentiated and associated in a certain way, not some thing that engages in differentiation. In this sense, a substance cannot be conceived apart from its activity.