Multidimensional Sensorimotor Grounding of Concrete and Abstract Categories

Semantic categories, and the concepts belonging to them, have traditionally been defined by their relative concreteness; that is, their reliance on perception. However, sensorimotor grounding must be regarded as going beyond the basic five senses, and incorporate a multidimensional variety of perceptual and action experience. We present a series of exploratory analyses examining the sensorimotor grounding of participant-produced member concepts for 117 categories, spanning traditionally concrete (e.g., animal, furniture) and highly abstract (e.g., unit of time, science) categories. We found that both concrete and abstract categories are strongly grounded in multidimensional sensorimotor experience. Both domains were dominated by vision and, to a lesser extent, head movements, but concrete categories were more grounded in touch and hand/arm action, while abstract categories were more grounded in hearing and interoception. Importantly, this pattern of grounding was not uniform, and subdomains of concrete (e.g., ingestibles, animates, natural categories, artefacts) and abstract (e.g., internal, social, non-social) categories were grounded in different sensorimotor dimensions. Overall, these findings suggest that the distinction between abstract and concrete categories is not as clearcut as ontological assumptions might suggest, and that the strength and diversity of sensorimotor grounding in abstract categories must not be underestimated.

PARADIGMATIC FOUNDATIONS OF THE LINGUISTICS OF THE FIRST HALF OF THE 21ST CENTURY

The paper proposes and defends the definition of the paradigm of scientific research in modern linguistics as evolutionary-informational-phenomenological science. The factors contributing to the appearance of such a term are given and substantiated. Among them is the transdisciplinary nature of modern scientific activity, centered around the need to reproduce a holistic picture of the world. As a result of this mode of modern scientific cognition, the very system of knowledge is complicated, which requires the transition of scientific ideas to the level of more abstract categories. Along with the established notions of methodology and theory, the term paradigm is more actively used. However, the case of the number and composition of modern paradigms of scientific knowledge still remains open, including in linguistics. The diversity of views on the linguistic paradigm is mainly limited to its three implementations: comparative-historical, system-structural, anthropocentric. However, it should be borne in mind that in the new civilizational and sociotechnical reality the role of linguistic science has radically and unprecedentedly changed, which has already adapted such concepts as evolutionary, informative, phenomenological. Theoretical rethinking of general scientific ideas about language, establishing close links between linguistics and global social and socio-technological processes occurring in the network-centric world, encourage the authors to qualify the modern linguistic paradigm as evolutionary-informational-phenomenological. Such approach provides an epistemological balance between empiricism and metaphysics, introduces the methodology of linguistics to the sciences close in principle to the scientific disciplines of nature

Cultural meanings in language: metaphors of vanity

The article is devoted to the study of metaphorization in the field of abstract categories in linguistic consciousness on the example of the cultural meaning “vanity”. The aim of the article is to establish the role and functions of metaphorical transfer in the visualization of abstract cultural meanings. The work used the methods of semantic, component, definitional and conceptual analysis, with the help of which the means and functions of semantic transfer in the metaphorization of vanity were investigated. The material for the research was the collected corpus of aphoristic sentences about vanity and the contexts of the metaphorical representation of vanity in the National Corpus of the Russian language. It is established that the metaphor in the language performs two main functions: cognitive, which gives the intellect the ability to comprehend something rationally incomprehensible, and expressive-evaluative, which allows the subject of speech to emotionally highlight any aspects and characteristics of the object. In the visualization of vanity, all the main types of metaphorical transfer on the auxiliary subject are used. Of the totality of semantic features of any category, in most cases, only a few are metaphorically distinguished, and these are connotative, evaluative features that are not associated with its definitional core. The attribute of negative evaluativeness in the semantics of vanity is metaphorized through the assimilation of this personal property to various kinds of unpleasant, harmful and dangerous creatures, plants, phenomena and objects. Like all “sinful passions” that subjugate a person and take possession of his will, vanity in speech is easily demonized – it is likened to “evil spirits”, mainly a demon. A specific feature of “reflexive feelings” – directed at oneself – conveys the likeness of vanity to a certain expanding substance, blowing a person from inside. In isolated cases, the likening of vanity to a crooked mirror and cotton wool metaphorizes such an essential semantic features of it as the imaginary, emptiness and futility of flaunting virtues. Thus, the study indicates that when metaphorizing abstract categories, which include vanity, not definitional semantic features of this category are visualized, but mainly semantic features relevant to assessment and emotional attitude of the subject of speech.

Domestic Dharma in Japan

The domestic dimensions of Buddhist practice are a robust and ubiquitous stream, though they have not received much scholarly attention. The category of “domestic Dharma” is a conceptual lens that focuses on everyday lived phenomenon in order for scholars to see Buddhist activity occurring in the privacy of people’s homes. Accessing and understanding the contours of such activities largely depends on ethnographic research. The core dynamics of domestic Dharma engage a field of practices, including ritualization of daily life, mothering as locus of transmission of teachings and practices, rites and objects for protection, healing activities, and interplay with ancestors. Domestic Dharma practices fall under five broad overlapping modes of religious activity: ritualized, scriptural, communicative, materially interactive, and aesthetic. Domestic Dharma practices support people in facing infertility, crippling chronic pain, death through disease, untimely loss of family members, experiencing equanimity, cultivating harmonious relationships, and creating beauty in daily life. Such activities do not fit neatly into abstract categories and institutional frames, for they are complex, concrete, and ever-changing. Women propel domestic Dharma by tending to the physical, emotional, and spiritual needs of themselves and their families. A family’s homemade ritualized activities are efficacious, because they emerge out of immediate situations, idiosyncratic habits, and preferred aesthetics. Domestic Dharma is a vital sphere of harmonious, resilient responses to the vicissitudes of life in which respect, responsibility, and gratitude are cultivated.

Legalism: a turn to history in the anthropology of law

Notorious definitional debates have characterized the anthropology of law, and scholars have not reached consensus over how “law” is to be distinguished from other social phenomena. This article suggests that light can be shed upon this issue by combining the insights of anthropologists and historians. Careful comparison among empirical examples highlights the importance of texts and the legal form. Case studies from Tibet are used to illustrate these points and draw attention to the phenomenon of legalism, that is, the use of generalizing rules and abstract categories to describe and organise the world. This provides a basis for exploring the nature and significance of law, both in the modern world and societies of the past.

The role of gender in the acquisition of the Serbian case system

Serbo-Croatian is marked for seven cases and has a noun class vs. gender distinction. Given the complexity of the inflectional system, we look at Serbo-Croatian as a case study in case acquisition. We explore different correlations available in the input that children could leverage to acquire the case system in Serbo-Croatian. We ask three main questions: 1) does a noun’s gender predict the noun’s nominative singular suffix? 2) does a noun’s nominative singular suffix predict the noun’s gender? and 3) does a noun’s noun class predict the noun’s gender? Specifically, we ask whether the language input provides children with sufficient evidence to form these three productive generalizations. To test this, we apply the Tolerance Principle (Yang, 2016) to a corpus of 270 inflected Serbian nouns. Within this set of data, we find that: 1) all nominative singular suffixes productively predict a gender; 2) all genders productively predict a nominative singular suffix (with the exception of the neuter gender which predicts two suffixes); and 3) two of the three noun classes predict a single gender. We conclude that the input provides sufficient evidence for these productive correlations and we argue that children can leverage these generalizations to infer the declension patterns or gender of novel nouns. We discuss how, given these findings, children could acquire most of the inflectional system by focusing on gender as a categorization system for nouns, without needing to posit abstract categories of noun class.

Body ground red – integrating Peirce, Kristeva and Greimas

Ground (Charles Peirce’s concept) – regardless whether it be taken as motivation or abstractness – affords the proposition that some abstract categories of meaning have acquired their qualities via bodily experience. In order to show this to be the case, the concept of ground will be drawn together with the division (according to Julia Kristeva) between the symbolic and the semiotic, the semiotic chora will be shown to function as an axiologizing thymic category as regard reception of perception (following Algirdas Greimas), and finally it will be proposed that it is this foundation that enables the coherence and inevitability of culture as a whole, being responsible for its stereoscopic quality as well. This procedure will further the haply sacrilegious march towards the emergence of modal semiotics, which allows us to dispense of signs in order to gain an anachronistically novel understanding of our own being.

Legalism: Rules, Categories, and Texts

Laws, rules, and texts, this chapter argues, deserve more sustained attention by legal anthropologists. They have tended to turn their backs on doctrine and texts, but law and legal phenomena have taken legalistic forms practically since the invention of writing. Historical and anthropological examples indicate that legalism – that is, the use of general rules and abstract categories – is typical of law as a social form. Paying attention to this aspect of law helps to explain legal phenomena that have long puzzled anthropologists, in particular, an enduring fascination with law, despite its repeated use to enact and legitimate power. A focus on legalism, moreover, allows scholars to compare diverse empirical examples from the rich corpus of historical legal studies with more contemporary ethnographic work in order to reflect upon the nature of law as a social form.

КОНЦЕПТ ПОЈЕДИНЦА У ЛИЧНИМ ОГЛАСИМА ЗА УПОЗНАВАЊЕ У СРПСКИМ И НЕМАЧКИМ МЕДИЈИМА – УПОРЕДНА АНАЛИЗА ДРУШТВЕНИХ ВРЕДНОСТИ

This paper studies the concept of the individual occurring in personal dating ads published in Serbian and German print and electronic media. The research is based upon existing studies of dominant values, but takes into account the fulfillment of an individual’s expectations vis-à-vis her/his potential partner as well. The values, as abstract categories, represent the basis for the very process of creating an ad by its author, while at the same time they are indicators of the dominant social attitudes. By applying the method of contrastive, content and statistical analysis, culture-based similarities and differences, as well as the typical concepts of men and women have been determined. The results of the study show that there occur, in fact, certain differences in the concept of the individual in Serbian and German ads. These originate from different values and orientations of the two societies. On the other hand, some discrepancies are sex-related.

Prologue

This book pushes past the limits of language to explain how musicking contributes to powerful emotional and spiritual experiences. Emphasis on the ethnographic moment clarifies the impact that the past and the future have on the immediacy of the present. The prologue introduces the ethnographic encounter at the center of the text and addresses three key terms in the book’s title: music, experience, and meaning. These abstract categories do not exist in isolation. There is no meaning without experience, nor music without meaning. The chapters that follow explore how meaning is experienced during Ndau spirit possession ceremonies and shapes emotional life.