Is ugliness in the mind of the beholder?

The paper explores the meaning and use of ugly in English. The study is based on corpus data from Cobuild Wordbanks Online and investigates the polysemy and the spheres of application of the concept. Through corpus analysis methodology, we investigate the most common collocations and the pragmatic and contextual uses of the term. Based on this analysis, our study proposes semantic explications of ugly in universal human concepts within the theoretical framework of the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM). We also analyze the most common collocations with the word ugly and classify them into several meaning-based categories. A comparison between beautiful and ugly reveals that they are not identical in their distribution, which suggests different cognitive salience of the concepts. We also note the special role of ‘people’ and ‘nature’ in conceptualization and use of beautiful and that of ‘human actions’ in ugly.

TACHYCARDIA MISDIAGNOSED AS PSYCHOTIC MENTAL ILLNESS.

Many people with similar or related life challenges may decide not to share personal information of the kind described in the present memoir. My sharing is intended in defense of my cognitive salience: despite having been diagnosed as supposedly “psychotic.” It is my hope that this memoir might help tip the scales in favor of “psycho-social” rather than “in-your-head,” models of personality disorder (1, 2, 3). Superior psychological models can be found (4); even before the gross statistics of Charles Spearman (1863 to 1945), AND before the forced conditioning experimentations of Ivan Pavlov (1849 to 1936), AND as well before the dubious Oral-Anal Hypothesis of Sigmund Freud (1856 to 1939). Some of these models (4) were presented by names such as Francis Galton (1822 to 1911), Hermann von Helmholtz (1821 to 1894), and Wilhelm Wundt (1832 to 1920): leaders of the subject area-domains commonly referred to as Experimental Psychology and Sensory Physiology.

Permanently Online—Always Stressed Out? The Effects of Permanent Connectedness on Stress Experiences

Concerns have been expressed that permanent online connectedness might negatively affect media user’s stress levels. Most research has focused on negative effects of specific media usage patterns, such as media multitasking or communication load. In contrast, users’ cognitive orientation toward online content and communication has rarely been investigated. Against this backdrop, we examined whether this cognitive orientation (i.e., online vigilance with its three dimensions salience, reactibility, monitoring) is related to perceived stress at different timescales (person, day, and situation level), while accounting for the effects of multitasking and communication load. Results across three studies showed that, in addition to multitasking (but not communication load), especially the cognitive salience of online communication is positively related to stress. Our findings are discussed regarding mental health implications and the origins of stress.

The Construction of Advertising Discourse by the Use of the Second-Person Object Te and the Clitic Se

The purpose of this study is to analyze the variation of the second-person object clitic te [‘you’] and the clitic se [lit. ‘it’] in advertising discourse from a cognitive viewpoint. The main explanatory notion will be cognitive salience; both clitics, te and se, exhibit this to varying degrees. The second-person te is more salient than the clitic se; therefore, the meanings conveyed by each in media discourse will be notably different. Results indicate that the distribution and usage of the clitics te vs. se constitutes a different strategy of persuasion in advertising discourse. In general terms, te is used when a special deictic stance is needed, such as indexing a second-person as a potential consumer of the product or idea, whereas se tends to appear in utterances that describe the general and objective benefits of the product or idea advertised, denoting a desubjectivizing stance. The sociosituational distribution of this variation according to the target consumers will be analyzed.

What we talk about when we talk about corpus frequency: The example of polysemous verbs with light and concrete senses

Gilquin (2008, What you think ain’t what you get: Highly polysemous verbs in mind and language. In Jean-Remi Lapaire, Guillaume Desagulier & Jean-Baptiste Guignard (eds.),From gram to mind: Grammar as cognition, 235–255. Bordeaux: Presse Universitaires de Bordeaux) reported that light uses of verbs (e.g.make use) tend to outnumber concrete uses of the same verbs (e.g.make furniture) in corpora, whereas concrete senses tend to outnumber light senses in responses to elicitation tests. The differences between corpus frequency and cognitive salience remain an important and much-discussed question (cf. Arppe et al. 2010, Cognitive corpus linguistics: Five points of debate on current theory and methodology.Corpora5(1). 1–27). The question is particularly complicated because bothcorpus frequencyandcognitive salienceare difficult to define, and are often left undefined. Operationalising and defining corpus frequencies are the issues at the heart of the present paper, which includes a close, manual semantic analysis of nearly 6,000 instances of three polysemous verbs with light and concrete uses,make, take, andgive, in the British component of the International Corpus of English. The paper compares semasiological frequencies like those measured by Gilquin (2008) to onomasiological frequency measurements (cf. Geeraerts 1997,Diachronic prototype semantics: A contribution to historical lexicology. Oxford: Clarendon Press). Methodologically, the paper demonstrates that these approaches address fundamentally different research questions, and offer dramatically different results. Findings indicate that corpus frequencies in speech may correlate with elicitation test results, if the corpus frequencies are measured onomasiologically rather than semasiologically; I refer to Geeraerts’s (2010,Theories of lexical semantics. Oxford: Oxford University Press) hypothesis ofonomasiological saliencein explaining this observation.