Afterword

The Afterword reframes this volume’s questions by arguing in favour of an emphasis on the communicative properties of song as an amalgam of words and music: the functions of song and of ordinary language overlap and coalesce in human practices. In place of the polar opposites that characterise nineteenth-century theory, what is proposed is a spectrum account of the language–music relation as an embodied cognitive event: how does human cognition manage the complex territory opened up by the synchronicities of music and language? This cognitive frame rests on the assumption that human activity, however far it reaches beyond the material ecology it arose from, is essentially local and situated. Songs are artefacts, special kinds of cognitive objects which have evolved within given cultural ecologies. Such artefacts are not one-way acts of human ‘intelligence’ doing things to the world, but the material form of an ecological relationship.

Realization of «Victory» and «Defeat» frames in sports Internet-discourse: problem of focusing

The relevance of the problem of realization of the frames Victory and Defeat that are linguistically represented in the sports Internet-discourse is due to the fact that in the recent decades scholars both in Russia and abroad develop the theoretical grounds of discourse analysis and pay special attention to different kinds of institutional and professional discourses, and sports discourse possesses two important features aims and participants; thus, sports discourse belongs to the group of institutional discourses and is of great interest for researchers. The aim of the research became the identification of methods that are applied in order to change the focus of the frame; in the course of the study the author solves the following tasks: description of the constituents of the cognitive event model, carrying out linguistic research of sports Internet-discourse fragments and defining the pragmatic goals of the author that in turn influence the frame as a whole. The match reports which are found in the news sections of sport teams` websites were used as the research materials. The study is devoted to the headings of the reports and introductions to them. It is these parts of the articles that contain information about the match outcome that is the basis for the frames under analysis. In the article the following methods were applied: critical discourse analysis as well as quantitative and qualitative methods in the framework of content analysis. Lexical units that were singled out were analyzed from both morphological and semantic perspectives. The study of modern sports Internet-discourse has demonstrated that the authors of match reports tend not only to convey the information about the match results to the readers of the web-site but also to influence their opinion by forming a particular interpretation. The conducted analysis makes it possible to conclude that an intentional shift of focus frame is achieved with the help of various lexical units, word combinations and, especially, evaluative adjectives.

Difference in Somatosensory Event-Related Potentials in the Blind Subjects Leads to Better Performance in Tactile P300 BCI

In this study, we created 8-command P300 tactile brain-computer interface, running on minimally modified consumer Braille display, and tested it on 10 blind subjects and 10 sighted controls with two stimuli types, differing in size. Larger stimuli provide better BCI performance both in blind and sighted participants than smaller stimuli. With large stimuli, median target selection accuracy in the blind group was 95%, which is 27% more than sighted controls (p < 0.05), suggesting that blind subjects are not only able to use tactile brain-computer interface but also can achieve superior results in comparison with sighted subjects. The difference in event-related potentials between groups is located in frontocentral sites around 300 ms post-stimulus and corresponds with early cognitive event-related potential components. Blind subjects have higher amplitude and shorter latency of ERPs. This effect was consistent across stimuli types. This is the first study to evaluate differences in event-related potentials between blind and sighted subjects in a BCI-specific task.

Modeling artificial agents’ actions in context – a deontic cognitive event ontology

Although there have been efforts to integrate Semantic Web technologies and artificial agents related AI research approaches, they remain relatively isolated from each other. Herein, we introduce a new ontology framework designed to support the knowledge representation of artificial agents’ actions within the context of the actions of other autonomous agents and inspired by standard cognitive architectures. The framework consists of four parts: 1) an event ontology for information pertaining to actions and events; 2) an epistemic ontology containing facts about knowledge, beliefs, perceptions and communication; 3) an ontology concerning future intentions, desires, and aversions; and, finally, 4) a deontic ontology for modeling obligations and prohibitions which limit agents’ actions. The architecture of the ontology framework is inspired by deontic cognitive event calculus as well as epistemic and deontic logic. We also describe a case study in which the proposed DCEO ontology supports autonomous vehicle navigation.