Preschoolers’ use and exploration of concepts related to scientific phenomena in preschool

The study described in this paper concerns science education in preschool, more specifically how young children in preschool settings invent, develop and explore science and scientific concepts in problem-solving and communicative situations. The aim of the paper is to discuss young children´s concept creation and draw conclusions for early science education. The method used was a secondary analysis of empirical material drawn from three previous studies carried out by the authors. Examples of preschool children’s use of language were extracted and was, for the purpose of this study, analyzed with a new focus on children’s use of concepts. The re-analysis draws from Vygotsky’s theoretical framework on children’s conceptual development and appropriation of new concepts (Vygotsky, 1934/1999; Åkerblom 2011) and from the later Wittgenstein (1986) on the role of language meaning in understanding. The findings underline the importance of allowing preschool children to invent, develop and explore science and technology concepts, as well as implications for preschool teachers to create dialogic spaces for the children to do so. The limitations of the study are however that it is based on a limited number of examples and even though it can give implications and point out directions, is not conclusive and should be followed by further research.

Epistemological Challenges Against Sociolinguistics

Sociolinguistics is a linguistics science that seeks to express the values of life that are revealed in language. Sociolinguistics is stuck in the study of language, which is purely empirical. This assessment can be observed when sociolinguistics only comes to the study of language, which reveals the linguistic system. It is essential to point out the other side of sociolinguistics that has not been explored, namely the aspect of language meaning. In this case, epistemology tries to challenge the existence of sociology concerning the role and function of sociolinguistics itself. Through literature study, Hermeneutics and heuristics are consistently and consistently used as the basis for the research method in this case. It can be concluded that sociolinguistics must begin to view language as a form of culture that becomes a social system and acts as a tool for human development.

Translating meaning as cognitive socio-cultural systems.A conceptual approach to the translation of plurilingualism in postcolonial literary discourse in Portuguese

Recent approaches to language, meaning and cognition contend that par-ticipants in linguistic interaction construct a mental representation of their understanding of discourse on the basis of linguistic expressions, world or experiential knowledge, socially-shared beliefs, and the imagination. Fo-cusing on the implications the coexistence of different languages has for the construction of a cognitive culture system, this paper argues that choosing monolingualism for the translation of postcolonial plurilingual texts impos-es semantic limitations, which may result in a dissimilar, domesticated, representation of the recreated reality. Besides taking an ethical stand, this paper also claims that preserving the plurilingualism of these texts responds to the wish to invite readers to open new mental spaces, where the cognitive system of the translated culture can be located. The analysis of examples from the translation into English of postcolonial texts in Portuguese will show strategies to achieve this aim.

Anthropocentrism in the Structure and Description of Language

Although the connection between language, meaning and culture has been dealt with on several occasions in Serbianlinguistics, we thought it appropriate to point out several examples of the lexical-grammatical structure of the Serbian language that illustrate the anthropocentric view of relations in the world immediately surrounding man. In order to realise our intention, we opted for verb constructions in which we can see the semantic transition from the original to the secondary domains, where the original domain primarily indicates the state of affairs typical of man or living beings in general.

The Singleton Fallacy: Why Current Critiques of Language Models Miss the Point

This paper discusses the current critique against neural network-based Natural Language Understanding solutions known as language models. We argue that much of the current debate revolves around an argumentation error that we refer to as the singleton fallacy: the assumption that a concept (in this case, language, meaning, and understanding) refers to a single and uniform phenomenon, which in the current debate is assumed to be unobtainable by (current) language models. By contrast, we argue that positing some form of (mental) “unobtanium” as definiens for understanding inevitably leads to a dualistic position, and that such a position is precisely the original motivation for developing distributional methods in computational linguistics. As such, we argue that language models present a theoretically (and practically) sound approach that is our current best bet for computers to achieve language understanding. This understanding must however be understood as a computational means to an end.

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

One More Thing

A medieval pragmatic orientation in grammar emerged from both theoretical and practical knowledge. Medieval pragmatic approaches to language actualized an alternate (Laclau and Mouffe [2000] would say “antagonistic”) hegemony, a discursive space of thinking differently about language, meaning, and communication. Pragmatically oriented grammarians reanalyzed many examples of (propositional) speech found in medieval logic texts and more formalist grammatical writing and arrived at different conclusions. They found descriptive value and analytic productivity in what others regarded as fallacies and errors. In effect, pragmatically oriented grammarians actualized as meaningful potential alternatives in the linguistic system. Some of those alternatives are exemplified in poetic discourse and how heretics talk.

Medicine in philately: History of Quarantine

Objectives This article provides an overview through philately on the history of the quarantine ap-plications which dominate the whole world nowadays because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Content In this review article, the History of Quarantine is enriched with philatelic examples and tried to explain. Summary Quarantine is defined as the isolation of animals, people, or land to prevent the spread of diseases or pests. It is different from medical isolation, which is for people who have been infected with the disease. The word “quarantine” comes from quarantine, Italian language meaning “40 days”. This is because of the 40-day isolation of ships and people practiced as a measure of disease prevention related to the plague. This practice was named “Quaranta” in the Republic of Venice, whose economy is based on trade, by keeping the ships coming to the city in the sea for 40 days off the city, so that the capital Venice will not be infected with epidemics. Outlook People’s efforts to take precautions against a possible pandemic risk are a practice that has been going on for ages. Quarantine, which is among the measures to prevent the spread of infectious diseases, includes measures taken by avoiding contact with humans and animals in suspected cases exposed to infectious diseases for a period equal to the longest incubation period of the disease.