Quantifying children's sensorimotor experience: Child body-object interaction ratings for 3,359 English words

Body-object interaction (BOI) ratings measure how easily the human body can physically interact with a word's referent. Previous research has found that words higher in BOI tend to be processed more quickly and accurately in tasks such as lexical decision, semantic decision, and syntactic classification, suggesting that sensorimotor information is an important aspect of lexical knowledge. However, limited research has examined the importance of sensorimotor information from a developmental perspective. One barrier to addressing such theoretical questions has been a lack of semantic dimension ratings that take into account child sensorimotor experience. The goal of the current study was to collect Child BOI rating norms. Parents of children aged 5 – 9-years-old were asked to rate words according to how easily an average 6-year-old child can interact with each word’s referent. The relationships of Child and Adult BOI ratings with other lexical semantic dimensions were assessed, as well as the relationships of Child and Adult BOI ratings with age of acquisition. Child BOI ratings were more strongly related to valence and sensory experience ratings than Adult BOI ratings and were a better predictor of three different measures of age of acquisition. The results suggest that child-centric ratings such as those reported here provide a more sensitive measure of children’s experience that can be used to address theoretical questions in embodied cognition from a developmental perspective.

Intensification for discursive evaluation: a corpus-pragmatic view

The phenomenon of intensification is pervasive in natural language use. Previous research has extensively discussed what intensifiers are and how they are associated with semantic developments. Corpora prove to be a useful tool to examine the semantic dimension of intensifiers. What has been overlooked, however, is the internal structure(s) of meaning conveyed by “intensifier + adjective” constructions in naturally occurring text and speech. The semantic relationship between the intensifier and the modified adjective needs to be made more explicit to address the pragmatics of intensification. Using BNC Sampler (a part-of-speech tagged corpus of general English) this study examines the most frequently used adjective intensifiers in both written and spoken discourse. Concordance lines generated for the adjective intensifiers are used to illustrate evaluative expressions in context. The observation contributes to debates on the pragmatics of intensifiers for evaluative meaning construction and transmission.

On Conceptual Revision and Aesthetic Judgement

This paper calls into question the view typically attributed to Kant that aesthetic judgements are particularist, resisting all conceptual determination. Instead, it claims that Kant conceives of aesthetic judgements, particularly of art, as playing an important role in the revision of concepts: one sense in which aesthetic judgements, as Kant defines them, ‘find a universal’ for a given particular. To understand the relation between artistic judgements and concepts requires that we consider what I call Kant’s diachronic account of aesthetic ideas, or how such judgements unfold in the course of communication and reflection. My reading draws Kant much closer to debates in the philosophy of art on the semantic dimension of artworks. Here, illuminating the way in which aesthetic judgements about art can play a role in conceptual revision allows us to make sense of the way in which modern artworks contest concepts rather than merely presenting or expressing them.

Understanding Plum Rain’s Effects on Urban Public Bicycle Unavailability Considering Both Place Semantics and Riding Distance

The effect of the plum rain weather event on cycling trips reflects the climate resilience of the public bicycle system. However, quantitative studies regarding the impact of plum rain on public bicycle users and corresponding spatial heterogeneity have not been paid much attention. This paper explores the spatial pattern of affected levels from the perspective of cyclist number, place semantics and riding distance. Corresponding public bicycle trips in normal weather are predicted by spatial-temporal random forest prediction. GIS neighborhood statistics and clustering algorithms are adapted to analyze and visualize the affected levels using origin-destination data of public bicycle trips and point of interest data of city public facilities. It is proved that there is an obvious spatial difference in affected levels by plum rain from three dimensions. In the dimension of the number of cyclists, the docking stations with different affected levels are distributed across the whole urban area. In the place semantic dimension, the docking stations with high affected levels show a clustered zonal distribution in the city center. In the dimension of cycling distance, the docking stations with high affected levels are mainly distributed in the periphery of the central urban area. The study theoretically expands the impact mechanism of environment and active transport. It is beneficial for the early monitoring, warning and assessment of climate change risks for public bicycle planning and management.

Cultivating Archaeological Landscape

The paper proposes an interdisciplinary exploration in order to define a set of strategies and tools oriented at planning/design/management of archaeological landscapes, especially featured by productive layers. The article adopts as a key dimension the “cultivating” approach, which can become a fertile ground for experimentation for developing sustainable and innovative planning methodologies to be applied in layered landscapes. In an extended semantic dimension, the term cultivation can be interpreted as a continuous attitude of taking care of (archaeological) places over time, to preserve and regenerate resources for the future in a holistic vision, also considering economic sustainability and liveability for inhabitants and local fauna. The cultivating approach can preserve heritage places by an active and inventive conservation, also fostering biodiversity and temporal diversity. As a case study, the article proposes the Landscape Masterplan for the Baratti and Populonia Archaeological Park.

Supplements without Bidimensionalism

In seminal work, Potts 2005 claimed that the behavior of 'supplements'—appositive relative clauses (ARCs) and nominals—offers a powerful argument in favor of a multidimensional semantics, one in which certain expressions fail to interact scopally with various operators because their meaning is located in a new semantic dimension. Focusing on ARCs, with data from English, French and German (Poschmann 2018), we explore an alternative to Potts’s bidimensional account in which (i) appositives may be syntactically attached with matrix scope, despite their appearance in embedded positions (McCawley 1981); (ii) contra McCawley, they may also be syntactically attached within the scope of other operators, in which case they semantically interact with them; (iii) they are semantically conjoined with the rest of the sentence, but (iv) they give rise to nontrivial projection facts when they do not have matrix scope. In effect, our analysis accounts for most of the complexity of these data by positing a more articulated syntax and pragmatics, while eschewing the use of a new dimension of meaning.

Quantum Process Semantics

The paper describes a model of subjective goal-oriented semantics extending standard "view-from-nowhere" approach. Generalization is achieved by using a spherical vector structure essentially supplementing the classical bit with circular dimension, organizing contexts according to their subjective causal ordering. This structure, known in quantum theory as qubit, is shown to be universal representation of contextual-situated meaning at the core of human cognition. Subjective semantic dimension, inferred from fundamental oscillation dynamics, is discretized to six process-stage prototypes expressed in common language. Predicted process-semantic map of natural language terms is confirmed by the open-source word2vec data.

Introduction: the role of the lexicon in actionality

Actionality (also referred to by labels such as “lexical aspect” or “aktionsart”) is the semantic dimension that encodes the constituent phases and boundaries of situations. Despite its central role in aspectual interpretation, careful language-specific descriptions and typological surveys of actional systems have been rare thus far. In this introduction, we describe the steps that lead to the compilation of the present special issue. We discuss several theoretical and methodological challenges that both field linguists and typologists face when investigating actional systems in the languages of the world and we point out some of the important insights to be gained from such endeavors. We then proceed to give an overview of the individual and varied contributions that make up this issue.

FABULA WHEEL AND PLOT MOVEMENT: HOW THE MOTIVIC COMPLEX WORKS IN A.P. CHEKHOV

The article considers the plot-forming potential of the invariant Chekhov pattern, which involves paired characters - the doctor and the investigator. Using the example of several texts ("Perpetuum mobile", "On Official Duty", "Drama on the hunt", "Investigator", "Ward No. 6"), we can see how this template works in different genre contexts (romantic novel, Christmas story, detective story) and how these contexts intersect with each other. Common to consider situational template are the motives of feeling and the vicious circle, which charged a mixed modality and intersect with the motive of theatricality, which, in turn, is associated with professional reflection, combining the figures of doctor, investigator and writer. Special attention is paid to the story "Drama on the Hunt", which is updated as a metatext, in which - against the background of the doubling of the character system - an additional semantic dimension of hunting as a narrative strategy is formed. The final texts of the group under consideration can be considered the stories "On Official Duty" and "Ward No. 6", in which a sense of duty and professional guilt is comprehended through an updated motivational complex.