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Diagrammatology investigates the role of diagrams for thought and knowledge. Based on the general doctrine of diagrams in Charles Peirce's mature work, Diagrammatology claims diagrams to constitute a centerpiece of epistemology. This book reflects Peirce's work on the issue in Husserl's contemporaneous doctrine of categorical intuition and charts the many unnoticed similarities between Peircean semiotics and early Husserlian phenomenology.
Excavating the Mind deals with the relationship between the material culture of humans, i.e. our technologies, arts and environments, and our mental worlds. Emphasizing the close interdependence of mind and matter, the volume resonates with current developments within sociology, psychology and the cognitive sciences, yet it aims to supplement the focus on modern, predominantly Western societies and individuals with studies of different cultural contexts and processes in the evolutionary and historical past as well as the ethnographic present. With contributions from cognitive and social archaeology as well as anthropology, semiotics and the history of religion, the book combines well-illustrated case studies covering a wide chronological and geographic span - from Neolithic Europe to the present-day South Pacific - with incisive discussion of particular theoretical issues in the study of mind and material culture. Excavating the Mind is an original contribution to the multidisciplinary debate on the uniquely human entanglement of complex material cultures and mental worlds.
Integrating research in linguistics, philosophy, semiotics, neurophenomenology, and literary studies, The Communicative Mind presents a thought-provoking and multifaceted investigation into linguistic meaning construction. It explores the various ways in which the intersubjectivity of communicating interactants manifests itself in language structure and use and argues for the indispensability of dialogue as a semantic resource in cognition. The view of the mind as highly conditioned by the domain of interpersonal communication is supported by an extensive range of empirical linguistic data from fiction, poetry and written and spoken everyday language, including rhetorically “creative” me...
When the Germans march into Denmark, Baron Henrik Ahlefeldt exchanges his nobility for anonymity, assuming a new identity so he can secretly row messages for the Danish Resistance across the waters to Sweden. American physicist Dr. Else Jensen refuses to leave Copenhagen and abandon her research--her life's dream. While printing resistance newspapers, she hears stories of the movement's legendary Havmand--the merman--and wonders if the mysterious and silent shipyard worker living in the same boardinghouse has something to hide. When the Occupation cracks down on the Danes, these two passionate people will discover if there is more power in speech . . . or in silence. Bestselling author of more than a dozen WWII novels, Sarah Sundin offers pens another story of ordinary people responding to extraordinary circumstances with faith, fortitude, and hope for a brighter future.
Processes constitute the world of human experience - from nature to cognition to social reality. Yet our philosophical and scientific theories of nature and experience have traditionally prioritized concepts for static objects and structures. The essays collected here call for a review of the role of dynamic categories in the language of theories. They present old and new descriptive tools for the modelling of dynamic domains, and argue for the merits of process-based explanations in ontology, cognitive science, semiotics, linguistics, philosophy of mind, robotics, theoretical biology, music theory, and philosophy of chemistry and physics. The collection is of interest to professional researchers in any of these fields; it establishes - for the very first time - crossdisciplinary contact among recent process-based research movements and might witness a conceptual paradigm shift in the making.
In The Evolution of Complex Spatial Expressions within the Romance Family, Thomas Hoelbeek offers a corpus-based historical study of a group of expressions in French and Italian. Applying a functional approach, he tackles adpositions containing the French noun travers or the Italian noun traverso, previously never analysed from a diachronic perspective. This study enriches our knowledge of the expressions analysed and their functioning in the past, but also in present-day French and Italian, providing diachronic observations regarding functional notions put to the test. Thomas Hoelbeek’s work also contributes to a better understanding of the grammaticalisation mechanisms of complex constructions, and shows that typologically related languages may evolve differently in their ways of representing space.
This book is about the interrelationship between nature, semiosis, metarepresentation and (self-)consciousness, and the role played by metarepresentation in evolution. Representations must have emerged via self-organization from non-representational systems (found in physics, chemistry and biology). Major steps have been the evolution of molecules, macromolecules, life, and finally cultural and symbolic systems. Representations and signs are therefore parts of a huge, possibly branching «ladder of beings». Metarepresentations - images representing images, language about language and language-use, thoughts about thoughts - constitute a fascinating theme within such diverse areas of research...
The order and behaviour of the premodifier (an adjective, or other modifying word that appears before a noun) has long been a puzzle to syntacticians and semanticists. Why can we say 'the actual red ball', but not 'the red actual ball'? And why, conversely, do some other premodifiers have free variation in sentences; for example we can say both 'German and English speakers' and 'English and German speakers'? Why do some premodifiers change the meaning of a phrase in some contexts; for example 'young man', can mean 'boyfriend', rather than 'man who is young'? Drawing on a corpus of over 4,000 examples of English premodifiers from a range of genres such as advertising, fiction and scientific texts, and across several varieties of English, this book synthesises research into premodifiers and provides a new explanation of their behaviour, order and use.
The French mathematician René Thom (Fields medal 1958) died in 2002. In this volume his contributions to biology, semiotics and linguistics are discussed by a group of scholars who have continued his work and have shaped the new paradigm of dynamic semiotics and linguistics. Thom's heritage is full of revolutionary ideas and deep insights which stem from a rich intuition and a sharp awareness of the current state of the sciences, including their potentials and risks. The contributions to this volume are elaborations of papers given at a colloquium at the International Center for Semiotics and Linguistics of the University of Urbino (Italy), in 2005. The central concern of this volume is sem...
This book investigates how language, embodiment, objects, and settings in historically shaped communities combine, and form human actions.