Sound-symbolism is the nonarbitrary link between the sound and meaning of a word. Japanese-speaking children performed better in a verb generalization task when they were taught novel sound-symbolic verbs, created based on existing Japanese sound-symbolic words, than novel nonsound-symbolic verbs (Imai, Kita, Nagumo, & Okada, 2008). A question remained as to whether the Japanese children had picked up regularities in the Japanese sound-symbolic lexicon or were sensitive to universal sound-symbolism. The present study aimed to provide support for the latter. In (...) a verb generalization task, English-speaking 3-year-olds were taught novel sound-symbolic verbs, created based on Japanese sound-symbolism, or novel nonsound-symbolic verbs. English-speaking children performed better with the sound-symbolic verbs, just like Japanese-speaking children. We concluded that children are sensitive to universal sound-symbolism and can utilize it in word learning and generalization, regardless of their native language. (shrink)

Iconicity is a fundamental property of spoken and signed languages. However, quantitative analysis of sound-meaning association in Chinese has not been extensively developed, and little is known about the impact of sound symbolism in children’s literature. As sound symbolism is supposed to be a universal cognitive phenomenon, this research seeks to investigate whether iconic structures of Mandarin are embodied in native Chinese speakers’ language experience. The paper describes a case study of Chinese storybooks with the goal of testing whether phonosemantic (...) association is prominent between name sounds and character features. A quantitative method was used to investigate the distribution of different phonological units in character denomination depending on their physical and emotional traits. The results show that phonemes and syllable combination patterns are closely related to perceivable character features. By comparing schematic mapping in Chinese with other languages, the study illuminates a cross-linguistic tendency in addition to a Chinese-specific iconic relation between sound and meaning. (shrink)

Sound symbolism is a non‐arbitrary correspondence between sound and meaning. The majority of studies on sound symbolism have focused on consonants and vowels, and the sound‐symbolic properties of suprasegmentals, particularly phonation types, have been largely neglected. This study examines the size and shape symbolism of four phonation types: modal and creaky voices, falsetto, and whisper. Japanese speakers heard 12 novel words (e.g., /íbi/, /ápa/) pronounced with the four types of phonation and rated the size and roundedness/pointedness each of the 48 (...) stimuli seemed to represent on seven‐point scales. The results showed that phonation types as well as consonantal and vocalic features influenced the ratings. Creaky voice was associated with larger and more pointed images than modal voice, which was in turn associated with larger and more pointed images than whisper. Falsetto was also associated with roundedness but not with smallness. These results shed new light on the acoustic approaches to sound symbolism and suggest the significance of phonation types and other suprasegmental features in the phenomenon. (shrink)

Natural language contains many examples of sound-symbolism, where the form of the word carries information about its meaning. Such systematicity is more prevalent in the words children acquire first, but arbitrariness dominates during later vocabulary development. Furthermore, systematicity appears to promote learning category distinctions, which may become more important as the vocabulary grows. In this study, we tested the relative costs and benefits of sound-symbolism for word learning as vocabulary size varies. Participants learned form-meaning mappings for words which were either (...) congruent or incongruent with regard to sound-symbolic relations. For the smaller vocabulary, sound-symbolism facilitated learning individual words, whereas for larger vocabularies sound-symbolism supported learning category distinctions. The changing properties of form-meaning mappings according to vocabulary size may reflect the different ways in which language is learned at different stages of development. (shrink)

This review covers experimental approaches to sound-symbolism—from infants to adults, and from Sapir’s foundational studies to twenty-first century product naming. It synthesizes recent behavioral, developmental, and neuroimaging work into a systematic overview of the cross-modal correspondences that underpin iconic links between form and meaning. It also identifies open questions and opportunities, showing how the future course of experimental iconicity research can benefit from an integrated interdisciplinary perspective. Combining insights from psychology and neuroscience with evidence from natural languages provides us with (...) opportunities for the experimental investigation of the role of sound-symbolism in language learning, language processing, and communication. The review finishes by describing how hypothesis-testing and model-building will help contribute to a cumulative science of sound-symbolism in human language. (shrink)

Sound symbolism refers to non‐arbitrary mappings between the sounds of words and their meanings and is often studied by pairing auditory pseudowords such as “maluma” and “takete” with rounded and pointed visual shapes, respectively. However, it is unclear what auditory properties of pseudowords contribute to their perception as rounded or pointed. Here, we compared perceptual ratings of the roundedness/pointedness of large sets of pseudowords and shapes to their acoustic and visual properties using a novel application of representational similarity analysis (RSA). (...) Representational dissimilarity matrices (RDMs) of the auditory and visual ratings of roundedness/pointedness were significantly correlated crossmodally. The auditory perceptual RDM correlated significantly with RDMs of spectral tilt, the temporal fast Fourier transform (FFT), and the speech envelope. Conventional correlational analyses showed that ratings of pseudowords transitioned from rounded to pointed as vocal roughness (as measured by the harmonics‐to‐noise ratio, pulse number, fraction of unvoiced frames, mean autocorrelation, shimmer, and jitter) increased. The visual perceptual RDM correlated significantly with RDMs of global indices of visual shape (the simple matching coefficient, image silhouette, image outlines, and Jaccard distance). Crossmodally, the RDMs of the auditory spectral parameters correlated weakly but significantly with those of the global indices of visual shape. Our work establishes the utility of RSA for analysis of large stimulus sets and offers novel insights into the stimulus parameters underlying sound symbolism, showing that sound‐to‐shape mapping is driven by acoustic properties of pseudowords and suggesting audiovisual cross‐modal correspondence as a basis for language users' sensitivity to this type of sound symbolism. (shrink)

An analysis of a valenced corpus of English words revealed that words that rhyme with slurs are rated more poorly than their synonyms. What at first might seem like a bizarre coincidence turns out to be a robust feature of slurs, one arising from their phonetic structure. We report novel data on phonaesthetic preferences, showing that a particular class of phonemes are both particularly disliked, and overrepresented in slurs. We argue that phonaesthetic associations have been an overlooked source of some (...) of the more peculiar, arational aspects of slurs. We conclude by drawing broader morals about the evolution of the lexicon. (shrink)

Previous research shows that simultaneously executed grasp and vocalization responses are faster when the precision grip is performed with the vowel [i] and the power grip is performed with the vowel [ɑ]. Research also shows that observing an object that is graspable with a precision or power grip can activate the grip congruent with the object. Given the connection between vowel articulation and grasping, this study explores whether grasp‐related size of observed objects can influence not only grasp responses but also (...) vowel pronunciation. The participants had to categorize small and large objects into natural and manufactured categories by pronouncing the vowel [i] or [ɑ]. As predicted, [i] was produced faster when the object's grasp‐related size was congruent with the precision grip while [ɑ] was produced faster when the size was congruent with the power grip (Experiment 1). The effect was not, however, observed when the participants were presented with large objects that are not typically grasped by the power grip (Experiment 2). This study demonstrates that vowel production is systematically influenced by grasp‐related size of a viewed object, supporting the account that sensory‐motor processes related to grasp planning and representing grasp‐related properties of viewed objects interact with articulation processes. The paper discusses these findings in the context of size–sound symbolism, suggesting that mechanisms that transform size‐grasp affordances into corresponding grasp‐ and articulation‐related motor programs might provide a neural basis for size‐sound phenomena that links small objects with closed‐front vowels and large objects with open‐back vowels. (shrink)

Although language has long been regarded as a primarily arbitrary system, sound symbolism, or non-arbitrary correspondences between the sound of a word and its meaning, also exists in natural language. Previous research suggests that listeners are sensitive to sound symbolism. However, little is known about the specificity of these mappings. This study investigated whether sound symbolic properties correspond to specific meanings, or whether these properties generalize across semantic dimensions. In three experiments, native English-speaking adults heard sound symbolic foreign words for (...) dimensional adjective pairs and for each foreign word, selected a translation among English antonyms that either matched or mismatched with the correct meaning dimension. Listeners agreed more reliably on the English translation for matched relative to mismatched dimensions, though reliable cross-dimensional mappings did occur. These findings suggest that although sound symbolic properties generalize to meanings that may share overlapping semantic features, sound symbolic mappings offer semantic specificity. (shrink)

Research on the relation between sound and meaning in language has reported substantial evidence for implicit associations between articulatory–acoustic characteristics of phonemes and emotions. In the present study, we specifically tested the relation between the acoustic properties of a text and its emotional tone as perceived by readers. To this end, we asked participants to assess the emotional tone of single stanzas extracted from a large variety of poems. The selected stanzas had either an extremely high, a neutral, or an (...) extremely low average formant dispersion. To assess the average formant dispersion per stanza, all words were phonetically transcribed and the distance between the first and second formant per vowel was calculated. Building on a long tradition of research on associations between sound frequency on the one hand and non‐acoustic concepts such as size, strength, or happiness on the other hand, we hypothesized that stanzas with an extremely high average formant dispersion would be rated lower on items referring to Potency (dominance) and higher on items referring to Activity (arousal) and Evaluation (emotional valence). The results confirmed our hypotheses for the dimensions of Potency and Evaluation, but not for the dimension of Activity. We conclude that, at least in poetic language, extreme values of acoustic features of vowels are a significant predictor for the emotional tone of a text. (shrink)

Cognitive Science, Volume 45, Issue 11, November 2021.

Swear words of English and French, both real and fictional ones, significantly tend to contain the least sonorous consonants, compared to the rest of the lexicon. What can explain the overrepresentation of such sounds among swear words? This might be a case of sound symbolism, when sounds are unconsciously associated with a meaning. We examine the pragmatic vs. semantic nature of the meaning involved, as well as two explanations in terms of iconicity. This unusual sound-meaning pairing would involve an emotional-contextual, (...) non-truth-conditional meaning, and be powerful enough that it influences a strong sociolinguistic convention – which words are swear words and which ones are not – suggesting that sounds convey meaning in yet unsuspected ways. (shrink)

Contrary to the assumption of arbitrariness in modern linguistics, sound symbolism, which is the non-arbitrary relationship between sounds and meanings, exists. Sound symbolism, including the “Bouba–Kiki” effect, implies the universality of such relationships; individuals from different cultural and linguistic backgrounds can similarly relate sound-symbolic words to referents, although the extent of these similarities remains to be fully understood. Here, we examined if subjects from different countries could similarly infer the surface texture properties from words that sound-symbolically represent hardness in Japanese. (...) We prepared Japanese sound-symbolic words of which novelty was manipulated by a genetic algorithm. Japanese speakers in Japan and English speakers in both Singapore and the United States rated these words based on surface texture properties, as well as familiarity. The results show that hardness-related words were rated as harder and rougher than softness-related words, regardless of novelty and countries. Multivariate analyses of the ratings classified the hardness-related words along the hardness-softness dimension at over 80% accuracy, regardless of country. Multiple regression analyses revealed that the number of speech sounds /g/ and /k/ predicted the ratings of the surface texture properties in non-Japanese countries, suggesting a systematic relationship between phonetic features of a word and perceptual quality represented by the word across culturally and linguistically diverse samples. (shrink)

In medieval epics such as the Byzantine Digenis Akritis and the Persian Šāhnāme, dragons are usually considered to be mere opponents of the hero. But the symbolism attached to them is far from being exclusively that of a monstruous creature fighting a good hero. The motif of the three-headed dragon combines an allegorical meaning with a mythological framework. The confrontation between a dragon and an apparently weaker protagonist like a maiden or a younger son highlights the latters’ inner strength and (...) intelligence, while dangerously revealing the dragon’s possession of these human qualities. On an axiological level, the dragon’s symbolism displays the same variety: the dragon is a malevolent creature, and the archetype of the enemy, but also serves as an auxiliary to sound out men’s hearts, as in Fereydūn’s trial of his three sons. The dragon furthermore symbolizes power when painted on banners. When united to its celestial foe, the dragon’s lineage leads to the birth of the greatest hero of the Persian epic, Rostam. Thus the dragon ultimately guarantees the world’s balance between good and evil. (shrink)

Certain nonwords, like maluma and takete, are associated with roundness and sharpness, respectively. However, this has typically been demonstrated using explicit tasks. We investigated whether this association would be detectable using a more implicit measure—a sequential priming task. We began with a replication of the standard Maluma/Takete effect before examining whether round and sharp nonword primes facilitated the categorization of congruent shapes. We found modest evidence of a priming effect in response accuracy. We next examined whether nonword primes affected categorization (...) of ambiguous shapes, using visual and auditory primes. We found that ambiguous shapes were categorized as round more often following the presentation of a round nonword. This suggests that phonemes may activate related shape information which then affects the processing of shapes, and that this association emerges even when participants are not explicitly searching for it. (shrink)

A classic example of the arbitrary relation between the way a word sounds and its meaning is that microorganism is a very long word that refers to a very small entity, whereas whale is a very short word that refers to something very big. This example, originally presented in Hockett's list of language's design features, has been often cited over the years, not only by those discussing the arbitrary nature of language, but also by researchers of sound symbolism. While the (...) two groups disagreed regarding the role of arbitrariness and sound symbolism in language, they both agreed there is a nonsound symbolic relation between word length and entity size in this case. This paper shows that the length of the words whale and microorganism in fact reflects a sound symbolic pattern. An analysis of >600 languages from >100 language families shows that languages use longer words to denote the concept small than they do to denote the concept big. The paper thus shows how explicit judgments might differ from implicit cognitive association and the problem of relying on these in sound symbolism research. (shrink)

Language maps signals onto meanings through the use of two distinct types of structure. First, the space of meanings is discretized into categories that are shared by all users of the language. Second, the signals employed by the language are compositional: The meaning of the whole is a function of its parts and the way in which those parts are combined. In three iterated learning experiments using a vast, continuous, open-ended meaning space, we explore the conditions under which both structured (...) categories and structured signals emerge ex nihilo. While previous experiments have been limited to either categorical structure in meanings or compositional structure in signals, these experiments demonstrate that when the meaning space lacks clear preexisting boundaries, more subtle morphological structure that lacks straightforward compositionality—as found in natural languages—may evolve as a solution to joint pressures from learning and communication. (shrink)

Psychologists have used experimental methods to study language for more than a century. However, only with the recent availability of large-scale linguistic databases has a more complete picture begun to emerge of how language is actually used, and what information is available as input to language acquisition. Analyses of such “big data” have resulted in reappraisals of key assumptions about the nature of language. As an example, we focus on corpus-based research that has shed new light on the arbitrariness of (...) the sign: the longstanding assumption that the relationship between the sound of a word and its meaning is arbitrary. The results reveal a systematic relationship between the sound of a word and its meaning, which is stronger for early acquired words. Moreover, the analyses further uncover a systematic relationship between words and their lexical categories—nouns and verbs sound differently from each other—affecting how we learn new words and use them in sentences. Together, these results point to a division of labor between arbitrariness and systematicity in sound-meaning mappings. We conclude by arguing in favor of including “big data” analyses into the language scientist's methodological toolbox. (shrink)

It is being increasingly recognized that the Saussurean dictum of “the arbitrariness of the linguistic sign” is in conflict with the pervasiveness of the phenomenon commonly known as “sound symbolism”. After first presenting a historical overview of the debate, however, we conclude that both positions have been exaggerated, and that an adequate explanation of sound symbolism is still lacking. How can there, for example, be (perceived) similarity between expressionsand contents across different sensory modalities? We offer an answer, based on the (...) Peircian notion of iconic ground, and G. Sonesson’s distinction betweenprimary and secondary iconicity. Furthermore, we describe an experimental study, in a paradigm first pioneered by W. Kohler, and recently popularized by V.Ramachandran, in which we varied vowels and consonants in fictive word-forms, and conclude that both types of sounds play a role in perceiving an iconic ground between the word-forms and visual figures. The combination of historical conceptual analysis, semiotic explication and psychological experimentationpresented in this article is characteristic of the emerging paradigm of cognitive semiotics. (shrink)

Previous studies have shown that Chinese speakers and non-Chinese speakers exhibit different patterns of cross-modal congruence for the lexical tones of Mandarin Chinese, depending on which features of the pitch they attend to. But is this pattern of language-specific listening a conscious cultural strategy or an automatic processing effect? If automatic, does it also apply when the same pitch contours no longer sound like speech? Implicit Association Tests (IATs) provide an indirect measure of cross-modal association. In a series of IAT (...) studies, conducted with participants with three kinds of language backgrounds (Chinese-dominant bilinguals, Chinese balanced bilinguals, and English speakers with no Chinese experience) we find language-specific congruence effects for Mandarin lexical tones but not for matched sine-wave stimuli. That is, for linguistic stimuli, non-Chinese speakers show advantages for pitch-height congruence (high-pointy, low-curvy); no congruence effects were found for Chinese speakers. For non-linguistic stimuli, all participant groups showed advantages for pitch-height congruence. The present findings suggest that non-lexical tone congruence (high-pointy, low-curvy) is a basic congruence pattern, and the acquisition of a language with lexical tone can alter this perception. (shrink)

I argue that an evolutionary adaptation for bodily mimesis, the volitional use of the body as a representational devise, is the “small difference” that gave rise to unique and yet pre-linguistic features of humanity such as imitation, pedagogy, intentional communication and the possibility of a cumulative, representational culture. Furthermore, it is this that made the evolution of language possible. In support for the thesis that speech evolved atop bodily mimesis and a transitional multimodal protolanguage, I review evidence for the extensive (...) presence of sound-symbolism in modern languages, for its psychological reality in adults, and for its contribution to language acquisition in children. On a meta-level, the argument is that dividing human cognitive-semiotic evolution into a sequence of stages is crucial for resolving classical dichotomies concerning human nature and language, which are both natural and cultural, both continuous with and discontinuous from those of animals. (shrink)

Iconicity, or the resemblance between form and meaning, is often ascribed to a special status and contrasted with default assumptions of arbitrariness in spoken language. But does iconicity in spoken language have a special status when it comes to learnability? A simple way to gauge learnability is to see how well something is retrieved from memory. We can further contrast this with guessability, to see (1) whether the ease of guessing the meanings of ideophones outperforms the rate at which they (...) are remembered; and (2) how willing participants’ are to reassess what they were taught in a prior task—a novel contribution of this study. We replicate prior guessing and memory tasks using ideophones and adjectives from Japanese, Korean, and Igbo. Our results show that although native Cantonese speakers guessed ideophone meanings above chance level, they memorized both ideophones and adjectives with comparable accuracy. However, response time data show that participants took significantly longer to respond correctly to adjective–meaning pairs—indicating a discrepancy in a cognitive effort that favored the recognition of ideophones. In a follow‐up reassessment task, participants who were taught foil translations were more likely to choose the true translations for ideophones rather than adjectives. By comparing the findings from our guessing and memory tasks, we conclude that iconicity is more accessible if a task requires participants to actively seek out sound‐meaning associations. (shrink)

Gesture-first theories of language origins often raise two unsubstantiated arguments against vocal origins. First, they argue that great ape vocal behavior is highly constrained, limited to a fixed, species-typical repertoire of reflexive calls. Second, they argue that vocalizations lack any significant potential to ground meaning through iconicity, or resemblance between form and meaning. This paper reviews the considerable evidence that debunks these two “myths”. Accumulating evidence shows that the great apes exercise voluntary control over their vocal behavior, including their breathing (...) apparatus, larynx, and supralaryngeal articulators. They are also able to learn new vocal behaviors, and even show some rudimentary ability for vocal imitation. In addition, an abundance of research demonstrates that the vocal modality affords rich potential for iconicity. People can understand iconicity in sound symbolism, and they can produce iconic vocalizations to communicate a diverse range of meanings. Thus, two of the primary arguments against vocal origins theories are not tenable. As an alternative, the paper concludes that the origins of language – going as far back as our last common ancestor with great apes – are rooted in iconicity in both gesture and vocalization. (shrink)

This chapter examines the ways in which French philosopher Gilles Deleuze offers conceptual resources for an enactive account of language, in particular his extensive consideration of language in The Logic of Sense. Specifically, Deleuze’s distinction between the nonsense of Lewis Carroll’s portmanteau creations and that of Antonin Artaud’s “transla- tion” of Carroll’s Jabberwocky highlights the need for an enactive, rather than merely embodied, approach to sense-making, particularly with regard to the general category of what Jakobson and Halle (1956) call “sound (...) symbolism”. (shrink)

To what extent do people attribute meanings to “nonsense” words? How general is such attribution of meaning? We used a set of words lacking conventional meanings to elicit drawings of made‐up creatures. Separate groups of participants rated the nonsense words and the drawings on several semantic dimensions and selected what name best corresponded to each creature. Despite lacking conventional meanings, “nonsense” words elicited a high level of consistency in the produced drawings. Meaning attributions made to nonsense words corresponded with meaning (...) attributions made by separate people to drawings that were inspired by the name. Naïve participants were able to recover the name that inspired the drawing with greater‐than‐chance accuracy. These results suggest that people make liberal and consistent use of non‐arbitrary relationships between forms and meanings.Open Research Badges This article has been awarded Open Materials and Open Data badges. All materials and data are publicly accessible via the Open Science Framework at https://osf.io/8juyc/. Learn more about the Open Practices badges from the Center for Open Science: https://osf.io/tvyxz/wiki. (shrink)

Sounds play crucial roles in a poem’s meaning (re)construction. Grasping the content of a literary work such as poetry often requires a profound interpretation of the underlying linguistic cum phonetic codes of its discourse. Extant studies on Nigerian children’s poetry have paid little attention to this aspect of meaning conception, thereby concentrating mainly on the surface lexical constructs. Hence, this study aims to examine imagic iconicity in children’s poems in order to demonstrate how a poem’s thematic realization is inferred through (...) the interpretation of the phonic and acoustic nature of the sounds employed. The study involves five poems: three from Ossie Enekwe’s Gentle Birds Come to me and two from Ikeogu Oke’s Song of Success and Other Poems for Children. The analysis is anchored to insights from Charles Sanders Peirce’s concept of the iconic sign, and exploits the action of acoustic and phonetic articulation of sounds to determine their functions and effects in the poems. The study reveals how specialized lexemic choices and onomatopoeia (kinaesthemes, phonaestheme or sound symbolism) in children’s poems make each poem functional and purposeful. Thus, children’s poetry contains language structures and configurations that transmit sense and embody what the poem is asserting in a way that interestingly engages the reader. (shrink)

One cue that may facilitate children's word learning is iconicity, or the correspondence between a word's form and meaning. Some have even proposed that iconicity in the early lexicon may serve to help children learn how to learn words, supporting the acquisition of even noniconic, or arbitrary, word–referent associations. However, this proposal remains untested. Here, we investigate the iconicity of caregivers’ speech to young children during a naturalistic free‐play session with novel stimuli and ask whether the iconicity of caregivers’ speech (...) facilitates children's learning of the noniconic novel names of those stimuli. Thirty‐four 1.5‐2‐year‐olds (19 girls; half monolingual English learners and half bilingual English‐Spanish learners) participated in a naturalistic free‐play task with their caregivers followed by a test of word‐referent retention. We found that caregivers’ use of iconicity, particularly in utterances in which they named the novel stimuli, was associated with the likelihood that children learned that novel name. This result held even when controlling for other factors associated with word learning, such as the concreteness and frequency of words in caregiver speech. Together, the results demonstrate that iconicity not only can serve to help children identify the referent of novel words (as in previous research) but can also support their ability to retain even noniconic word‐referent mappings. (shrink)

Identifico la naturaleza y el estatus epistémico de un sub-tipo de intuiciones lingüísticas que llamo intuiciones icónicas (IIs). Por medio de estas intuiciones, los hablantes son capaces de detectar correspondencias icónicas consistentes entre formas lingüísticas y significados. En primer lugar, identifico los principales rasgos del fenómeno lingüístico detectado por las IIs: el sonoro-simbolismo. Las correspondencias en las cuales consiste son icónicas porque están conformadas por diferentes tipos de semejanzas percibidas o asociaciones basadas en similitudes entre estímulos -uno de los cuales (...) es lingüístico. Luego analizo las principales caracterizaciones filosóficas y psicológicas alternativas de las intuiciones, y su rol evidencial, centrándome en las intuiciones lingüísticas. Sobre estas bases, concluyo que las intuiciones tendrían que ser concebidas como un constructo heterogéneo. En segundo lugar, argumento que las IIs no son ni creencias, disposiciones a la creencia, juicios o pareceres intelectuales con contenidos proposicionales, sino más bien pareceres perceptuales. Ellas consisten en la capacidad o sensibilidad para detectar correspondencias o asociaciones icónicas. En otras palabras, los inputs sonoros “rastrean” directamente los significados transmitidos por ellos. Se caracterizan por su peculiar fenomenología presentacional y su componente evaluativo. Ahora bien, de acuerdo al tipo de contenido y de procesamiento cognitivo involucrado, se puede distinguir entre las más puramente perceptuales, basadas en procesos asociativos y aquella que involucran experiencia acumulada, procesos analíticos y manipulación conceptual. Después de revisar la literatura psicolingüística experimental basada en intuiciones acerca del sonoro-simbolismo, argumento que las IIs son intuiciones de primer nivel, y como tales, una fuente confiable de evidencia directa y prima facie acerca de los rasgos icónicos en el lenguaje. Finalmente, argumento que estas IIs ofrecen una “ventana” privilegiada para explorar las relaciones entre lenguaje y percepción (y afecto/emoción). Concluyo argumentando que esta clase de intuición es un input no prescindible para la reflexión filosófica y la investigación científica sobre el lenguaje. Así, aunque defiendo la relevancia de las intuiciones para entender el significado lingüístico, las IIs no son de la misma clase ni requieren los mismos métodos para estudiarlas que aquellas que interesaron más a los filósofos. (shrink)

Iconicity refers to a resemblance between word form and meaning. Previous work has shown that iconic words are learned earlier and processed faster. Here, we examined whether iconic words are recognized better on a recognition memory task. We also manipulated the level at which items were encoded—with a focus on either their meaning or their form—in order to gain insight into the mechanism by which iconicity would affect memory. In comparison with non‐iconic words, iconic words were associated with a higher (...) false alarm rate, a lower d’ score, and a lower response criterion in Experiment 1. We did not observe any interaction between iconicity and encoding condition. To test the generalizability of these findings, we examined effects of iconicity in a recognition memory megastudy across 3880 items. After controlling for a variety of lexical and semantic variables, iconicity was predictive of more hits and false alarms, and a lower response criterion in this dataset. In Experiment 2, we examined whether these effects were due to increased feelings of familiarity for iconic items by including a familiar versus recollect decision. This experiment replicated the overall results of Experiment 1 and found that participants were more likely to categorize words that they had seen before as familiar (vs. recollected) if they were iconic. Together, these results demonstrate that iconicity has an effect on memory. We discuss implications for theories of iconicity. (shrink)

A radical, compelling study of the female voice.,Multi-contextual theorist Gladwell puts forward,her analysis of the polemic of feminist rhetorical,discourse as it presents a fresh and vital,approach to an anatomy of female subjectivity,through precise listening and the audacity to,speak aloud.

Blackpentecostal Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility investigates the relationship of aesthetic productions to modes of collective, social intellectual practice. Engaging black studies, queer theory, sound studies, literary theory, theological studies, continental philosophy and visual studies, Black Pentecostal Breath analyzes the ways otherwise modes of existence are disruptions of marginalization and violence.

François Viète is often regarded as the first modern mathematician on the grounds that he was the first to develop the literal notation, that is, the use of two sorts of letters, one for the unknown and the other for the known parameters of a problem. The fact that he achieved neither a modern conception of quantity nor a modern understanding of curves, both of which are explicit in Descartes’ Geometry, is to be explained on this view “by an incomplete (...) symbolization rather than by any obstacle intrinsic in the system.” Descartes’ Geometry provides only a “clearer expression” of themes already sounded in Viète’s work, one that perfects Viète’s literal calculus and gives it “its modern form”; it merely continues the “‘new’ and ‘pure’ algebra which Viète first established as the ‘general analytic art’.” It can seem, furthermore, that this must be right, that had there been some obstacle intrinsic to Viète’s system that barred the way to a modern conception of quantity and a modern understanding of curves, then Descartes’ Geometry would have had to have taken a very different form than it did. As it was, Descartes had only to improve Viète’s symbolism, free himself of the last vestiges of the ancient view of geometrical and arithmetical objects, and apply the new symbolism to the study of curves in order to achieve what Viète did not but could have. But what, really, is the status of this “could have”; what would it actually have taken for Viète to achieve Descartes’ results in the Geometry? The interest of the question lies in its potential to better our understanding of the nature of modern mathematics. (shrink)

In this article, it is often pointed out to a more specific area by using the term Ṣūfi art on the basis of the aforementioned understanding. Thus, an analytic approach is adopted along with the usage of deductive method, and a layer of meaning is tried to be established through criticism and analysis. Firstly, a basic framework was constructed by mentioning the origins of Ṣūfi art. Then the attention was drawn to the sacredness included in Ṣūfi art in terms of (...) its historical frame and ontological structure. It is asserted that Ṣūfi art is based on four basic arguments: beauty, creativity, transcendence, and imagination. Ṣūfis considered art as an activity of beauty and the expressive power of it. Relying on the basic motive that Allah is the Greatest Artist, the Ṣūfis believe that the beauty of their art is a manifestation of Divine Names. They saw art as an expression of manifestation and unveiling. The Ṣūfis, who deemed the world in terms of Divine Beauty (Jamāl), witnessed the manifestations of the Divine Attribute of Beauty in all things; as a result of this witnessing, the masterpieces of Islamic art came into existence. It is the sapiental and the gnostic outlook that underlies this success of the Ṣūfi orders (tariqa) in Islamic history. In Ṣūfism, the perfection (kamāl) presupposes the beauty (jamāl); and each beauty presupposes also the perfection. Therefore, it is not possible to distinguish beauty from perfection in the Ṣūfi art. The sense of loving the beauty is so strong for them that they have tried to reflect the perfect beauty they witness in their works of art, to give an external presence to the phenomenon of beauty and to make the spiritual reality visible that is innate within their beings. Ṣūfism is in a sense an effort to seek beauty. It has been an endless longing to seek, search and witness The All Beauty, that is God Himself. The effort to search for Divine Beauty is sometimes revealed by tune, and sometimes by harmonious words or by a single line. Then, they turn into music, poetry, calligraphy and illumination. According to the maxim stating “There is a path from heart to heart”, these works were transmitted from one generation to another, ensuring the continuity of this Divine tune. Despite the fact that Ṣūfi works make no pretensions to be art as such, they were widely accepted, influenced the masses and gained appreciation in that they were created by people with a sincere heart, intimate sentiments and a deep world of contemplation. The second stage of the gnostic dimension in Islamic arts has been tried to be expounded through the ultimate goal of Ṣūfi art. In Ṣūfi tradition, the aesthetics and sensitivity of art attract attention at every opportunity, but the Ṣūfis did not consider art as their main aim. For them, art denotes only a means. Ṣūfis, who appeal to the eyes, ears and mind with the artistic forms, endeavoured to permeate to the hearts with the spiritual atmosphere provided. With their performances, exuberance and success in different branches of fine arts, they mobilized the aesthetic sentiments in each person's nature and ensured that the human pleasure become accorded with the divine pleasure. Focusing on the sapiential and gnostic dimension of Islamic arts, the basic principles of Ṣūfi art are emphasized as the third stage. It is also suggested that these principles also have a religious content are marked with religious style, have a strong sense of sacredness, possess generality and the peculiarity, have symbolic and representative aspects, are based on symbolism and have traditional characteristics, their style of expression is based on revelation, and are not intended to provoke carnal desires. As to the fourth remarkable factor within the sapiential and gnostic dimension of Islamic art, the Ṣūfi worldview behind the mentioned artistic works is given. As to the fifth remarkable factor in the gnostic dimension of Islamic arts, the thought behind the world of art sustained in the dervish lodges (tekke) is discussed. These dervish lodges were emphasized as the most important places where the beautiful word, beautiful sound and beautiful line converge and these lodges were evaluated as the kitchen where the fine arts were prepared and as the boiler where the arts are cooked. It is due to these features that each of the dervish lodges in Ottoman Empire became a kind of education and fine arts centre. In these lodges, many musicians, composers, poets, illuminators, bookbinders, carvers, engravers and marbling masters were trained. While the dervishes in the dervish lodges exhibited their own unique works of art, they also carried out the requirements of their spiritual trainings (sayru sulūk). (shrink)

Developing a suggestion of Wittgenstein, I provide an account of truth tables as formulas of a formal language. I define the syntax and semantics of TPL (the language of Tabular Propositional Logic), and develop its proof theory. Single formulas of TPL, and finite groups of formulas with the same top row and TF matrix (depiction of possible valuations), are able to serve as their own proofs with respect to metalogical properties of interest. The situation is different, however, for groups of (...) formulas whose top rows differ. For them I provide (i) a tree-style system of ‘row tree proofs’, which is shown to be sound and complete, and (ii) an alternative, re-writing strategy. (shrink)

One measure of the validity of [Joseph] Frank's insight is the extent to which other versions of his ideas appear in other contexts: for if "spatial form" refers to something real, it cannot have escaped notice by other readers. One thinks, for example, of Northrop Frye's description of the critic viewing all the elements of the poem as a simultaneous array before him; or of Gaston Bachelard's evocative descriptions of The Poetics of Space. Or Pound's interest in ideographic script; or (...) the frequent critical association of modern literature with impressionist painting. Or Eliot's poet synthesizing Spinoza, the sound of the typewriter, and the smell of cookery into a unified whole. Or—at the root of it all, perhaps—Poe's insistence on the unified effect of the story or poem.1 All of these instances reflect a more or less casual assumption of the basic premise of Frank's essay. More recently another critic, Frank Kermode, has offered an alternative description of this general problem. In The Romantic Image2 he assesses symbolist poetic theory; here the verbal image , autonomous and autotelic, presumably unites meaning and feeling without intervening reflection or discourse: the "image" so hypostatized seems very close to a "spatial" form, and certainly the suppression of discourse, of reflection generally, follows from the disruption of syntax and narrative that results from the impulse toward "spatial" effects. Provisionally, we might say that Joseph Frank's essay is grounded in an essentially formalist conception of the literary work as artifact, and that the striking features of his argument result from an attempt to assimilate extended works to a theory basically lyric in its orientation: as corollary, we must assume that the modern writers he cites had themselves operationally defined the concept in the course of their writing. · 1. Northrop Frye, "Literary Criticism," in The Aims and Methods of Scholarship in Modern Languages and Literature, ed. James Thorpe , p.65. See also Fables of Identity: Studies in Poetic Mythology , p. 21. Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas . Ernest Fenollosa, The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry, ed. Ezra Pound . T.S. Eliot, "The Metaphysical Poets," Selected Essays , p. 247. Edgar Allan Poe, review of Twice-Told Tales, in Works, 17 vols., ed. James A. Harrison 11: 104-13.· 2. Frank Kermode, The Romantic Image . William Holtz, professor of English at the University of Missouri-Columbia, is currently preparing an edition of an unpublished juvenile manuscript by Charlotte Brontë. (shrink)

Reproduced with the kind permission of the author. Currently available in the collection I Looked Alive . © 2010 The Brooklyn Rail/Black Square Editions | ISBN 978-1934029-07-7 Originally published 2003 Four Walls Eight Windows. continent. 1.1 (2011): 43-51. Introduction Ben Segal What interests me is instigated language, language dishabituated from its ordinary doings, language startled by itself. I don't know where that sort of interest locates me, or leaves me, but a lot of the books I see in the stores (...) seem to lack language entirely. Gary Lutz (2006). This issue of continent.'s fiction section features a reprint of “This Is Nice of You” from the first edition of Gary Lutz's collection I Looked Alive . That book was originally released by Four Walls Eight Windows in 2003 and has since been reissued in 2010 by The Brooklyn Rail/Black Square Editions. Calamari Press has also reissued Lutz's Stories in the Worst Way (originally published by Knopf, largely forgotten and dismissed, and then re-issued by the too-short-lived 3rd Bed). “This Is Nice of You” was edited for the re-issue of I Looked Alive and, as the original book is out of print, the earlier version of the story has been hard to come by for some time. This initial version is a bit longer than the new version—Lutz is a master of tightening down his texts to their most linguistically intensified cores—but it is in no way sloppy. It is a great privilege for continent. to be able to make available rare texts of (first) aesthetic and (second) scholarly value. For those readers unfamiliar with Gary Lutz, I believe this story will serve as a worthy introduction. Like Raymond Carver, Diane Williams, Christine Schutt, and so many other important twentieth century and contemporary short story writers, Lutz studied with and was edited by Gordon Lish. This connection is apparent in his attention to sound and the sentence as compositional unit, but Lutz's is a unique voice. “This Is Nice of You” bears Lutz's trademark torqued and turning syntax, his sexed-but-nameless characters, his rendering of the human body and its emissions as utterly discomfiting. Lutz's preoccupations with the mundane raise ordinariness, via startling language and observation, to grandiosity and grotesquery. In the fall of 2008, Lutz delivered a lecture entitled “The Sentence is a Lonely Place” to writing students at Columbia University. The lecture was later printed in The Believer (and is linked below). In it, he spoke about the importance of the sentence as a compositional unit, as even the distinguishing formal characteristic of prose. Specifically, Lutz explained that, from Lish, he had developed a "poetics of the sentence." Accordingly, Lutz constructs his stories at the level of the sentence, paying extreme attention to the material of words- their letters and their sounds- and the way they abut one another and interact on this material level even before they are employed in the service of traditional aims of fiction like meaning or story. Lutz often uses a(n almost constraint-related) technique called consecution. Letters or sounds from one word are carried forward into the following, producing drama and movement in the language itself at a level entirely apart from that of plot. For example, you can see how the 't's in the first sentence of “This Is Nice of You” repeat fast and hard through met and then soften into the 'th's of brothers and they. This close attention to the specific material and characteristic conditions of prose means that Gary Lutz's work always involves both a happening in language and of language. “This Is Nice of You” has a richness and depth that is hidden not in symbolism or obscure reference but on the surface of the page, in the language of every sentence. FURTHER READING Lutz, Gary. “ The Sentence Is a Lonely Place. ” The Believer January, 2009. Web. Short stories and excerpts at Web del Sol . Web. Taylor, Justin. “ An Interview with Gary Lutz .” Bookslut. July, 2006. Web. THIS IS NICE OF YOU [156] [1] I was a man dropping already well through my forties, filthy with myself, when, taking a turn at the toilets one afternoon, I met two brothers-they said they were brothers-who swore they had a sister, a schoolteacher, an officer of instruction at the county college, a whirlwind midlife turmoil of everything already put to ruin, who had gone off from a new marriage in an old car, an upkept and ennobling sedan, but had returned now to the apartment and [157] was living there alone with the little runoff there was from the marriage-some outcurved appliances, apparently, and low-posted furniture promoting its own mystery but becoming figurable in certain concentrations of TV light-and, above all, a telephone (on a pedestal, they insisted), the handpiece of which she gripped in lieu of exercise, or in fury, and I thus let out my little, reliable cry that I was in fact a student of the telephone, that it was a debasing apparatus in the main, with its meager economy of bells and tones, and the intimacy of the mouthpiece that sent your breath, tiny aftervapors of it, back toward your lips, so that regardless of the party accepting the outgoing products of your voice, you were, at most, in a further, rivaling exchange with yourself alone, and this is what must have brought the two of them around, the men who proclaimed brotherhood with the woman, because they offered me her phone number, put it at my disposal on a piece of paper one of them had already committed it to, a tearing from a menu, and the looks the men were now giving me had deletions in them, already, of my exact, beanpole shape and size. So off I went to a pay phone, the nearest canopied one I could find. The woman answered after the second ring and said she needed a lift right that very moment into the little, unlevel city close by. She was idling in the doorway of the building when I pulled up in front, and I helped her into the car, then got back in myself. I had always had a way of not having to look at people that nonetheless brought them to me in full, and so I still am certain of the susceptive and impressible comp-[158]lexion, the shimmer on the mouth, a lipstick of low brilliance, a difficulty around the eyes, the hair short and rayed out exclamation ally, skin bagged up over the elbow bone, conflict even in how her arms stayed at her sides—in sum, a spinal loveliness for me, an off-blonde quantity with shadowed, thumbworn hollows that put me out of as much as I might have ever known of women before. I set the two of us into the narrow traffic, and I remember telling her, by way of explaining the little burden which I had shifted, by now, from the shelf of the dashboard and onto my lap, that when you lived in filth, as I then did, a daily newspaper came to count for a lot, although instead of the thick-supplemented local paper I bought a trimmer one from a backlying town—not, of course, for any affluences of native data it carried, but as an article of house ware: a rough immaculacy in four lank sections, a set of fresh, hygienic surfaces to come between the table, say, and whatever I had going for me at the table, if the table was where I was going forward—because what else so cheap comes so clean and far-spreading? The woman told me that her own trouble with paper was that through a modest hole, no larger than a quarter, that had been drilled a foot or so above the floor (the standard height, she had reasoned, of legitimate electrical outlets), and by means of which her faculty office had at last gained communication with the roomier but unoccupied office next door, more and more often shot a single sheet of paper, plain copier paper she had rolled just barely into a tube, [159] so that after landing on the floor of the neighboring office the paper would preserve little if any of the curl, and there would be nothing written or typed on it, of course, and it was always a blank sheet that had been ageing on her desk for some time and had already been moved around, or advanced, from station to station on the desktop, coming into further creaselets and crimps and other infirmities—paper, in short, still too bare and unfraught to be thrown responsibly and forgettably away, and yet too seasoned and beset with irritations of the surface (a molelike blemish, say, or what looked like a tiny hair, an eyelash, sunk into it, or frecklings, or notational pressings of a fingernail), too wrought, in sum, for the paper to be appointed to any secure curricular purpose. Her office, she claimed, was in fact full of such paper, much-handled and singularized sheets of it by the loose, functionless hundred. I had to get it across to the woman that I myself no longer had an office, or any other place to divide me reliably from everybody else, and that for much of the daylight I thus appeared to be among people because I kept putting myself where people came together into even closer-fitting assortments, the viewing areas and showrooms and rotundas and such: I took in the lean-to look of the women, the tongues coming and going in what the men kept thinking of to say—whole families of low knees for me to bark my shins against during the crowded and involving way out. At home afterward, in the one room where my life was packed down, I would keep my nose stuck in the safehold of the phone [160] book, where the names of people suffered reduction to mere episodes of the alphabet and underwent humbling declensions down every column (Lail, Lain, Laine, Lainerd), and he names of streets, of the towns and townships, got docked in crude, heedless abbreviations (the vowels almost always the first to get poked out), and I would run my eyes over the telephone numbers themselves, each sequence of digits another fallible run of the infinite. I thus corrected my feelings for people and assembled myself emotionally into whatever else I had at hand—the obligating arms of the clothes hangers, usually, or the keen-angled understructure, the guardian legginess, of the ironing board. The woman said that in her case, though, it was more a matter of making slow circuits of the classroom where she had to put across the Emporial Sciences, retail theory and methods, to heat-giving and suggestive young women, some of them world cruelties already. There was the cooing of empty stomachs in the hour just before lunch, and the braying and fizzle of loaded stomachs in the low hours of the afternoon. She would recite her notes in a voice barely loyal to anyone octave, a tiny alluvium of slaver hardening at the corners of her mouth on the days she gave the glassy lozenges a slow, warming suck, and she would take lowering notice of how whatever she said succumbed at once to freak spellings and razzing paraphrase in the big, dividered notebooks; and because in midafternoon light the world looked as thorough, as filled in, as it was ever going to get, a better way to set about ruining her eyes was to review how hair had [161] established itself on the arms of the young women, because almost every arm had brought across itself a welcome and diversifying shadow. On one girl it would be a fine, driftless haze afloat above the white of the arm, never seeming to touch down on the skin itself. (An atmosphere, at most, of chestnut brown.) On another, it was as if copper wire, the narrowmost lengthlets of it, had been stuck into the fleshy batter of the thick, freckled forearms. On a third: a field of it–wheat-colored, thin-spun. On a fourth; a differencing, darkish updrift that shaded off as it approached the inner bend of the elbow, then re-emerged at the base of the upper arm as whiskery fringe. On others it was a brassy or rust-colored frizz, or it was as coarse as cornsilk, or it looked fussed on, as if the arm had been slowly stroked with charcoal. But here the woman broke off, or I may well have made an interruption of my own—I think I must have asked whether she was hungry, and she said if I was, and so on one of the lesser streets I parked the car and led her down into a belowstairs eating house I still remembered. Sandwiches were presently lowered in front of us. I watched her remove the festooned toothpick from hers and then play her fingers over the toasted planes before she took a fond first bite. "This is nice of you," she said. I must have looked at her in the way I then had of getting people to speak so they would not seem to be dwelling any longer on my features, because if on the well-set face the mouth and eyes are said to seem frozen in elegant orbit about the til) of the nose, then mine was a face that behold-[162]ers, regarders, could not help trying to round off with greater success, to goad the particulars of it back into the arcs they had wandered away from—the mouth, for instance, having been pursed and pinched suchwise that it seemed resident more on one side of the face than the other—and there were other signs of original strife to be busied with (slapdash eyebrows unbunched, it appeared, from reserves of hair elsewhere on my person; a showing of adult acne, a shrivelly little relevance of it, confined to the declivity of my nose); and so to be polite, the woman thus sank her gaze into her sandwich, and told me, in a voice lowered accordingly, that, one late-childhood summer, she had devoted herself to collecting postage stamps: it was a tongue-involving sideline to early-arriving puberty, and she liked having to lick the pale, gummed hinges instead of the sticky backs of the stamps themselves before entering everything into the hosting album; and once, during some foul weather between her and a brother (the older, thrown-over one, who had already made a habit of fooling the underside of his arm across the top of hers and calling her "pussified"), she reached for the shoe box in which she had let duplicate stamps accumulate—Spanish ones, mostly, of a fading orange—and sent the box slooshing through the lower air so that the stamps showered onto the brother's bare legs with a full, delicate harm. The woman was now touching up the surface of her iced tea with tiny activities, initiatives, of the longspun spoon. I myself was good at getting my touch onto things, although in a way that seemed to mix up the motive atoms inside [163] them, but I was satisfied that for the moment my sandwich, the unbitten-at half of it, was displayable and fit and local to my plate. The woman went on to say that, as a child, she had been bundled off, many an afternoon, to the slope-ceilinged quarters of a bachelor uncle who, when speaking of anybody not immediately present, could not bring himself to use the person's name but instead would say "an acquaintance of mine in ..." and then mention the name of some lapsed homeland, or little-loved rural orchestra, or backset building about to come down; and it was never a riddle, this device of his (not once could the girl have been expected to identify any of the subjects), and no matter how often and aloud he insisted that particularizing persons any further—bringing even a first name down upon anyone of them—would have been indecent, he claimed, much like doing things to people while they slept, the girl accepted all of the uncle's prim and extravagant evasion for what he surely must have intended it to be: a neat, protective trick to space the world out a little further in her favor, to scatter the population so that wherever her hand might at last come down, it would have to be on herself alone. And here I could sense that the woman wanted from my mouth an account of as much as I myself might have ever managed of attachment, so I told her I had once owned a house (a rising, really, of much-fingered, handwrought architecture that amounted to a little family of rooms above garages: a boxlike building with a rattly thorax of downspouts [164] and drainpipes and an unfolded but full-toned fire escape), and I had had for a time a boarder, a student, a high-colored, loose-packed representative of declining girlhood, hung with necklaces and barrettes, a girl of precise but shifting leanings and inclinations; and the afternoon she had come round to ask after the room, I stood in the entranceway, handshaken and asweat, and from what would later be my memory of the girl, I made off with, first, how every pore of her nose seemed to be sheltering within itself a tiny dark seedlet, a grain of something immediately, enormously valuable. And an almost lipless mouth (just a slit, practically), the teeth inside looking wet, watered-it was my life's chore, at that instant, to keep from sending the back of my thumb blotterlike across the line of them (I was later to learn she drank everything cold and through the narrowest of straws). And her hair: it was tea-colored hair she had, long and reachful, an unstopped downcome of it. Tall for a girl, but she managed to stay out of much of her height and put herself across as somebody backward, or behind. I must have told the girl, as best I could, that I of course had a wife, a full-faced, imperishable partner, though for the moment she was gone otherwhere in the marriage, and here the woman, my present companion, my tablemate, whose feet were now parked, in parallel, on the grade of my upper leg, interrupted to say that her husband, too, had been such a liar, and what could I bring up by way of reply other than that a lie is a truth struck through with other, further truth, or that a lie is the present multiplied by the past or that a lie [165] is an outcry of borrowed hope? The woman gave me an allowed look of disgust, her eyes lowered but still popular with me, and on I went with what had now become the girl of my story. For there had been a great, gainful carpet in the room I put the girl into, a matty expanse of coarse, grabby piles, an engrossing affair that took things into itself and held them tight, misered them, and I of course insisted that the girl not bother herself with its upkeep, that I enjoyed weekly access to a prestigious, upstanding vacuum cleaner; but no sooner was the girl out of the house each morning than I would withdraw from my room, where time was unportionable, and loose myself into the ticktock impertinence of the girl's room and get down on my knees, and, going after the carpet first with my fingers, then with a forceps, and finally by unspooling lengths of clear package-sealing tape and pressing them against the tufts in neat rectangles to catch what I might have missed, I brought vast tracts of the carpet to depletion, recovering not simply the girlinesses, the girleries, one would expect (buttons, straight pins, downed jewelry), but flirtier personalia in the form, say, of a stray confetto brought into the world when a page had been wrung with out caution from a spiral-bound notebook, or some pleated paper shells of the chocolates she required, or one of the bargain antihistamines she took to get her naps going, or a trash-bag tie ragged enough to show the kinked line of the wire within (this I would get wound around my finger), or a cough drop enwrapped like a bonbon (I would undo the [166] wings of the wrapper and have to decide whether to suck the drop all down or begin chewing it midway)—I became the following, the public, that these things, these off-faIlings, had come to have; but mostly there was hair, afloat above the uppermost pushings of the fabric of the carpet an almost continuous haziness of loose hairs of all lengths and sources, and I would have to set them out on a fresh sheet of paper and assort them according to the regions of the body they had taken their departure from, and in no time I had nest-like filiations of broken filaments and smaller involvements of the hairs that made me think of hooks, of barbs, of treble clefs, and each pile required a separate envelope, to be filed in a separate shoe box for every sector of the body until, I hoped, the boxes themselves would no longer be enough and I would have raised something semblable, brought up something equal in volume to the comprehensive girl herself. And her wastebasket! For every bit of rubbish, every dreariment she tossed into the thing, I would, in secret, deposit a reciprocal discard of my own, matching a spotted, confessory tissue of hers with a lurid throwaway after my own heart–the cardboard substructions of a fresh parcel of underwear, maybe, or tearings from pantyhose I now and again pressed against a span of my forearm to work onto it the complications of female shading I otherwise made do, choosily, without. I thus built the two of us up together in her trash! One afternoon-it was another of those lifeful, unsam-[167]pled days on which the world humors us each a little differently to keep us nicely on our last legs—I discovered in the wastebasket an inch-deep textbook of hers, a paperback with a celery-colored cover that had come partly unglued, and this dilapidation I paired off, naturally, with a name-your baby guide to whose pages, during my recurrent turnings of them, in bed or at table, I had contributed dried produces of my person, a chemical splendor entirely mine. This coupling sent a sudden spigoty thrill from me that forced an unbuckling and an unzipping and a cleanup with a handkerchief I then ventured responsively into the wastebasket as well. It was in the bathroom afterward that I found a suds-clouded puddle on the unlevel floor of the tub, a little undrained remainder, rimmed with offscum, of the girl's prolonged early-morning soak, and this was as much as I needed to get on my hands; I pressed them flat against the wet porcelain, then flapped them around in the air, and that was when I noticed it—in the amphitheater of the toilet bowl, an orange-yellow tint, or value, to the waters. When the girl arrived home that evening, I told her, of course, that I had discovered fresh, unforeseen trouble within the tank of thelet (a misalignment of the trip lever, a waywardness of the float ball, a ulation of the lift wires, kinks and defects, really, throughout the entire system) and that in fine it was an apparatus now operable only by means of advanced and strenuous equilibrial manipulations that it would be unseemly, inhospitable, of me to pre-[168]sume to burd to burden her with–so that from here on out, following any leak or evacuation she need merely lower the lid and then, before quitting the room, ring the handbell that had been placed on the would seeeverythinghing else. But the bell never rang, not even once, and from my window the next morning I watched the girl carry from the house a little plastic bag distended balloonishly, much like those bags you will remember having seen in the hands of children bearing homeward their solitary carnival-prize goldfish. In fact, I never ran across the likes of the girl again. The man who came to collect her things-not the father, apparently, but an advocate, an upholder-l found to be dull-eared and lax in his speech, and the better part of his face seemed to have already begun making tiny, rotational departures from whatever it was that the eyes, themselves impressively mobile, were just that moment having to take in. (Was there a lamp in the house that was not that night slopping its wattage over everything?) I guess I was waiting for the man to take a laggard, last-minute interest in me, and by now I was pushing everything out into the paired first person–it was, I said, “Our night shot,” and I began including the two of us in whatever it might be doing out, the expected sprinkles and such—but he was no friendship buff, and he paid no heed to my telling him that the only dress of hers I'd ever twidged myself into even part of the way had been the simplest of them all, a large-buttoned wonder of depthless blue, and then only on the principle that one naturally fits whatever one has into whatever somebody else [169] had first, or how else would the world keep getting any taller with people? The man just went about the removal of the girl's things without having to be reminded too noticeably, I guess, of how every dick hangs by a thread. My listener, though, had by this time brought about some becoming slowings of her arm—it was an arm inclinable to langorous diagonals and magicianly swoops through the air above the tabletop—but it no longer was involving itself with her plate, so I suggested we shove off, I made payment for the food, and on our way to the car, and then in the car as I took to following her pointings, the directional tilts of her head, she said that you naturally kept putting more and more of yourself into another person, at first wondering how much she can take, how much of you is accumulable and how much she can hold, and you're letting things out, disbursing yourself, and you've soon got things set up in her, and room is being made for even more of you, and if you bring this off with enough people, even two or three, what you've got is at first a comfort, because you can pass yourself along and move a little more widely through the world and leave it to these others to man your grievances, your disappointments; and what brought this to mind, the woman said, was a term of financial hardship she had contrived for herself a few years back, an unpaid leave of absence from scrupling letter grades onto quiz papers (propped-up As, and upended Bs made to look, rather, like fannies; all As and Bs, no Cs or anything lower, the difference between an A and a B having less to do with the accuracy of whatever facts might [170] have been impounded in provided for an answer than with anything recallable about the way the enrollee ad conformed her body to the confining perpendiculars of her chair and the navel-level writing surface that projected from it, or the way there might one day have been an unignorable blush on the instep of a once-moseying foot, disburdened of its shoe, that had got itself trapped in the grillwork of that cagelike involvement, intended for books, that was welded to, or otherwise schemed into, the underworks of the chair)—this had been a duration, in short, of controlled difficulty when the misexpenditure of even a twenty-dollar bill had set her thrilling, gloating, over everything she would miss out on, and one afternoon she had made an engagement for a haircut, just a trim, and very early in the session the haircutter, a woman ill-defined in the face but otherwise full of conspicuities of emotion, set down the prevailing scissors and pressed the flat of a lukewarm hand against the woman's cheek, held it there for a good minute or longer, while the other hand eventually found its way into a drawer, a shallow treasury of slender specialty scissors, one pair of which the cutter withdrew and began routing deductively through the woman's hair, the other hand staying put on the cheek, longer and longer, and the woman went home and for afterward the bathtub was now a more likely destination than any of the upright furniture, and it got easier to fill the tub with further clarifying volumes than to clear space on the difficult heights of the sofa, and she was hardly claiming to have become a cleaner [171] person in result—she in fact would often discover, voyaging about her body, a browned, fractionary detail of a larger crepe of toilet tissue that must have got itself stuck in some assy crevice and was impossible to get plucked out of the revolving suds—she was saying only that she spent more and more of her time thus immersed, ill off in water, and the haircutter had surely had a hand in it, the woman was doing some of the cutter's life now, coming into some of its wrong, because you sometimes have to look to somebody else's life to get dimensions set back even part of the way around your own, and it should not have to be any less your own life when it comes from somebody else, and you could surely fudge a society out of anyone available person and get this person doubling for the many, so that in the little run of things perpetuable from one person to the next, every loose moment stood to become a complete, active finality. But by now this was a new day, with only an hour or so off it already, and the place the woman had made me bring us to, the man's place, with a promise that the man was elsewhere—this was on a little offshoot of a street, a stewy efficiency apartment the color had long ago gone out of; and when, once in bed, still clothed, I found among the sheets and blankets a spoiling pair of the man's underpants, one of the leg openings of which was puckered into an avid, sloppy mouth, I held myself accountable for redisposing the fabric until I got a befitting featurelessness back onto it; but all the while, I am sure I had to make myself go over again in my mind that if the body is the porter of as many organs of affec-[172]tion as there might one day turn out to be, then the idea was to let the thing carry you to where you would otherwise never have any reason to arrive, because I listened for the unmelodiof the the thede ofthe woman's zipper, and then the woman made me put myself out of my own clothes, the attritional corduroys and overshirt, and got herself up at last onto the topic not of the man whose apartment it was (because his story was scarcely the story of how the boy who decides he is half a girl no sooner starts to worry about where the other half might than he gets careless with where he rests his eyes, or what he gives even the feeblest of fingerholds to, and anything, even a crumbly triangle of pie offered on a saucer instead of on a pie plate proper, comes in easy, ready, wronging answer), but of her husband, and how, no more than a couple of months into the marriage, he had begun snugging away in his undershorts a little source of chanc, reliable frictions to nudge him onward through the workday—anything company-keeping that could be counted on not to slide out of the elasticky leg holes: a half-dollar packet of chocolate tittles, maybe, that was barely noticeable in the baggy surround of the widecut trousers so popular at the time. For by now the woman had at last brought what is usually called the other mouth to within only inches of my lips, but it is not a mouth, obviously, although I let myself go along with the goodwill behind the comparison, the way I will remain loyal to anything deliberately and faithfully misunderstood, and I fussed my tongue against the vital trifles hung inside of her, as much of the curtailed finery as I could find, [173] and gave the whole insimplicity of it a slow-circling, examinational lick, until I was taking a sudden tepid downwash on the tongue. It was a familiar, latrine in dribble that must have tasted, no doubt, like trouble just starting out.p [1] Editor's Note: Original pagination from first edition print denoted with bracketed page numbers. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Do physicians and nurses have an obligation to treat patients who are HIV‐positive? Although an initial review of the possible sources of such an obligation yields equivocal results, a closer examination reveals a clear obligation to treat. The current risk of job‐caused HIV‐infection is not sufficient to warrant a refusal to treat. This is so because there exist rationally justified, general social, as well as specific peer expectations, that health care professionals treat HIV‐positive patients. These expectations impose moral obligations (...) on doctors and nurses. Moreover there is no sound libertarian argument entitling doctors and nurses to refuse to treat HIV‐positive patients. A morally appropriate identification with his or her role would disincline a health care professional to refuse treatment to an HIV‐positive patient. The likely source of such refusal is occupational alienation and an irrational reaction to AIDS symbolism. (shrink)