Height-pitch associations are claimed to be universal and independent of language, but this claim remains controversial. The present study sheds new light on this debate with a multimodal analysis of individual sound and melody descriptions obtained in an interactive communication paradigm with speakers of Dutch and Farsi. The findings reveal that, in contrast to Dutch speakers, Farsi speakers do not use a height-pitch metaphor consistently in speech. Both Dutch and Farsi speakers’ co-speech gestures did reveal a mapping of higher pitches (...) to higher space and lower pitches to lower space, and this gesture space-pitch mapping tended to co-occur with corresponding spatial words (high-low). However, this mapping was much weaker in Farsi speakers than Dutch speakers. This suggests that cross-linguistic differences shape the conceptualization of pitch and further calls into question the universality of height-pitch associations. (shrink)

Searching through semantic memory may involve the use of several retrieval cues. In a verbal fluency task, the set of available cues is limited and every candidate word is a target. Individuals exhibit clustering behavior as predicted by optimal foraging theory. In another semantic search task, the remote associates task, three cues are presented and a single target word has to be found. Whereas the task has been widely studied as a task of creativity or insight problem solving, (...) in this article, the RAT is treated as a semantic retrieval task and assessed from the perspective of information foraging theory. Experiments are presented that address the superadditive combination of cues and the anti-clustering behavior in the recall sequence. A new type of search behavior in the RAT is put forward that involves maximizing the difference in activation between target and distractors. This type of search is advantageous when the target is weak and cue patches are contaminated with strong competitors. (shrink)

Embodiment approaches to cognition and emotion have put forth the idea that the way we think and talk about affective events often recruits spatial information that stems, to some extent, from our bodily experiences. For example, metaphorical expressions such as “being someone’s right hand” or “leaving something bad behind” convey affectivity associated with the lateral and sagittal dimensions of space. Action tendencies associated with affect such as the directional fluency of hand movements (dominant right hand-side – positive; non-dominant left (...) hand-side – negative) and approach-avoidance behaviors (forward – positive; backwards – negative) might be mechanisms supporting such associations. Against this background, experimental research has investigated whether positive and negative words are freely allocated into space (e.g., close or far from one’s body) or resonate with congruent (vs. incongruent) predefined manual actions usually performed by joysticks or button presses (e.g., positive - right; negative - left, or vice versa). However, to date, it is unclear how the processing of affective concepts resonate with directional actions of the whole body that are performed freely within a context enabling lateral and sagittal movements simultaneously. Accordingly, 67 right-handed participants were to freely step on an 8-response pad (front, back, right, left, front-right, front-left, back-right, or back-left) after being presented in front of them valence-laden personal life-events submitted before the task (e.g., words or sentences such as “graduation” or “birth of a child”). The most revealing finding of this study indicates that approach-avoidance behaviors and space-valence associations across laterality are interwoven during whole body step actions: Positive events induced steps highly biased to front-right whereas negative events induced steps highly biased to back-left. (shrink)

This book offers an ideal first reader in ancient Greek. It presents a selection of extracts from a comprehensive range of Greek authors, from Homer to Plutarch, together with generous help with vocabulary and grammar. The passages have been chosen for their intrinsic interest and variety, and brief introductions set them in context. All but the commonest Greek words are glossed as they occur and a general vocabulary is included at the back. Although the book is designed to be used (...) by students who have only completed a beginner's course in Greek, students of all ages will find that it helps them to improve their ability and confidence in reading a wide range of prose and verse texts, while at the same time providing a fascinating and copiously illustrated introduction to the riches and variety of ancient Greek literature over a period of almost a thousand years. (shrink)

A partir del estudio de tres quechuismos vigentes en el habla mapuche williche² evidenciamos la existencia de relaciones interculturales en el horizonte andino. Nuestro análisis se concentra en voces de origen quechua que refieren a instituciones mapuches centrales en términos identitarios, religiosos y sociales. En cada uno de los casos, los préstamos lingüísticos revelan paralelismos culturales preexistentes. El estudio comparativo de los conceptos designados por estas voces y las prácticas culturales asociadas a ellas expone el correlato de sistemas de representaciones (...) simbólicas que se perfilan como variantes de una matriz cosmovisionaria común. From the study of three quechuisms in mapuche williche speech, we show the existence of intercultural relations in the Andean horizon. Our analysis focuses on Quechua voices which refer to central identitarian, religious, and social mapuche institutions. In each of the cases, the loaned words reveal preexisting cultural parallels. The comparative study of concepts designated by these voices and cultural practices associated with them exposes the correlation of symbolic representational systems which appear as variants of a common worldview matrix. (shrink)

From Curriculum Vitae parsing to web search and recommendation systems, Word2Vec and other word embedding techniques have an increasing presence in everyday interactions in human society. Biases, such as gender bias, have been thoroughly researched and evidenced to be present in word embeddings. Most of the research focuses on discovering and mitigating gender bias within the frames of the vector space itself. Nevertheless, whose bias is reflected in word embeddings has not yet been investigated. Besides discovering (...) and mitigating gender bias, it is also important to examine whether a feminine or a masculine-centric view is represented in the biases of word embeddings. This way, we will not only gain more insight into the origins of the before mentioned biases, but also present a novel approach to investigating biases in Natural Language Processing systems. Based on previous research in the social sciences and gender studies, we hypothesize that masculine-centric, otherwise known as androcentric, biases are dominant in word embeddings. To test this hypothesis we used the largest English word association test data set publicly available. We compare the distance of the responses of male and female participants to cue words in a word embedding vector space. We found that the word embedding is biased towards a masculine-centric viewpoint, predominantly reflecting the worldviews of the male participants in the word association test data set. Therefore, by conducting this research, we aimed to unravel another layer of bias to be considered when examining fairness in algorithms. (shrink)

Consider the concept combination ‘pet human’. In word association experiments, human subjects produce the associate ‘slave’ in relation to this combination. The striking aspect of this associate is that it is not produced as an associate of ‘pet’, or ‘human’ in isolation. In other words, the associate ‘slave’ seems to be emergent. Such emergent associations sometimes have a creative character and cognitive science is largely silent about how we produce them. Departing from a dimensional model of human conceptual (...) space, this article will explore concept combinations, and will argue that emergent associations are a result of abductive reasoning within conceptual space, that is, below the symbolic level of cognition. A tensor-based approach is used to model concept combinations allowing such combinations to be formalized as interacting quantum systems. Free association norm data is used to motivate the underlying basis of the conceptual space. It is shown by analogy how some concept combinations may behave like quantum-entangled particles. Two methods of analysis were presented for empirically validating the presence of non-separable concept combinations in human cognition. One method is based on quantum theory and another based on comparing a joint probability distribution with another distribution based on a separability assumption using a chi-square goodness-of-fit test. Although these methods were inconclusive in relation to an empirical study of bi-ambiguous concept combinations, avenues for further refinement of these methods are identified. (shrink)

We already have a distinction between the intension and extension of terms. This is not simply the distinction that is operative in philosophy of mind, body, and action. There, the concern is with things, and with a physicalistic or a mentalistic account of them. The physicalist says he supports an ‘extensional’ analysis of things, the mentalist an ‘intensional’. So, the physicalist says that, in the end, only ‘the extensional language of physical science’ will do in ontology. But, associating this physical-mental (...) dichotomy with the intension-extension distinction as applied to terms is misleading. The ontological issue is obscured by the association. An ontologist wants, like Spinoza or Berkeley, to know whetherthingsare extended or not, and in what respects. This question makes central the concept of space, or more generally of ‘field’, ‘domain’. Unfortunately, the same word ‘extension’ is used also for the spread or location of athingin space. To dissociate the extension of a term, a logical notion, from the ontological notion of the spatial status of a thing, I introduce the new word ‘extention’. This coinage correlates, not with the ‘intension’ of terms—the logical correlate of ‘extension’—but with ‘intention’, a word that fortunately already has common currency, and reeks with connotations that have logical ties with ‘consciousness’. So, from here on, we have two dichotomies: intension-extension applying to terms, and intention-extention applying to things. Since terms are things, both sorts of considerations are relevant to them, the logical one and the ontological. Only the latter applies to, say, stones or persons, since these are not linguistic terms. (shrink)

Consider the concept combination ‘pet human’. In word association experiments, human subjects produce the associate ‘slave’ in relation to this combination. The striking aspect of this associate is that it is not produced as an associate of ‘pet’, or ‘human’ in isolation. In other words, the associate ‘slave’ seems to be emergent. Such emergent associations sometimes have a creative character and cognitive science is largely silent about how we produce them. Departing from a dimensional model of human conceptual (...) space, this article will explore concept combinations, and will argue that emergent associations are a result of abductive reasoning within conceptual space, that is, below the symbolic level of cognition. A tensor-based approach is used to model concept combinations allowing such combinations to be formalized as interacting quantum systems. Free association norm data is used to motivate the underlying basis of the conceptual space. It is shown by analogy how some concept combinations may behave like quantum-entangled particles. Two methods of analysis were presented for empirically validating the presence of non-separable concept combinations in human cognition. One method is based on quantum theory and another based on comparing a joint probability distribution with another distribution based on a separability assumption using a chi-square goodness-of-fit test. Although these methods were inconclusive in relation to an empirical study of bi-ambiguous concept combinations, avenues for further refinement of these methods are identified. (shrink)

Theories of embodied cognition assume that concepts are grounded in non-linguistic, sensorimotor experience. In support of this assumption, previous studies have shown that upwards response movements are faster than downwards movements after participants have been presented with words whose referents are typically located in the upper vertical space. This is taken as evidence that processing these words reactivates sensorimotor experiential traces. This congruency effect was also found for novel words, after participants learned these words as labels for novel objects (...) that they encountered either in their upper or lower visual field. While this indicates that direct experience with a word's referent is sufficient to evoke said congruency effects, the present study investigates whether this direct experience is also a necessary condition. To this end, we conducted five experiments in which participants learned novel words from purely linguistic input: Novel words were presented in pairs with real up- or down-words ; they were presented in natural sentences where they replaced these real words ; they were presented as new labels for these real words ; and they were presented as labels for novel combined concepts based on these real words. In all five experiments, we did not find any congruency effects elicited by the novel words; however, participants were always able to make correct explicit judgements about the vertical dimension associated to the novel words. These results suggest that direct experience is necessary for reactivating experiential traces, but this reactivation is not a necessary condition for understanding the corresponding aspects of word meaning. (shrink)

Etymologies are often entertaining, but it is not always obvious what they mean. Take the case of Old Frankish *sal, meaning a single-roomed dwelling. The word was taken over by speakers of Vulgar Latin as sala, and by 1100 CE it had become a word of Anglo-Norman French, since in The Song of Roland it crops up as sale, meaning the living area of a castle. Some time later, it wandered into Italian. Renaissance architects wanted to make a (...) new word for the increasingly grandiose spaces they were designing, so they added an augmentative suffix, producing salone. In the seventeenth century, French translations of Italian works on architecture reproduced the new term, only dropping the final e so as to keep the masculine gender of the Italian. French salon came into English in the early eighteenth century, initially as a word for a large and lofty room; but as French speakers applied it more and more to social functions occurring in such spaces, English speakers did so too. Then came a fork: a phonological adaptation produced saloon, which drifted off as a fully naturalized word of English toward hotels, carriages, bars, and cars; but salon persisted nonetheless. By retaining the stress pattern and marginally nasal final vowel of its source language, the doublet has remained in use as a xenism—a word of English understood to be not English, but understood in English all the same.How many such words are there? Hundreds, maybe thousands. Coupé, du jour, fuselage, pizza, paparazzi, sauerkraut, Zeitgeist—all signal their foreignness either by nonstandard pronunciation of written consonants (s, g, j, z), the presence of foreign diacritics, or irregular tonic stress. These are the kinds of loanwords that Scholar calls “émigrés,” but he gives us not thousands or hundreds or even a dozen of them: his chapters deal only with four: à la mode, ennui, naïveté, and caprice. The histories of these words do not really teach us any more about the cultural, social, and political relations between England and France than do saloon and salon, which is not much at all, or any other set of loanwords that retain phonetic or orthographic signs of foreignness. Scholar nonetheless does his level best to put his favored four at the heart of early modern English culture. Lengthy accounts of a play by Dryden, a famous work of Schiller's, an essay by Raymond Williams, Caribbean notions of creolization, and a John le Carré novel, learned though they all may be, do not really make the argument more persuasive, or even clear. By the end of this beautifully produced and floridly written book, the reader (or at least this reader) is not quite sure what it was really about. The very title of Émigrés repurposes a xenism which in regular usage is associated with high social status (we never talk of émigré workers, for example), thus exhibiting what I suppose the whole field ought to demonstrate: the ways in which new, hard, or nonnative words are always used to establish pecking orders between speakers, between their interlocutors and between their worlds. In Bourdieusian terms: not to make distinctions, but to create distinction. (shrink)

Memory for numbers improves with age. One source of this improvement may be learning linear spatial-numeric associations, but previous evidence for this hypothesis likely confounded memory span with quality of numerical magnitude representations and failed to distinguish spatial-numeric mappings from other numeric abilities, such as counting or number word-cardinality mapping. To obviate the influence of memory span on numerical memory, we examined 39 3- to 5-year-olds’ ability to recall one spontaneously produced number (1-20) after a delay, and the relation (...) between numeric recall (controlling for non-numeric recall) and quality of mapping between symbolic and non-symbolic quantities using number-line estimation, give-a-number estimation, and counting tasks. Consistent with previous reports, mapping of numerals to space, to discrete quantities, and to numbers in memory displayed a logarithmic-to-linear shift. Also, linearity of spatial-numeric mapping correlated strongly with multiple measures of numeric recall (percent correct and percent absolute error), even when controlling for age and non-numeric memory. Results suggest that linear spatial-numeric mappings may aid memory for number over and above children’s other numeric skills. (shrink)

We already have a distinction between the intension and extension of terms. This is not simply the distinction that is operative in philosophy of mind, body, and action. There, the concern is with things, and with a physicalistic or a mentalistic account of them. The physicalist says he supports an ‘extensional’ analysis of things, the mentalist an ‘intensional’. So, the physicalist says that, in the end, only ‘the extensional language of physical science’ will do in ontology. But, associating this physical-mental (...) dichotomy with the intension-extension distinction as applied to terms is misleading. The ontological issue is obscured by the association. An ontologist wants, like Spinoza or Berkeley, to know whetherthingsare extended or not, and in what respects. This question makes central the concept of space, or more generally of ‘field’, ‘domain’. Unfortunately, the same word ‘extension’ is used also for the spread or location of athingin space. To dissociate the extension of a term, a logical notion, from the ontological notion of the spatial status of a thing, I introduce the new word ‘extention’. This coinage correlates, not with the ‘intension’ of terms—the logical correlate of ‘extension’—but with ‘intention’, a word that fortunately already has common currency, and reeks with connotations that have logical ties with ‘consciousness’. So, from here on, we have two dichotomies: intension-extension applying to terms, and intention-extention applying to things. Since terms are things, both sorts of considerations are relevant to them, the logical one and the ontological. Only the latter applies to, say, stones or persons, since these are not linguistic terms. (shrink)

Diminishing awareness is a consequence of the information explosion: disciplines are becoming increasingly specialized; individuals and groups are becoming ever more insular. This paper considers how awareness can be enhanced via abductive knowledge discovery the goal of which is to produce suggestions which can span disparate islands of knowledge. Knowledge representation is motivated from a cognitive perspective. Words and concepts are represented as vectors in a high dimensional semantic space automatically derived from a text corpus. Information flow computation between (...) vectors is proposed as a means of suggesting potentially interesting implicit associations between concepts. Information flow is applied to computational scientific discovery by attempting to simulate Swanson's Raynaud-fish oil discovery in medical texts. Both automatic and semi-automatic attempts were studied and compared against suggestions computed via semantic association. Even though this work is preliminary and speculative in nature, there is some justification to believe that appropriate suggestions can be “abduced” from semantic space. (shrink)

A co-founder of the Catholic Worker Movement, its newspaper, and hospitality houses, the writer Dorothy Day promoted public peace nationally and internationally as a journalist, an organizer of public protests, and a builder of associational communities. Drawing upon Hannah Arendt’s conceptions of the role of speech and action in creating the public realm, this paper focuses on several of Day’s most controversial public positions: her leadership of non-cooperation against Civil Defense drills intended to prepare New York City residents to survive (...) a nuclear war; her urging of Catholics to find common cause with the Cuban revolutionary government; and her support for interracial farming communities in the Southern United States. As Arendt asserts about Rahel Varnhagen’s salon in Berlin, by being public meeting spaces hosted in private houses, Catholic Worker communities fostered egalitarian rather than “agonal” politics. Like Gandhi’s newspapers and ashrams as well as “Occupy” communities such as Zuccotti Park, Day’s newspaper was a center for incubating and implementing social reform. The Catholic Worker provided a place where writers could question the official rhetoric of such conflicts as World War II and the Cold War, put forward different interpretations of unfolding events, and chart possible alternatives to establishment agendas. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:On Japanese Things and Words:An Answer to Heidegger's QuestionMichael F. MarraIt has been over thirty years since my high school teacher of philosophy, Professor Dino Dezzani, recommended a book from which to begin my study of philosophy: Martin Heidegger's (1889-1976) Unterwegs zur Sprache (On the way to language [1959]). Evidently he was aware of my interest in literature and thought that Heidegger's discussion of words, things, and poetic language (...) would give some sort of direction to my naïve and youthful questions of what literature is about and what I should hope to find in it.The impact that Heidegger's book had on this young student was much greater than my professor could ever have imagined. I would hardly have committed myself to the study of Japan were it not for my reading of "A Dialogue on Language between a Japanese and an Inquirer," which appears in On the Way to Language. The dialogue is a fictional reconstruction of an actual meeting that Heidegger had with Tezuka Tomio (1903-1983), a Japanese scholar of German literature who visited the German philosopher in Freiburg at the end of March 1954.1 In the dialogue the Inquirer (Heidegger) formulates a central question that, in my opinion, should be of fundamental interest to anyone seriously concerned with the study of Japan. The question is deceptively simple, at least compared with the difficulty of coming up with the answer-an answer that, as a matter of fact, the reader will not find fully formulated in the dialogue. The question is: "What is the Japanese word for 'language' "? The Japanese visitor (Tezuka in Heidegger's recollection) appears to have been caught off guard, as we can see from Heidegger's parenthetical remark: "after further hesitation." Had Heidegger posed the same question to a Frenchman or an Italian, the answer would have been immediate: "langue" or "lingua." The challenge for Tezuka was definitely higher since he had a variety of words from which to choose. He could have used, for example, the expression gengo, a combination of two Chinese characters indicating "the speech of words." Instead, he used an ancient Japanese word derived from the native Yamato vocabulary: kotoba, which literally means "the foliage of speech."2There should be little doubt that Tezuka's choice was prompted by his desire to please Heidegger by playing the philosopher's own game-something that Tezuka totally succeeded in doing, as Heidegger's dialogue attests. Tezuka introduced a term that lent itself to etymological play-an enterprise very close to the heart of Heidegger, and one that was also very popular among Japanese thinkers.3 In fact, the expression kotoba incorporates the word koto, which means both "thing" and [End Page 555] "word" and which is found in the basic concepts of Japanese ontology: Mikoto (God, or "the honorable thing"), makoto (truth, or "the true word"), kotodama (soul, or "the spirit of words"), and kotowari(reason, or "the splitting of things"). The association of "words" and "things" in the Japanese word for "language" must have been of particular interest to Heidegger, who, four years before his meeting with Tezuka, had written "Das Ding" (The thing), a major lecture on the notion of things interpreted in light of the fourfold earth, sky, divinities, and mortals. In the dialogue Heidegger refers to this essay, in which "things" are presented in their objectified presence-the disparaged things that modernity and technology have dispossessed of their Being (Sein). Heidegger points out that never has the distance between things and Sein been as great as in modernity, when all distances in space and time have shrunk.4 Given the unflattering position that Heidegger had taken on the notion of "things," Tezuka was forced to come to the rescue of the Japanese word kotoba by endowing koto with the meaning of two Heideggerian keywords: "event" (kotogara) and "affair" (Sache). The thingly component of kotoba was not simply an objectifiable presence that can be counted, analyzed, and disposed of, but rather a poietic "act" that has the power to create a reality by transforming the named thing (koto) into a real thing (koto).In "A Dialogue... (shrink)

The idea that the form of a word reflects information about its meaning has its roots in Platonic philosophy, and has been experimentally investigated for concrete, sensory-based properties since the early 20th century. Here, we provide evidence for an abstract property of ‘boundedness’ that introduces a systematic, iconic bias on the phonological expectations of a novel lexicon. We show that this abstract property is general across events and objects. In Experiment 1, we show that subjects are systematically more likely (...) to associate sign language signs that end with a gestural boundary with telic verbs (denoting events with temporal boundaries, e.g., die, arrive) and with count nouns (denoting objects with spatial boundaries, e.g., ball, coin). In Experiments 2–3, we show that this iconic mapping acts on conceptual representations, not on grammatical features. Specifically, the mapping does not carry over to psychological nouns (e.g. people are not more likely to associate a gestural boundary with idea than with knowledge). Although these psychological nouns are still syntactically encoded as either count or mass, they do not denote objects that are conceived of as having spatial boundaries. The mapping bias thus breaks down. Experiments 4–5 replicate these findings with a new set of stimuli. Finally, in Experiments 6–11, we explore possible extensions to a similar bias for spoken language stimuli, with mixed results. Generally, the results here suggest that ‘boundedness’ of words' referents (in space or time) has a powerful effect on intuitions regarding the form that the words should take. (shrink)

Scientific study of dreams requires the most objective methods to reliably analyze dream content. In this context, artificial intelligence should prove useful for an automatic and non subjective scoring technique. Past research has utilized word search and emotional affiliation methods, to model and automatically match human judges’ scoring of dream report’s negative emotional tone. The current study added word associations to improve the model’s accuracy. Word associations were established using words’ frequency of co-occurrence with their defining words (...) as found in a dictionary and an encyclopedia. It was hypothesized that this addition would facilitate the machine learning model and improve its predictability beyond those of previous models. With a sample of 458 dreams, this model demonstrated an improvement in accuracy from 59% to 63% on the negative emotional tone scale, and for the first time reached an accuracy of 77% on the positive scale. (shrink)

Alternative proteins, including plant-based and cell-based meat and dairy analogues, are discursively positioned as a new form of meat and dairy and as a solution to the myriad of issues associated with conventional animal agriculture. Animal agricultural industries across various nations have resisted this positioning in regulatory spaces by advocating for laws that restrict the use of meat and dairy terms on the labels of alternative proteins products. Underlying this contestation are differing understandings of, and vested interests in, desirable futures (...) for animal agriculture. In Australia, this broader contestation led to a national-level inquiry by a Senate parliamentary committee entitled _Definitions of meat and other animal products_ (the Inquiry). This paper reports findings from a study of the problematizations developed through the Inquiry using a framework for policy discourse analysis referred to as Bacchi’s ‘What’s the Problem Represented to be’ methodology. It shows how the dominant discourse throughout the Inquiry moved away from the initial problematization of alternative proteins as a threat to animal agriculture. Instead, both industries were ultimately positioned as not in competition and only labelling laws were problematized with the solution being amendments to ensure ‘consumer clarity’. This outcome ignored a range of alternative problematizations related to the ethical, environmental, health, social and economic issues raised by animal agriculture and by alternative proteins. This lack of scrutiny benefits both industries, by closing off the policy discourse to consideration of a range of alternative interests, voices, and potential solutions, such as stricter health and welfare regulation. (shrink)

To help infer the meanings of novel words, children frequently capitalize on their current linguistic knowledge to constrain the hypothesis space. Children's syntactic knowledge of function words has been shown to be especially useful in helping to infer the meanings of novel words, with most previous research focusing on how children use preceding determiners and pronouns/auxiliary to infer whether a novel word refers to an entity or an action, respectively. In the current visual world experiment, we examined whether (...) 28‐ to 32‐month‐olds could exploit their lexical semantic knowledge of an additional class of function words—prepositions—to learn novel nouns. During the experiment, children were tested on their ability to use the prepositions in, on, under, and next to to identify novel creatures displayed on a screen (e.g., The wug is on the table), as well as their ability to later identify the creature without accompanying prepositions (e.g., Look at the wug). Children overall demonstrated understanding of all the prepositions but next to and were able to use their knowledge of prepositions to learn the associations between novel words and their intended referents, as shown by greater‐than chance looks to the target referent when no prepositional phrase was provided. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Book Reviews 137 The Meanings of Landscape: Essays on Place, Space, Environment and Justice BY KENNETH R. OLWIG London: Routledge, 2019 REVIEWED BY TIMM SCHÖNFELDER Landscape is more than spatial scenery that meets the eye: it is an anthropogenic artefact, an intellectual construct, a mirror of culture; it even has its own language.1 This broadness is reflected in the compilation of nine authoritative essays by the geographer and (...) professor of landscape architecture Kenneth R. Olwig that were published during the past quarter of a century and are now molded into a more coherent whole. In this regard, the present volume can be considered the pinnacle of Olwig’s intellectual oeuvre. In a fervent foreword, the anthropologist Tim Ingold sets the tone when he urges the reader to shed the contemporary notion of what he terms “topophobia”—­ a lack of bond betweenpeopleandplaces—­andtoreinstatephilologyasacentralfield of interest after it was “relegated by techno-­ science to the margins of scholarship” (xv). To achieve this, the essays deal with an eclectic set of themes ranging from Ptolemy’s notion of “choros” as something similar to today’s understanding of landscape, to the humanistic geographer Yi-­Fu Tuan’s concept of “topophilia,” which is hailed as a guiding ideal for much of Olwig’s work. The articles are bound together by an introduction that quickly transcendsthegeometricallimitationsoflandscape,ontologicallyquestioning whether these can be representative of the world itself at all (3). The first chapter thus delves right into the etymologies of “landscape” and its historical implications in the Nordic countries and England with detours through Italy and the German lands. In a cursory, highly associative manner Olwig fathoms the respective cultural implications. Central is the idea that the concept of landscape is more than the mere scenicrepresentationofspaceitcametobeknownasinRenaissance art and culture.2 Rather, the Nordic variants of the word, like the Swedish landskap, are used to denote natural regions with their own polity that were then gradually subjected to a monarchic state, not least through the surveying and mapping of their territory (see also chapter two). ENVIRONMENT, SPACE, PLACE / VOLUME 13 / ISSUE 2 / 2021 138 At times, Olwig’s philological musings appear rather stretched, as when he associates the German word Grundgesetz (the “basic/­ fundamental law” of 1949, which until today serves as Germany’s constitution ) with a biopolitical dimension of “ground” as in “soil” (41).3 In cases like this, his use of literature is selective. This culminates in a problematic assessment of Nazi ideology as being motivated by a specific understanding of landscape. Statements like “there can be no doubt that the modern German conception of Landschaft was implicated in the promotion of blood-­ and-­ soil fascist ideology” (42) neglect important literature on the topic.4 Such generalizations are owed to the author’s sweeping tour de force approach. The reviewer would have preferred more guidance through the theoretical thickets by way of a clear, chronologically ordered argument. This is not helped by the occasional seeming inconsistency, as in the claim that the U.S. “inherited the British scenic idea of landscape” as a former colony while also being “very much the inheritor of German romantic ideas concerning the relation of culture to nature as expressed in the physical landscape” (45), which, in turn, showed parallels to “fascist landscapes” in the “attempt to cleanse geography of its environmentalist taint by making it a science of space” (42). This truly is a lot of ground to cover for one essay. The ensuing chapters, however, try to disentangle this inspired jumble. The second article, “Landscape, Place, and the State of Progress,” identifies a switch since the Renaissance from the idea of circuitous development to linear progress towards utopia. For Olwig, there is a “darker, Faustian side” to it that he identifies as the “dialectic of modernity,” which “opposes cosmic dreams of a utopian future to the topian exigencies of present and past”: to advance, the path had to be cleared of traditional elements (52). This materialized in courteous theatre as well as in Shakespeare’s popular plays, and in the new architecture of parks where landscape was symbolic for cultural and social progress (64). “Choros, place, and the spatialization of landscape” traces important theoretical threads within geography... (shrink)

Il s’agira d’aborder dans cette contribution l’œuvre de Carl Andre en tant qu’arrangement de pièces combinatoires, selon des ensembles minimaux qui se parcourent, dont l’expérience et littéralement la compréhension ne peuvent se faire qu’à partir du déplacement physique du visiteur. Un déplacement qui prend son impulsion à partir du sol, départ de la sculpture mais aussi plan selon lequel la plus existentielle des dimensions se donne, condition fondatrice de l’habiter humain. Si l’installation a souvent été considérée comme une extension des (...) pratiques de l’assemblage et du collage, c’est-à-dire en fonctionnant selon des principes d’association, de contamination et de télescopage, le travail de Carl Andre pose de manière très radicale et rigoureuse les conditions mêmes qui rendent possible toute installation : la mise en tension sans cesse renouvelée d’une proximité et d’un lointain qui fonde l’horizon d’un spectateur toujours dessaisi de ce qui ad-vient, l’avènement de la corporéité en tant que mouvement, des prises sensori-motrices sans cesse reconduites et indexées sur la perception des objets qui occupent l’espace et le redistribuent, enfin la nature éminemment trajective de cette catégorie d’œuvre que l’on tente de définir par le terme d’installation. Les environnements sculpturaux proposés par l’artiste américain donnent lieu, ils instituent l’espace et l’ouvrent, ils sont autant de places à investir. In this contribution, we will deal with the works by Carl Andre as an arrangement of combinatory parts, according to minimal sets you can go by whose experience and literally the understanding can only be made from the visitor’s physical moves. A movement that origins from the ground, the start of the sculpture but also a map according to which the most existential of dimensions emerges, the founding condition of human beings. If the installation has often been considered an extension of assembly and collage habits, that is to say functioning according to association, contamination and going back and forth principles, the works by Carl Andre set the very conditions which make any kind of installation possible in an extremely radical and strict way: the forever renewed focus of a proximity and a distance which founds the horizon for a spectator who keeps being deprived of what will come, the surge of corporeality as a movement, of forever renewed sensorimotor grips indexed to the perception of objects which fill space and redistribute it, and at last the trajective nature of this kind of works one tends to define by the word of installation. The sculptural environment offered by the American artist gives place, they institute space and widen it, they are as many places to invest. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Rhetoric 33.3 (2000) 221-242 [Access article in PDF] Reigning in the Court of Silence: Women and Rhetorical Space in Postbellum America Nan Johnson [Figures]Nervous, enthusiastic, and talkative women are the foam and sparkle, quiet women the wine of life. The senses ache and grow weary of the perpetual glare and brilliancy of the former, but turn with a sense of security and repose to the mild, (...) mellow glow irradiating the sphere of the latter. We associate all ideas of rest with quiet women. They are soul-divinities reverently guarding their sacred trusts in the Court of Silence. When she speaks, her words are aptly chosen and fitly spoken. She is wise and thoughtful, but loving and meek. "Still waters run deep," but not in the world-applied sense; babbling rills do not wear their channels deep, but streams of calmest flow have hidden depths undreamed of, unsuspected.--Anonymous, "Quiet Women" 461In an article entitled "Quiet Women," which appeared in The Ladies' Repository in 1868, an anonymous author argues that "quiet women are the wine of life." Capturing the deep cultural longing of the postbellum period for the icon of the American woman as angel of the hearth, this portrait deifies the quiet woman and demonizes the other possibilities: the enthusiastic woman, the talkative woman, the brilliant woman, and the babbling woman. The mild and mellow queen of the "Court of Silence" is graceful, calm, and, most important of all, silent. In this characterization, an idealized woman is defined as necessarily rhetorically meek. By worshiping "the quiet woman," influential proponents of public opinion such as The Ladies' Repository reinscribed for a postbellum readership a definition of true womanhood that equated silence with feminine virtue and enthusiastic vocality with its opposite. The argument that the rhetorical conduct of the "wise and thoughtful" woman could be contrasted instructively with the trivial and ultimately inconsequential rhetorical behavior of loud and talkative women is one that was made in so many cultural conversations of the postbellum period that it achieved the power of an ideological trope. 1 [End Page 221]Efforts to regulate women's rhetorical behavior intensified rather than abated in the decades following the Civil War as women pursued education, the right to vote, property rights, and mobility in public life. In conduct literature, a genre that proliferated during the postbellum period, the preferred construction of the "quiet" woman was a mainstay in an ideological agenda that supported the generally held nineteenth-century view that character and the nature of one's rhetoric are mutually revealing. Like other types of self-help materials marketed in the last decades of the century, such as elocution manuals and letter-writing guides, conduct manuals included among their vast tables of contents the matters of how and where one ought to speak. In their coverage of deportment in all areas of life, conduct manuals promised the aspiring middle-class American an education in the home in the culturally valuable skills of public speaking and writing. 2 The collective enterprise of the parlor rhetoric movement and conduct literature in particular was to offer happiness and success to those who would follow certain rules. Enormously popular in the postbellum period and well into the turn of the century, conduct manuals argued a conservative gender agenda that appealed to the middle-class readers of a nation who seemed eager to accept the idea that correct deportment in daily life could help to restore the social calm the postwar nation longed for. Although by the 1880s the American public had well in mind notable examples of women, such as Lucretia Mott, Sojourner Truth, Frances Willard, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who had assumed powerful reformist voices in the causes of abolition, temperance, and women's rights, the rhetorical space these women occupied in shaping political and cultural life was viewed as the exception rather than the rule. 3 In spite of the high profile rhetorical careers of a handful of women, or, perhaps, because of them, postbellum America wondered uneasily just how public women's lives... (shrink)

Saturday Night Live's comedy and philosophy have something fundamental in common: both re‐tune attention by challenging assumptions about the world and each other. Comedy reveals assumptions by exploiting them in exaggerated form – and boy do we have a lot of assumptions, particularly about race and racial identity. “Black Jeopardy” reminds people that many things affect identities, not just the putative race to which we belong. The “neighborhood” we're exposed to is one of pure fancy: a comedic rendering of all (...) the stereotypes and biases that are carried by notion of “black.” In “Mr. Robinson's Neighborhood,” which appeared multiple times from Season 6 to Season 10, Eddie Murphy plays the ghetto version of Fred Rogers, from the PBS show Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood. The sketches usually end with Mr. Robinson leaving his apartment by fire escape, typically to avoid violence or arrest. (shrink)

We compared the ability of three different contextual models of lexical semantic memory and of a simple associative model to predict the properties of semantic networks derived from word association norms. None of the semantic models were able to accurately predict all of the network properties. All three contextual models over-predicted clustering in the norms, whereas the associative model under-predicted clustering. Only a hybrid model that assumed that some of the responses were based on a contextual model and (...) others on an associative network successfully predicted all of the network properties and predicted a word's top five associates as well as or better than the better of the two constituent models. The results suggest that participants switch between a contextual representation and an associative network when generating free associations. We discuss the role that each of these representations may play in lexical semantic memory. Concordant with recent multicomponent theories of semantic memory, the associative network may encode coordinate relations between concepts, and contextual representations may be used to process information about more abstract concepts. (shrink)