A semiotic approach to musical metaphor : theory and methodology

textThe idea that music acts in part as a vehicle for meaning is a truism in both popular reception and music scholarship. The language used to speak and to write about music is replete with words that describe it metaphorically. Melodies descend; rhythms speed up; timbre is smooth. Certainly, we use these terms for communicative facility, yet by applying this language to music, we create metaphors that, according to Ludwig Wittgenstein, act as frames that direct interpretation. In the paper, I put forth a theory that views metaphor as the process of semantic transfer or substitution in which a non-musical concept stands in for a musical feature, effectively enabling us to hear music as more than simply sound. The use of certain metaphors receives inspiration from previously heard music, programs, a perceived similarity with non-musical phenomena, or a combination of these. The methodology that I propose coordinates these metaphors—places them within a single frame—and enables them to interact with one another and to create a more palpable musical experience for the listener. I use Chopin's E minor and A major preludes from Op. 28 as the primary models for expounding this hermeneutic.Musi

"Talent, Skill and Support." : A Method for Automatic Creation of Slogans

Slogans are an effective way to convey a marketing message. In this paper, we present a method for automatically creating slogans, aimed to facilitate a human slogan designer in her creative process. By taking a target concept (e.g. a computer) and an adjectival property (e.g. creative) as input, the proposed method produces a list of diverse expressions optimizing multiple objectives such as semantic relatedness, language correctness, and usage of rhetorical devices. A key component in the process is a novel method for generating nominal metaphors based on a metaphor interpretation model. Using the generated metaphors, the method builds semantic spaces related to the objectives. It extracts skeletons from existing slogans, and finally fills them in, traversing the semantic spaces, using the genetic algorithm to reach interesting solutions (e.g. “Talent, Skill and Support.”). We evaluate both the metaphor generation method and the overall slogan creation method by running two crowdsourced questionnaires.Peer reviewe

Meta4meaning : Automatic Metaphor Interpretation Using Corpus-Derived Word Associations

We propose a novel metaphor interpretation method, Meta4meaning. It provides interpretations for nominal metaphors by generating a list of properties that the metaphor expresses. Meta4meaning uses word associations extracted from a corpus to retrieve an approximation to properties of concepts. Interpretations are then obtained as an aggregation or difference of the saliences of the properties to the tenor and the vehicle. We evaluate Meta4meaning using a set of human-annotated interpretations of 84 metaphors and compare with two existing methods for metaphor interpretation. Meta4meaning significantly outperforms the previous methods on this task.Peer reviewe

Metaphorical language in financial discourse

The aim of this paper is to apply the socio-cognitive approach to metaphorical language in financial discourse according to three levels of metaphorical salience and innovation – the experiential, the cultural, and the topical level. According to the results of the analysis, financial media discourse employs metaphors of these levels in a blended manner and as different mechanisms of legitimization. While a consistency between certain domains of the experiential and the cultural level exists, the topical level is best interpreted in terms of the traditional theory on metaphor. The consistency of the experiential and cultural metaphorical language shows how a metaphorically modelled target domain influences the choice of culture-specific lexicalizations. The mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion as legitimization devices portray finance as an objective and natural discourse of scientific status, while the topical level uses different rhetorical devices to engage the discourse recipients and to guide conceptualization. In summation, the socio-cognitive approach to other discursive genres in general can be fruitful in the classification and the study of the interaction of different metaphorical mappings and the way they integrate to make the discourse legitimate and coherent

Size and emotion or depth and emotion? Evidence, using Matryoshka (Russian) dolls, of children using physical depth as a proxy for emotional charge

Background: The size and emotion effect is the tendency for children to draw people and other objects with a positive emotional charge larger than those with a negative or neutral charge. Here we explored the novel idea that drawing size might be acting as a proxy for depth (proximity).Methods: Forty-two children (aged 3-11 years) chose, from 2 sets of Matryoshka (Russian) dolls, a doll to represent a person with positive, negative or neutral charge, which they placed in front of themselves on a sheet of A3 paper. Results: We found that the children used proximity and doll size, to indicate emotional charge. Conclusions: These findings are consistent with the notion that in drawings, children are using size as a proxy for physical closeness (proximity), as they attempt with varying success to put positive charged items closer to, or negative and neutral charge items further away from, themselves

Strategic Use of Language in White House Twitter Communications

Lippmann (1922) theorized that we understand our world through elites and the media because we cannot experience everything ourselves. We look to others to share their experiences with us. In this way, the media and elites tell us what is important in our world. Converse (1964), Zaller (1992), and Lupia (1994) argue that not only do elites and the media help us see what is important, but they draw out attributes of these issues to help us make political determinations congruent with our belief systems. In this thesis, I conduced two studies investigating candidate, party, and White House tweets about the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA). First, I used a quantitative content analysis to understand how in-parties, out-parties and politicians communicated about the PPACA. I studied tweets from 2009, when the bill was in Congress; in 2012, during an election year; and in 2015, at the start of another election cycle. I observed that elites and media used the term “Obamacare” with affective cues to communicate about the PPACA. The Democrats used positive tone when talking about the law, while the Republicans used negative tone and oppositional language. I also noted that Democrats linguistically reappropriated “Obamacare” to imbue it with positive cues for their base. Next, I conducted to qualitative textual analysis to investigate how the White House communicated about the healthcare policy priority. I began with emergent open coding of 10% of the sample and used this to develop a quantitative code book to analyze the remaining 90%. I developed a tactical category architecture with six categories of provision of information and seven categories of propagandistic techniques. I was able to show that widely used techniques in strategic communication are effective in setting the agenda for the public. Parties, candidates, and the White House communicate what issues are salient and help us toward value judgments of those issues in line with our ideologies. Twitter changes how tacticians practice. The brevity of tweets requires strategic use of language to build the agenda and a savvy press to interpret those cues as they share the agenda with the public