Iconicity in signed and spoken vocabulary: A comparison between American Sign Language, British Sign Language, English, and Spanish

© 2018 Perlman, Little, Thompson and Thompson. Considerable evidence now shows that all languages, signed and spoken, exhibit a significant amount of iconicity. We examined how the visual-gestural modality of signed languages facilitates iconicity for different kinds of lexical meanings compared to the auditory-vocal modality of spoken languages. We used iconicity ratings of hundreds of signs and words to compare iconicity across the vocabularies of two signed languages - American Sign Language and British Sign Language, and two spoken languages - English and Spanish. We examined (1) the correlation in iconicity ratings between the languages; (2) the relationship between iconicity and an array of semantic variables (ratings of concreteness, sensory experience, imageability, perceptual strength of vision, audition, touch, smell and taste); (3) how iconicity varies between broad lexical classes (nouns, verbs, adjectives, grammatical words and adverbs); and (4) between more specific semantic categories (e.g., manual actions, clothes, colors). The results show several notable patterns that characterize how iconicity is spread across the four vocabularies. There were significant correlations in the iconicity ratings between the four languages, including English with ASL, BSL, and Spanish. The highest correlation was between ASL and BSL, suggesting iconicity may be more transparent in signs than words. In each language, iconicity was distributed according to the semantic variables in ways that reflect the semiotic affordances of the modality (e.g., more concrete meanings more iconic in signs, not words; more auditory meanings more iconic in words, not signs; more tactile meanings more iconic in both signs and words). Analysis of the 220 meanings with ratings in all four languages further showed characteristic patterns of iconicity across broad and specific semantic domains, including those that distinguished between signed and spoken languages (e.g., verbs more iconic in ASL, BSL, and English, but not Spanish; manual actions especially iconic in ASL and BSL; adjectives more iconic in English and Spanish; color words especially low in iconicity in ASL and BSL). These findings provide the first quantitative account of how iconicity is spread across the lexicons of signed languages in comparison to spoken languages

"#Humanity washed ashore" : visual metaphors and emotions in social media

We wrześniu 2015 roku morze wyrzuciło na turecką plażę ciało 3-letniego uchodźcy, Alana Kurdi, który razem z rodziną próbował dotrzeć do greckiej wyspy Kos. Zdjęcie ciała chłopca znalazło się na łamach gazet na całym świecie, wywołując w newsroomach dyskusję o wrażliwości odbiorców, a w Internecie falę komentarzy. Emocje zapisane w wizualnych metaforach są przedmiotem analiz zaprezentowanych w tym artykule. W ciągu zaledwie 24 godzin od śmierci Alana Kurdi 20 milionów ludzi widziało zdjęcia zrobione przez Nilüfer Demir. Setki tysięcy użytkowników mediów społecznościowych przesyłało fotografię opatrzoną często hashtagiem #Człowieczeństwo wyrzucone na brzeg. W artykule analizuję graficzne przekształcenia fotografii prasowej, zgromadzone na stronach Bored Panda i Buzzfeed, gdzie znaleźć można rankingi popularności kilkudziesięciu rozsyłanych wiralowo obrazów, które w 2015 roku pomagały tysiącom użytkowników Internetu w wyrażaniu żalu, współczucia, bólu, gniewu i oburzenia poprzez dzielenie się obrazami zmieniającymi Alana Kurdi w ikonę kryzysu. Omawiam wykorzystane w obrazach symbole, archetypy, intertekstualne nawiązania, które sprawiały, że wizualne metafory były perswazyjnie skuteczne. Chłopiec, który utonął u wybrzeży Europy, otrzymał drugie życie w przestrzeni Internetu, gdzie jego ciało "wycięte" z fotografi i było np. układane do snu, ożywiane albo prezentowane w kontekstach uruchamiających nowe znaczenia. W artykule pokazuję, w jaki sposób Internauci manifestują swoje poglądy i uczucia, których słowa nie mogą wyrazić, a w ekspresji emocji pomagają wizualne metafory tworzące nowe narracje i wiele mówiące o Współczuciu 2.0, smutku, złości i innych emocjach w epoce cyfrowej.In 2015 almost 3000 refugees died trying to cross the Sea to Europe. 3-year-old Alan Kurdi was one of them. Together with his mother and brother, the boy drowned when a boat carrying migrants sank at dawn of September 2, 2015. His body was found on a Turkish beach, where Nilüfer Demir took memorable pictures of the boy and a policeman cradling Alan in his arms. The photos appeared on front pages around the world, in news and social media. The toddler has become a tragic human face of the humanitarian crisis, a symbol, an icon, an emblem, and emotional vehicle allowing thousands of Internet users to express their grief and outrage and manifest their compassion through sharing the dramatic images of Alan and creating their own stories about the boy's afterlife. Visual metaphors generated in this unprecedented way provide us with insight into the sentiments of media consumers, who watch the evening news and create their own narratives refl ecting their feelings about Europe's refugee crisis. Extremely strong emotional response of social media users who shared and disseminated the images of Alan, hash tagged #Humanity Washed Ashore, is the focus of my paper which demonstrates how Internet users manifest their views and express what words cannot express, resorting to metaphorical representations that can be discussed in terms of storytelling. My study investigates how the stories created by media audiences go beyond the narratives prevalent in traditional media and what it tells us about Compassion 2.0, fear, grief, anger and other emotions in the digital age

Making new ideophones in Siwu: Creative depiction in conversation

Ideophones are found in many of the world’s languages. Though they are a major word class on a par with nouns and verbs, their origins are ill-understood, and the question of ideophone creation has been a source of controversy. This paper studies ideophone creation in naturally occurring speech. New, unconventionalised ideophones are identified using native speaker judgements, and are studied in context to understand the rules and regularities underlying their production and interpretation. People produce and interpret new ideophones with the help of the semiotic infrastructure that underlies the use of existing ideophones: foregrounding frames certain stretches of speech as depictive enactments of sensory imagery, and various types of iconicity link forms and meanings. As with any creative use of linguistic resources, context and common ground also play an important role in supporting rapid ‘good enough’ interpretations of new material. The making of new ideophones is a special case of a more general phenomenon of creative depiction: the art of presenting verbal material in such a way that the interlocutor recognises and interprets it as a depiction

Looking Out, Looking In: Contemporary Artists from Morocco

This is the catalogue of the exhibition "Looking Out, Looking In: Contemporary Artists from Morocco" held at Faye G., Jo, and James Stone Gallery 855 Commonwealth Avenue from February 8, 2019 – March 31, 2019. The exhibition is curated by Cynthia Becker, Associate Professor of African Art, Boston University Department of History of Art and Architecture and Nadia Sabri, Professor of Art History and curator, Faculty of Education Sciences, University of Mohammed V in Rabat, Morocco. Participating artists are Hassan Darsi, Wiame Haddad, Hassan Hajjaj, Randa Maroufi, Safaa Mazirh, Lamia Naji, and Nour Eddine Tilsaghani.Looking Out, Looking In: Contemporary Artists from Morocco brings together seven diverse Moroccan photographers and videographers for the first time. Each works in a unique style and comes from a different background, but what links them is their exploration of how seeing is not always equated with knowing. They recognize that the process of looking is a political act and seek to emphasize the ambiguity of meaning contained within the visual. Some artists consider how Moroccan society is looked at by outsiders and confront the historical biases inherent in the colonial gaze. Others imagine a world without borders, making sense of the boundaries that divide nation-states. Some consider aspects of Moroccan culture hidden from public view due to political oppression. Each uses their art to contemplate the moral and emotional experiences of looking in at oneself in response to looking out at the complex social issues that impact Morocco today.The exhibition is co-sponsored with Boston University’s African Studies Center, the Boston University Arts Initiative, the Institute for the Study of Muslim Societies & Civilizations, the Department of History of Art & Architecture. The Boston University Art Galleries programs are supported in part through a grant from the Boston Cultural Council and administered by the Mayor’s Office of Arts and Culture

The Art of Dissent: Parody, Travesty and Irony in Late Soviet Culture

Irony is the favorite tool of Russian postmodernists fighting discourse totalitarianism. They wield it like a crowbar to pry open in the simulacrum, to tear down the Potemkin portable villages built by forced discursive labor. Every new blow the ironist strikes against the official reality reaffirms his intonational freedom amidst the most coercive discourse. An ultimate weapon of the spiritual proletariat, irony proves to the intellectual that he is a subject rather than an object of discourse. Alas, ironic vigil takes its toll. The self busily disclaiming identity with itself loses track of what it really is. It knows not how to commit, empathize, make believe. Deconstructive irony is a radical epoche whose subject lost control over his destiny and no longer knows how to throw the parodic stick shift into reverse. Irony is indeed a double-edged sword: its corrosive edge cuts those who evade pathos and greets with cynicism constructive engagement. Irony can be construed as a dissimulative gesture signaling to the audience that the individual\u27s face is but a mask, that discursive performance is not to be taken literally. Along with this gesture comes a deep aversion to direct speech. The postmodernist is someone who can\u27t say I love you without immediately putting quotation marks around his words. He wants to distance himself from direct speech, ostensibly to protect himself from discourse\u27s totalitarian proclivities and poshlost, but in the process he does violence to his own voice, suppresses its non-ironic modalities

Scoring Loss in Some Recent Popular Film and Television

This is a pre-copyedited, author-produced PDF of an article accepted for publication in Music Theory Spectrum following peer review. The version of record is available online at: https://doi.org/10.1093/mts/mtu014A certain tonally- and temporally oriented progression of two triads, dwelt upon usually through undulation, accompanies scenes depicting the contemplation of a considerable sorrowful loss in many popular films and throughout one television program produced between 1985 and 2012. In lieu of any strong stylistic precedent for this musico-dramatic association, certain structural relationships between the two triads relative to other triadic pairings may account for possible motivations of the association

Spartan Daily, October 16, 2018

Volume 151, Issue 24https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/spartan_daily_2018/1066/thumbnail.jp

'Properer Men': myth, manhood and the Trojan war in Greene, Shakespeare and Heywood

No abstract available