Theories of the development of human communication

This article considers evidence for innate motives for sharing rituals and symbols from animal semiotics, developmental neurobiology, physiology of prospective motor control, affective neuroscience and infant communication. Mastery of speech and language depends on polyrhythmic movements in narrative activities of many forms. Infants display intentional activity with feeling and sensitivity for the contingent reactions of other persons. Talk shares many of its generative powers with music and the other ‘imitative arts’. Its special adaptations concern the capacity to produce and learn an endless range of sounds to label discrete learned understandings, topics and projects of intended movement

HYBRID DISCOURSE AND THE EMERGENCE OF CONTEXT IN BBC’S QUESTION TIME

This paper explores how hybrid discourse, instantiated in talk and interaction, can be shaped not only by a situational context (TV panel show) and cultural context (TV’s increasing democratisation of laity), but also by human volition in pursuit of recognizable and allowable goals. It does this by examining the emergence of context in light of a non-mainstream hybrid and refl exive activity. Specifically, it examines a non-normative interview format that has arisen in contemporary broadcasting through the analysis of three transcribed segments which were taken from two key episodes of the BBC’s fl agship political program: Question Time. Using a range of analytical concepts from symbolic interactionism, pragmatics, and conversational analysis, such as frames and footings, activity types, discourse types, and turn-taking, the analysis shows how institutional (political) and non-institutional (normative) practices can come together in the pursuit of individual goals and contemporary media’s goal for increasingly partisan journalism and confrontainment. Overall, the paper highlights the importance of a multidimensional approach to context, whereby meaning both emerges from and is constitutive of the forms and functions of an activity’s discourse, whilst further highlighting the role of hybridity in contemporary discourse

Confirmation Report: Modelling Interlocutor Confusion in Situated Human Robot Interaction

Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) is an important but challenging field focused on improving the interaction between humans and robots such to make the interaction more intelligent and effective. However, building a natural conversational HRI is an interdisciplinary challenge for scholars, engineers, and designers. It is generally assumed that the pinnacle of human- robot interaction will be having fluid naturalistic conversational interaction that in important ways mimics that of how humans interact with each other. This of course is challenging at a number of levels, and in particular there are considerable difficulties when it comes to naturally monitoring and responding to the user’s mental state. On the topic of mental states, one field that has received little attention to date is moni- toring the user for possible confusion states. Confusion is a non-trivial mental state which can be seen as having at least two substates. There two confusion states can be thought of as being associated with either negative or positive emotions. In the former, when people are productively confused, they have a passion to solve any current difficulties. Meanwhile, people who are in unproductive confusion may lose their engagement and motivation to overcome those difficulties, which in turn may even lead them to drop the current conversation. While there has been some research on confusion monitoring and detection, it has been limited with the most focused on evaluating confusion states in online learning tasks. The central hypothesis of this research is that the monitoring and detection of confusion states in users is essential to fluid task-centric HRI and that it should be possible to detect such confusion and adjust policies to mitigate the confusion in users. In this report, I expand on this hypothesis and set out several research questions. I also provide a comprehensive literature review before outlining work done to date towards my research hypothesis, I also set out plans for future experimental work

Subjectivity, gesture and language consciousness in the early prose fiction of Jean Genet (1910-1986).

PhDThis thesis interprets the language of the self in both editions of Jean Genet's five works of early prose fiction. Its appendices present the first list of the 65000 words of excisions and variants between the subscribers' (1943-48) and public editions (1949-53). Many critics have interpreted Genet's works in terms of his life, applying to them a reductive notion of the self. Subjectivity in this thesis is a broader concept which addresses the (self-) representation of narrators and characters. I apply close textual analysis to two types of passage (relating to gestures and language consciousness respectively) which represent subjectivity in non-specular language (where one thing does not clearly reflect or refer to another). I use the ubiquitous 'geste' as the guide-word for my analysis of gesture since its usage is similar in each of the texts considered. Gestures are of course mediated by language in Genet's texts but, surprisingly, are only partially represented in visual terms. Consequently, gestures do not serve to consolidate subjectivity and resist attribution to individual characters. It is rather in the interpretation of gestures that narrators and characters who both perform and interpret gestures can negotiate the assigning of meaning and the concomitant firming tip of subjectivity. Language consciousness is a textual speculation on the production and reception of a passage or text and each of Genet's texts demonstrates different interactions between such speculations and the representation of subjectivity. My emphasis on language consciousness helps to elucidate tile structure of the prose text (narrative frames, for example) and its relation to other genres (literary criticism and poetry, for example). I conclude that in Genet's texts innovative language represents (and sometimes fails to represent) plural subjectivity in complex ways. I argue that the interdependence of these three aspects (language, representation and subjectivity) presents a new paradigm for understanding Genet's texts. Furthermore, I outline in my conclusions how it is possible to apply a comparative analysis of these aspects to other works such as Martin Heidegger's Zur Seiqfrage (1955)

Application-driven visual computing towards industry 4.0 2018

245 p.La Tesis recoge contribuciones en tres campos: 1. Agentes Virtuales Interactivos: autónomos, modulares, escalables, ubicuos y atractivos para el usuario. Estos IVA pueden interactuar con los usuarios de manera natural.2. Entornos de RV/RA Inmersivos: RV en la planificación de la producción, el diseño de producto, la simulación de procesos, pruebas y verificación. El Operario Virtual muestra cómo la RV y los Co-bots pueden trabajar en un entorno seguro. En el Operario Aumentado la RA muestra información relevante al trabajador de una manera no intrusiva. 3. Gestión Interactiva de Modelos 3D: gestión online y visualización de modelos CAD multimedia, mediante conversión automática de modelos CAD a la Web. La tecnología Web3D permite la visualización e interacción de estos modelos en dispositivos móviles de baja potencia.Además, estas contribuciones han permitido analizar los desafíos presentados por Industry 4.0. La tesis ha contribuido a proporcionar una prueba de concepto para algunos de esos desafíos: en factores humanos, simulación, visualización e integración de modelos

More than a Spasm, Less than a Sign: Queer Masculinity in American Visual Culture, 1915-1955

This research considers the contribution of visual culture to queer masculinity among white American men during a profound reorientation both in popular understandings and the practical conditions of eroticism between men. From about 1915 to 1955 a pragmatic libidinal economy centered on the theatrical effeminacy of “fairies” was displaced by one founded on the presumption of strongly delineated and relatively fixed hetero- and homo-sexual identities. Although medical discourses about queerness had been developing since the middle of the Nineteenth Century in Europe, what Americans of the opening decades of the twentieth century knew about queerness they learned unsystematically from hearsay, the observation of local people and practices, and visual culture. Photography and film built on existing representational conventions, such as those developed in painting, illustration, theatre and nightlife, but the voyeuristic position of the spectators of films and photographs provided a special liberty to look at men, fetishistically or critically, and imagine recreating their gestures in the medium of one’s own body. Gesture is understood here as the aestheticization of self-presence by means of the movement or disposition of the body and its props. Gestures articulate a selfhood that enjoys a conditional freedom in its relation to the social world while being subject to the structures of meaning it inherits and the operation of discipline. Through fine-grained analyses of queer gags in Charlie Chaplin’s slapstick comedy and nude figure studies by George Platt Lynes, this research argues that visual culture provided an apprenticeship in and theory of queer masculinity as a set of gestures. This study supplements the scholarly literature on Charlie Chaplin by foregrounding aspects of his star text that key audiences to recognize the masculinity of his signature Tramp as queer and cataloguing his use of dance, drag, and accident to provide a figure for homoeroticism in slapstick. It also significantly extends the existing critical literature on the photography of George Platt Lynes by considering camp, surrealism, and glamour as aspects of a decades-long engagement with the phenomenal texture of life as a middle-class queer American man

Estudios de lingüística aplicada VI

El volumen Estudios de Lingüística Aplicada VI presenta una serie de contribuciones recientes en el campo de la Lingüística Aplicada. Dado que encontramos variedad de temas en los nueve capítulos que incluye, los contenidos del volumen se han aglutinado en dos grandes bloques. El primer bloque versa sobre el análisis del discurso y el segundo bloque sobre la enseñanza y el aprendizaje de lenguas.Molés Cases, T.; Currás Móstoles, MR.; Periñán Pascual, JC.; Romero Forteza, F. (2024). Estudios de lingüística aplicada VI. Editorial Universitat Politècnica de València. https://doi.org/10.4995/SCLIN.2023.67200