Spectators’ aesthetic experiences of sound and movement in dance performance

In this paper we present a study of spectators’ aesthetic experiences of sound and movement in live dance performance. A multidisciplinary team comprising a choreographer, neuroscientists and qualitative researchers investigated the effects of different sound scores on dance spectators. What would be the impact of auditory stimulation on kinesthetic experience and/or aesthetic appreciation of the dance? What would be the effect of removing music altogether, so that spectators watched dance while hearing only the performers’ breathing and footfalls? We investigated audience experience through qualitative research, using post-performance focus groups, while a separately conducted functional brain imaging (fMRI) study measured the synchrony in brain activity across spectators when they watched dance with sound or breathing only. When audiences watched dance accompanied by music the fMRI data revealed evidence of greater intersubject synchronisation in a brain region consistent with complex auditory processing. The audience research found that some spectators derived pleasure from finding convergences between two complex stimuli (dance and music). The removal of music and the resulting audibility of the performers’ breathing had a significant impact on spectators’ aesthetic experience. The fMRI analysis showed increased synchronisation among observers, suggesting greater influence of the body when interpreting the dance stimuli. The audience research found evidence of similar corporeally focused experience. The paper discusses possible connections between the findings of our different approaches, and considers the implications of this study for interdisciplinary research collaborations between arts and sciences

Writing Fighting: Critical Cognitive Approaches to the Language of Killing in War

This thesis investigates the ways in which soldiers use language to report and structure their experiences of conflict. In particular, it examines autobiographical descriptions of acts of killing from wars across the 20th and 21st century. Beginning with the application of Cognitive Grammar (Langacker, 2008) to a clause-level Critical Discourse Analysis of lexicogrammar (cf. Hart, 2013; 2014; 2018), it shows that diverse stylistic strategies construe force and causality in a number of ways. In doing so, the study also reinforces the importance of narrative context and background knowledge in the interpretation of individual clauses. Considering the applicability and limitations of Cognitive Grammar to discourse-level analysis (following Pincombe, 2014), the thesis presents a novel approach to the representation of the perception of intentionality in language. It argues that inferred intentions can function as reference points (Langacker, 2008; Harrison, 2017), marking continuity or deviation from mind-modelled (Stockwell, 2009) norms associated with the perception of an agent across discourse. In addition, the thesis calls into question the specificity with which analysts define and distinguish between social and linguistic agency, and conducts a reader-response study, finding that readers’ perceptions of agents’ intentionality differ from their assessments of responsibility. Overall, the analysis demonstrates that Cognitive Grammar can effectively account for the ideological construal of killing in soldiers’ writings, and that the adaptation of the model to consider the perception of intentionality promises further novel developments in the critical and stylistic analysis of discourse from a cognitive perspective

Mapping the pedagogic practice of grade ten English teachers: a qualitative multi-lensed study.

Doctoral Degree. University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg.This study addresses the issue of how to track the classroom talk of subject English teachers in Grade Ten classrooms in KwaZulu-Natal. Subject English, as a horizontal knowledge structure, presents particular challenges of content and methodological specification: what may be included, and the means of teaching and assessment, are contested, wide-ranging, and frequently opaque. English teachers are central to the construal of the subject in the classroom and their classroom talk is central to their construal of the subject to their learners. Classroom observations were conducted in four purposively selected KwaZulu- Natal state high schools, spanning the socio-economic spectrum, across the period 2005-2009. Twenty-six lessons were analysed using code theory’s concepts of classification and framing. This analysis presented broadly similar categorisations of strong classification and framing for most of the lessons, apart from some framing differences with respect to evaluation. However, my field observations had identified differences between the teachers’ classroom talk that were not captured. This led to the quest of finding pedagogically well theorised languages of description of teacher talk capable of capturing the range of variation and flow with greater nuance. Application of the lenses of systemic functional linguistics (SFL), Jacklin’s tripartite typology extending code theory (2004), Brodie’s expansion of classic classroom discourse analysis (2008, 2010), Legitimation Code Theory (LCT) (2014), and conceptual integration theory (2015), were successful in describing and discriminating more fully the range of pedagogy. Detailed analysis of four literature lessons (two teaching novels, two teaching poetry) from the two schools at opposite ends of the socio-economic spectrum, are presented as exemplars of these lenses’ capacity as languages of description for subject English teacher classroom talk. The multi-lensed descriptions highlighted variations such as: o the degree of use of nominalised discourse (SFL); o more dominantly discursive pedagogy or more dominantly conventional pedagogy (Jacklin); o more overt or more implicit evaluations, greater use of insert moves versus greater use of elicit moves (Brodie); and o cultivation of a cognitively associative literary gaze versus cultivation of a decoding of the text gaze and intricate movements by the teachers between relatively stronger and weaker epistemic and social relations; more frequent and deeper versus less frequent and flatter semantic waving (LCT). A fifth lesson, focused on learner oral performances of infomercials, is analysed using conceptual integration theory, as the sole example in the data set, of pedagogic conceptual integration. These analyses highlight the potential of these lenses as tools for the unpacking and specification of teachers’ pedagogic practice, particularly their pedagogic content knowledge, an undertaking which has been protractedly difficult to achieve beyond localised, intuitive description. They also illuminated the intricate complexity of pedagogy, and the propensity for pedagogic meaning to disintegrate when the level of analysis shifts down to too small a micro-focus. This highlights the ongoing need for research to pinpoint the ‘sweet spot’ of the optimally smallest unit of a pedagogic act. Key components of the pedagogic process emerged that we need more refined understanding of in relation to what teachers do and the impact of this on the epistemic access of learners: teacher pedagogic mobility, pedagogic coherence and pedagogic flow. The study points to the Jacklinian and LCT lenses as offering the most potential for the ongoing investigation of these dimensions

Directional adposition use in English, Swedish and Finnish

Directional adpositions such as to the left of describe where a Figure is in relation to a Ground. English and Swedish directional adpositions refer to the location of a Figure in relation to a Ground, whether both are static or in motion. In contrast, the Finnish directional adpositions edellä (in front of) and jäljessä (behind) solely describe the location of a moving Figure in relation to a moving Ground (Nikanne, 2003). When using directional adpositions, a frame of reference must be assumed for interpreting the meaning of directional adpositions. For example, the meaning of to the left of in English can be based on a relative (speaker or listener based) reference frame or an intrinsic (object based) reference frame (Levinson, 1996). When a Figure and a Ground are both in motion, it is possible for a Figure to be described as being behind or in front of the Ground, even if neither have intrinsic features. As shown by Walker (in preparation), there are good reasons to assume that in the latter case a motion based reference frame is involved. This means that if Finnish speakers would use edellä (in front of) and jäljessä (behind) more frequently in situations where both the Figure and Ground are in motion, a difference in reference frame use between Finnish on one hand and English and Swedish on the other could be expected. We asked native English, Swedish and Finnish speakers’ to select adpositions from a language specific list to describe the location of a Figure relative to a Ground when both were shown to be moving on a computer screen. We were interested in any differences between Finnish, English and Swedish speakers. All languages showed a predominant use of directional spatial adpositions referring to the lexical concepts TO THE LEFT OF, TO THE RIGHT OF, ABOVE and BELOW. There were no differences between the languages in directional adpositions use or reference frame use, including reference frame use based on motion. We conclude that despite differences in the grammars of the languages involved, and potential differences in reference frame system use, the three languages investigated encode Figure location in relation to Ground location in a similar way when both are in motion. Levinson, S. C. (1996). Frames of reference and Molyneux’s question: Crosslingiuistic evidence. In P. Bloom, M.A. Peterson, L. Nadel & M.F. Garrett (Eds.) Language and Space (pp.109-170). Massachusetts: MIT Press. Nikanne, U. (2003). How Finnish postpositions see the axis system. In E. van der Zee & J. Slack (Eds.), Representing direction in language and space. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Walker, C. (in preparation). Motion encoding in language, the use of spatial locatives in a motion context. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Lincoln, Lincoln. United Kingdo

What do we mean when we say climate change is urgent?

Recent discussions of climate change in multiple domains—the academic literature, the popular press, political movements, and international climate policy regime—have increasingly framed the phenomenon as a “crisis,” an “emergency,” or an “urgent” situation. In this paper, we contextualize the time pressure of climate change in the broader social science literature, perform bibliometric and discourse analyses of this framing, and explore potential implications of this trend for climate decision making. While the increased prevalence of time pressure terms is arguably part and parcel of modernity, these terms are in general not synonymous. In the context of climate decision making, we find that “urgency” functions as a boundary object relaying the internalization of time pressure between (1) the academic literature and the international climate change policy regime and (2) political movements and the popular press; especially as construed in these latter domains, “crisis” and “emergency” connote time pressure but so too generate a constellation of other affective and cognitive states. A review of a set of related literatures suggests that the time pressure framing of climate change affects the quantity and quality of information and the range of options (e.g., geoengineering) considered in choice processes for mitigation and adaptation actions, as well as the sequencing and timing of chosen plan elements; furthermore, these effects likely vary in both direction and magnitude with characteristics of the individuals or organizations in which they manifest. Taken as a whole, the crisis framing of climate change is likely to polarize beliefs and actions, especially in the absence of accompanying information about self-efficacy and hope