The Material Bases of Meaning

Contemporary semiotics has often gone too far in proposing language as the model to explain every phenomenon of communication. Giorgio Prodi’s seminal book, originally published in Italian in 1977, poses the question from the opposite perspective: his ‘natural history of meaning’ does not depict a biological universe that behaves as if it spoke, but a cultural universe structured even at its highest levels according to the same modes and processes of mutual adaptation and ‘reading’ that happen at the level of cells. The picture he paints shows us knowledge at its origin, as a process of environmental adaptation and interpretation, in which the discoveries of biology interact with those of semiotics. Within this natural history of language competence, the book emphasises the remote, primitive phase, which takes place below the threshold of the subjective and the social. Proceeding from there it outlines a holistic hypothesis of semiosis at the cultural level: the elementary phases of the recognition of meaning, which become progressively more complex as the phylogenesis progresses, lead all the way to the construction of linguistic systems in the human animal. This is an investigation of the elementary biological processes in order to identify the material logic that is the foundation of the higher processes of meaning-making – prehistory of the sign, biology of semiosis: from the side of nature and from the side of culture. | Giorgio Prodi (1928–1987) was an Italian oncologist and a pioneer of biosemiotics

Embodiment and Grammatical Structure: An Approach to the Relation of Experience, Assertion and Truth

In this thesis I address a concern in both existential phenomenology and embodied cognition, namely, the question of how ‘higher’ cognitive abilities such as language and judgements of truth relate to embodied experience. I suggest that although our words are grounded in experience, what makes this grounding and our higher abilities possible is grammatical structure. The opening chapter contrasts the ‘situated’ approach of embodied cognition and existential phenomenology with Cartesian methodological solipsism. The latter produces a series of dualisms, including that of language and meaning, whereas the former dissolves such dualisms. The second chapter adapts Merleau-Ponty’s arguments against the perceptual constancy hypothesis in order to undermine the dualism of grammar and meaning. This raises the question of what grammar is, which is addressed in the third chapter. I acknowledge the force of Chomsky’s observation that language is structure dependent and briefly introduce a minimal grammatical operation which might be the ‘spark which lit the intellectual forest fire’ (Clark: 2001, 151). Grammatical relations are argued to make possible the grounding of our symbols in chapters 4 and 5, which attempt to ground the categories of determiner and aspect in spatial deixis and embodied motor processes respectively. Chapter 6 ties the previous three together, arguing that we may understand a given lexeme as an object or as an event by subsuming it within a determiner phrase or aspectualising it respectively. I suggest that such modification of a word’s meaning is possible because determiners and aspect schematise, i.e. determine the temporal structure, of the lexeme. Chapter 7 uses this account to take up Heidegger’s claim that the relation between being and truth be cast in terms of temporality (2006, H349), though falls short of providing a complete account of the ‘origin of truth’. Chapter 8 concludes and notes further avenues of research

A quantitative and typological study of Early Slavic participle clauses and their competition

This thesis investigates the semantic and pragmatic properties of Early Slavic participle constructions (conjunct participles and dative absolutes) to understand the principles motivating their selection over one another and over their main finite competitor (jegda-clauses). The issue is tackled by adopting two broadly different approaches, which inform the division of the thesis into two parts. The first part of the thesis uses detailed linguistic annotation on Early Slavic corpora at the morphosyntactic, dependency, information-structural, and lexical levels to obtain indirect evidence for different potential functions of participle clauses and their main finite competitor. The goal of this part of the thesis is to understand the roles of compositionality and default discourse reasoning as explanations for the distribution of participle constructions and jegda-clauses in the Early Slavic corpus. The investigation shows that the competition between conjunct participles, absolute constructions, and jegda-clauses occurs at the level of discourse organization, where the main determining factor in their distribution is the distinction between background and foreground content of an (elementary or complex) discourse unit. The analysis also shows that the major common denominator between the three constructions is that all of them can function as frame-setting devices (i.e. background clauses), albeit to very different extents. In fact, conjunct participles are more typically associated with the foreground constituent of a discourse unit, whereas dative absolutes and jegda-clauses are typically associated with the background content. The second part of the thesis uses massively parallel data, including Old Church Slavonic and Ancient Greek, and analyses typological variation in how languages express the semantic space of English when, whose scope encompasses that of Early Slavic participle constructions and jegda-clauses. To do so, probabilistic semantic maps are generated and statistical methods (including Kriging, Gaussian Mixture Modelling, precision and recall analysis) are used to induce cross-linguistically salient dimensions from the parallel corpus and to study conceptual variation within the semantic space of the hypothetical concept when. Clear typological correspondences and differences with Early Slavic from linguistic phenomena in other languages are then exploited to corroborate and refine observations made on the core semantic-pragmatic properties of participle constructions and jegda-clauses on the basis of annotated Early Slavic data. The analysis shows that 'null’ constructions (juxtaposed clauses such as participles and converbs, or independent clauses) consistently cluster in particular regions of the semantic map cross-linguistically, which clearly indicates that participle clauses are not equally viable as alternatives to any use of when, but carry particular meanings that make them less suitable for some of its functions. The investigation helped identify genealogically and areally unrelated languages that seem typologically very similar to Old Church Slavonic in the way they divide the semantic space of when between overtly subordinated and 'null’ constructions. Comparison with these languages reveals great similarities between the functions of Early Slavic participle constructions and of linguistic phenomena in some of these languages (particularly clause chaining, bridging, insubordination, and switch reference). Crucially, new clear correspondences are found between these phenomena and 'non-canonical’ usages of participle constructions (i.e. coreferential dative absolutes, syntactically independent absolutes and conjunct participles, and participle constructions with no apparent matrix clause), which had often been written off as ‘aberrations’ by previous literature on Early Slavic

'Schizomorphic visions': visuality and dissenting subjectivities in the poetry of the Italian neoavanguardia

This dissertation examines the role of literary visuality in the construction of cultural categories of madness, delirium, schizophrenia, and trauma in the poetry of the Italian neoavanguardia. In addition to exploring configurations of madness and delirium in theoretical and critical writings produced by members of various interrelated literary movements in the 1960s, this dissertation centres on close readings of a selection of lesser known ekphrastic, visual, concrete, and collage poetic works, produced between 1961-1977, by Giulia Niccolai, Edoardo Sanguineti, Adriano Spatola, and Patrizia Vicinelli. I look also to more recent thought outside of the immediate historical Italian-language context in order to illuminate and inform my readings of the strategies of these literary figures. As part of my analysis of the renegotiation of these fraught themes in the experimental poetry of the neoavanguardia, I investigate how the theoretical category of schizomorfismo as described by Alfredo Giuliani, a key figure in the literary group known as the Novissimi, provides an illuminating paradigm for reading the discontinuous, discordant and febrile literary forms found within this poetry. I draw attention to the underexamined visual dynamics at play in both theoretical and poetic writings of this period, expanding on the fluid relations between visuality and madness, and their invocation as dissenting, countercultural literary entities. As examples of a scrittura altra, invocations of ‘other’ subjectivities are, I argue, embedded in these mostly non-representational texts, which draw on the rich capacities of visual, typographic and concrete experimental forms to raise questions of normativity, marginalisation, and subjugation, as well as interrogate epistemologies of logic and logocentrism. Accordingly, this dissertation interrogates what it means to invoke cultural-clinical categories in the context of poetic experimentation and as literary tools of social critique at a historical moment, in Italy and beyond, when the relationship between clinical and cultural understandings of non-normative mental states were being fundamentally renegotiated

Learning Disabilities

Learning disabilities are a heterogeneous group of disorders characterized by failure to acquire, retrieve, and use information competently. These disorders have a multifactorial aetiology and are most common and severe in children, especially when comorbid with other chronic health conditions. This book provides current and comprehensive information about learning disorders, including information on neurobiology, assessment, clinical features, and treatment. Chapters cover such topics as historical research and hypotheses of learning disorders, neuropsychological assessment and counselling, characteristics of specific disorders such as autism and ADHD, evidence-based treatment strategies and assistive technologies, and much more

Topics, presuppositions, and theticity: An empirical study of verb-subject clauses in Albanian, Greek, and Serbo-Croat

LoC Class: PG9522, LoC Subject Headings: Albanian language--Clauses, Greek language/Modern--Clauses, Serbo-Croatian language--Clause

Topics, Presuppositions, and Theticity: An Empirical Study of Verb-Subject Clauses in Albanian, Greek, and Serbo-Croat

Verb-Subject order is often claimed to be the surface expression of thetic utterances, which are supposed to be ontologically different from the classical Aristotelian categoric type: thetic utterances are not divided in two parts (subject and predicate, topic and comment), but represent the information they convey as a cognitive whole. The purpose of the present study is to offer a detailed description of the clauses with this word order in Albanian, Greek, and Serbo-Croat, in which the verb-subject strategy is a very prominent one, and, based on these data, to reexamine the postulates of the theory of two basic utterance types. The results may be subsumed in two claims: (1) The equation "VS = thetic" does not hold true, because subject postponement is a distinctive feature of at least three constructions, which I labeled Inversion, VsX-Construction and vS-Construction. Of these, only the latter resembles what is usually called thetic. (2) The existence of a non-categoric utterance type does not automatically follow from the existence of vS-Construction, since this construction also displays a specific kind of topic-comment articulation, explainable in terms of certain word order and intonation rules of the three languages in question

Vieraan kielen sanat ja idiomiperiaate

This work sets out to examine how second language (L2) users of English acquire, use and process lexical items. For this purpose three types of data were collected from five non-native students of the University of Helsinki. First, each student s drafts of Master s thesis chapters written over a period of time were compiled into a language usage corpus. Second, academic publications a student referred to in her thesis were compiled into a corpus representing her language exposure. Third, several hundreds of words a student used in her thesis were presented to her as stimuli in word association tasks to obtain psycholinguistic data on the representation of the patterns in the mind. Lexical usage patterns, conceived of in accordance with John Sinclair s conceptualisation of lexis and meaning, were then compared to (1) language exposure and (2) word association responses. The results of this triangulation show that, contrary to mainstream thinking in SLA, language production on the idiom principle, i.e. by retrieving holistic patterns glued by syntagmatic association rather than constructing them word by word, is available to L2 users to a much larger degree than is often claimed. More than half of significant multi-word units used by the students also occur in the language they were exposed to. The idiosyncratic multi-word units are often a result of approximation or fixing. Approximation is a process through which a more or less fixed pattern loosens and becomes variable on the semantic or grammatical axis due to frequency effects and the properties of human memory. Fixing, on the other hand, is a reverse process making the wording of the pattern become overly fixed through repeated usage. Neither of the processes damage the meaning communicated in any way. Word association responses also support the main conclusion of the availability of the idiom principle showing that multi-word units used are also represented holistically in the mind and so confirming the continuity between exposure, usage and psycholinguistic representation. Furthermore, they suggest that the model of a unit of meaning developed by Sinclair has psycholinguistic reality as representations of lexical items in the mind seem to mirror the components of a unit of meaning: collocation, colligation and semantic preference. This work offers an in-depth discussion of Sinclair s conceptualisation of meaning and a novel methodology for studying units of meaning in L2 use both quantitatively and qualitatively by triangulating usage, exposure and word association data. It is hoped that the dissertation will be of interest to scholars specialising in second language acquisition and use, English as a lingua franca, phraseological view of language and corpus linguistic methodology.Miksi joskus tuntuu siltä, ettei koskaan pysty puhumaan toista kieltä virheettömästi? Tämä tutkimus osoittaa, että puhujan sanaston rakenteet ja sanojen käyttöprosessit ovat vieraalla kielellä hyvin samankaltaisia kuin äidinkielessä ja kielen muutoksessa. Tarkastelun kohteena on Helsingin yliopiston eri kielitaustaisten opiskelijoiden käyttämä englannin kielen sanasto heidän omissa teksteissään ja sana-assosiaatiotesteissä. Tutkimus soveltaa kielen analyysiin sellaista monisanaisen merkitysyksikön mallia, joka mahdollistaa yksikön sisäisen vaihtelun ja muutoksen havainnoinnin. Tutkimuksessa kehitetyn mallin avulla voi havainnoida sitä, miten merkityksen siirtymä tapahtuu vapaassa sanayhdistelmässä niin, että se kiteytyy uudeksi monisanaiseksi merkitysyksiköksi ja sitä, miten tämä yksikkö jatkaa edelleen vakiintumista ja muuttumista merkitysjatkumoa pitkin jopa idiomiin asti. Merkityksen yksikkö voi myös muuttua taaksepäin ja vakiintumisen sijaan löystyä ilman, että se kuitenkaan täysin hajoaa. Tätä vaihtelua voidaan kognitiivisesti selittää frekvenssivaikutuksella: mitä yleisempi yksikkö on, sitä paremmin meillä on sen tarkka käyttö hallussamme ja kääntäen: mitä harvinaisempi se on, sitä todennäköisempää on, että emme tuota sitä sanatarkasti. Harvinaisemmat yksiköt tuotetaan todennäköisemmin likiarvona eli korvaamalla muutama niiden komponentti abstraktimmalla komponentilla. Ilmauksen vakiintumisilmiö on tuttu kaikille, joilla on kokemusta saman tekstin, esimerkiksi saman luennon tai puheen, esittämistä useampaan kertaan: samat ilmaukset päädytään toistamaan melkein samoin sanoin. Ilmauksen likiarvo on taas kysymyksessä silloin, kun vaikkapa etsitään kirjastosta kirjaa, jonka nimestä on mielessä hieman epätarkka muistikuva: oliko se Looking at the Sun vai Gazing at the Sun , kun itse asiassa se on Staring at the Sun . On perusteltua olettaa, että sama prosessi toimii kun toisen kielen käyttäjä lausuu so to say eikä so to speak , the hen or the egg eikä the chicken or the egg tai to my head eikä to my mind , koska muistamme merkityksen paremmin kuin kielellisen ilmiasun. Siksi toisen kielen käyttö ei enimmäkseen ole virheellistä vaan ainoastaan hieman epämääräisempää, kielen muotojen likiarvoista käyttöä