Revisit euphemisms from the perspective of intentionality

This paper studies the role of intentionality in the process of generating euphemisms. Intentionality, as the key to human consciousness activities, is not only the starting point of the language user’s consciousness activity related to euphemism generation, but also functions through the whole generating process. Its functions can be specified as triggering, orientation, and selection. Collective intentionality restricts individual intentionality and has the function of identifying and integrating individual intentionality. Under the effect of collective intentionality and social environment, the euphemisms are renewed with the time and bear features unique to a particular group.

What is “meta-” for? : a Peircean critique of the cognitive theory of metaphor

My thesis aims to anatomize the cognitive theory of metaphor and suggests a Peircean semiotic perspective on metaphor study. As metaphorical essentialists, Lakoff/Johnson tend to universalize a limited number of conceptual metaphors and, by doing this, they overlook the dynamic relation between metaphorical tenor and vehicle. Such notion of metaphor is not compatible with the polysemous nature of the sign. The diversity and multivalency of metaphorical vehicle, in particular, cast serious doubts on the hypothesis of “conceptual metaphors” which, being meta-metaphorical constructs, can tell us nothing but a dry and empty formula “A is B”. Consequently, Lakoff/Johnson’s notion of conceptual metaphor is very much a Chomskyan postulation. Also problematic is the expedient experientialism or embodied philosophy they have put forward as a middle course between objectivism and subjectivism. What is missing from their framework is a structural space for dynamic interpretation on the part of metaphor users. In contrast, cognitive linguists may find in Peirce’s theory of the sign a sound solution to their theoretical impasse. As a logician, Peirce sees metaphor as the realization of iconic reasoning at the language level. His exposition on iconicity and iconic reasoning has laid a solid foundation upon which may be erected a fresh epistemology of metaphor fit for the contemporary study of language and mind. Broadly speaking, metaphor in Peirce can be examined from roughly two perspectives. Macroscopically, metaphor is an icon in general as opposed to index and symbol, whereas, microscopically, it is a subdivided hypoicon on the third level as opposed to image and diagram. Besides, Peirce also emphasized the subjective nature of metaphor. Semioticians after Peirce have further developed his theory on metaphor. For example, through his concept of “arbitrary iconicity”, Ersu Ding stresses the arbitrary nature of metaphorization and tries to shift our attention away from Lakoff/Johnson’s abstract epistemological Gestalt to the specific cultural contexts in which metaphors occur. Umberto Eco, on the other hand, sees interpretation of signs as an open-ended process that involves knowledge of all kinds. Encyclopedic knowledge thus serves as unlimited source for metaphorical association. For Eco, the meaning of a metaphor should be interpreted in the cultural framework based on a specific cultural community. Both Ding’s and Eco’s ideas are in line with Peirce’s theoretical framework where the meaning of a metaphor depends on an interpreter in a particular socio-historical context. They all realize that we should go beyond the ontology of metaphorical expressions to acquire a dynamic perspective on metaphor interpretation. To overcome the need for presupposing an omnipotent subject capable of knowing the metaphor-in-itself, we turn to Habermas’s theory of communicative action in which the meaning of metaphor is intersubjectively established through negotiation and communication. Moreover, we should not overlook the dynamic tension between metaphor and ideology. Aphoristically, we can say that nothing is a metaphor unless it is interpreted as a metaphor, and we need to reconnect metaphors with the specific cultural and ideological contexts in which they appear

The Cognitive Psychology of Humour in Written Puns

The primary purpose of this dissertation was to investigate how humour from written puns is produced. Prior models have emphasized that novel or surprising incongruities should be important to humour appreciation­ (Suls, 1972; Topolinski, 2014). In study 1, a new approach to operationalizing incongruity as semantic dissimilarity was developed and tested using Latent Semantic Analysis (Landauer, Foltz & Laham, 1998). “Latent semantic incongruity” was associated with humour ratings, but only for puns with low ratings of familiarity from a prior occasion or for those with a low level of aggressive content. Overall, there was also an unexpected strong positive association between familiarity with a pun from a prior occasion and humour ratings. Study 2 demonstrated that humour ratings for puns decreases with repeated exposures. Changes in humour with repetition were dependent on latent semantic incongruity, the duration of time spent comprehending the pun and providing humour ratings, and on how humour was measured. Study 3 investigated whether “elaboration” on the two implied concepts in each pun was associated with humour (as predicted by Wyer & Collins, 1992). Elaboration quantity (the number of associated words that participants could comfortably list) and elaboration duration (the duration of time participants spent on the elaboration task) were associated with humour ratings, but only for familiar puns. In summary, fluent comprehension of incongruity was important to humour from unfamiliar puns, whereas elaboration on the implied concepts in puns was important to humour appreciation for puns that were familiar from a prior occasion

LANGUAGE STRATEGIES IN INTERNATIONAL BUSINESS: NEW PROSPECTS FOR NEGOTIATION AND CONFLICT MANAGEMENT

With the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020 — when negotiations have been almost exclusively carried out in online settings — there is a growing need for research which addresses this new norm. This dissertation explores how linguistic cues can corroborate or challenge the established measures in negotiation and conflict management research. The overarching objective is to study the interdependence of language and culture in the presence of technology within the domain of international negotiations and conflict resolution. The first essay of the dissertation addresses the anomalies regarding the use of the two major negotiation strategies identified by prior research – questions and answers (Q&A) and substantiation and offers (S&O) – and their effectiveness across cultures. I triangulate between cognitive methods utilized in negotiations research (mental model convergence, fixed-pie bias), linguistic cues (words with positive and negative connotations), and language style matching (LSM), a novel analysis in international buyer-seller negotiations. Based on an online negotiation simulation between representatives of a high-context (Hong Kong Chinese) and low-context (U.S.) communication culture (total sample size is 300) and subsequent linguistic analysis of the transcripts, the essay questions the notion of normative strategy; shows the conditions when the strategies have an integrative versus distributive character; identifies cognitive mechanisms which explain why S&O might be more beneficial than Q&A in a high-context communication culture; and clarifies in which cultural contexts the index of language style matching reflects a deeper, cognitive simmilarity and in which an automatic process. The second essay is a systematic literature review of studies about language in international conflict management research. The essay emphasizes a positive potential of a conflict and suggests how it can be achieved linguistically in an intercultural environment. It shows how language can give a dynamic process to conflict management. Unlike the static view of conflict, the proposed theoretical framework underscores the importance of poly-contextual behavior, i.e., how the behavior changes across contexts. By focusing on the multilingualism, the essay further disentangles language and culture, which are often mixed together. The essay suggests short term and long term strategies for a dynamic conflict de-escalation in the domain of international business

Computational Understanding, Generation and Evaluation of Creative Expressions

Computational creativity has received a good amount of research interest in generating creative artefacts programmatically. At the same time, research has been conducted in computational aesthetics, which essentially tries to analyse creativity exhibited in art. This thesis aims to unite these two distinct lines of research in the context of natural language generation by building, from models for interpretation and generation, a cohesive whole that can assess its own generations. I present a novel method for interpreting one of the most difficult rhetoric devices in the figurative use of language: metaphors. The method does not rely on hand-annotated data and it is purely data-driven. It obtains the state of the art results and is comparable to the interpretations given by humans. We show how a metaphor interpretation model can be used in generating metaphors and metaphorical expressions. Furthermore, as a creative natural language generation task, we demonstrate assigning creative names to colours using an algorithmic approach that leverages a knowledge base of stereotypical associations for colours. Colour names produced by the approach were favoured by human judges to names given by humans 70% of the time. A genetic algorithm-based method is elaborated for slogan generation. The use of a genetic algorithm makes it possible to model the generation of text while optimising multiple fitness functions, as part of the evolutionary process, to assess the aesthetic quality of the output. Our evaluation indicates that having multiple balanced aesthetics outperforms a single maximised aesthetic. From an interplay of neural networks and the traditional AI approach of genetic algorithms, we present a symbiotic framework. This is called the master-apprentice framework. This makes it possible for the system to produce more diverse output as the neural network can learn from both the genetic algorithm and real people. The master-apprentice framework emphasises a strong theoretical foundation for the creative problem one seeks to solve. From this theoretical foundation, a reasoned evaluation method can be derived. This thesis presents two different evaluation practices based on two different theories on computational creativity. This research is conducted in two distinct practical tasks: pun generation in English and poetry generation in Finnish.Laskennallista luovuutta on tutkittu paljon puhtaan tuottamisen näkökulmasta ja saman aikaan tutkimusta on tehty laskennallisen estetiikan saralla. Väitöskirjani yhdistää näitä kahta eri koulukuntaa, sillä kehittämäni laskennallisesti luovat järjestelmät käyttävät tuottamisessa apuna estetiikkaa; järjestelmät siis tulkitsevat teoksiaan samaan aikaan, kun ne niitä tuottavat. Käsittelen väitöskirjassani metaforien automaattista tulkintaa, värien nimien tuottamista, sloganien tuottamista sekä suomenkielisen runouden tuottamista. Metodeina käytän perinteistä koneoppimisalgoritmia, eli niin kutsuttua geneettistä algoritmia, sekä neuroverkkoja. Niiden yhdistelmää nimitän mestari ja oppipoika -malliksi, jossa geneettinen algoritmi opettaa neuroverkkoja