Expressive APs and expletive NPs revisited: Refining the extant relevance-theoretic procedural account

In the third stage in the development of the notion of procedural meaning, relevance theorists analysed expressive devices like intonation, interjections, expressive APs, expletive NPs, slurs and paralanguage. This paper revisits expressive APs and expletive NPs by arguing that the emotional-state descriptions they trigger only take within their scope a propositional constituent. Such shorter-ranging mental structure does not fit neatly in the definition of higher-level explicature, so two possible solutions are proposed in order to accommodate it within the relevance-theoretic notional apparatus, the second of which could involve a refinement of the distinction between lower- and higher-level explicatures. Moreover, that type of constituent-directed description is shown to be also enacted by other expressives and other linguistic expressions, and to be constructed in other communicative acts. Finally, since the words functioning as expressive APs and expletive NPs come from various lexical categories, an account of the lexical-pragmatic processes enabling their transfer is given

Computing Happiness from Textual Data

In this paper, we use a corpus of about 100,000 happy moments written by people of different genders, marital statuses, parenthood statuses, and ages to explore the following questions: Are there differences between men and women, married and unmarried individuals, parents and non-parents, and people of different age groups in terms of their causes of happiness and how they express happiness? Can gender, marital status, parenthood status and/or age be predicted from textual data expressing happiness? The first question is tackled in two steps: first, we transform the happy moments into a set of topics, lemmas, part of speech sequences, and dependency relations; then, we use each set as predictors in multi-variable binary and multinomial logistic regressions to rank these predictors in terms of their influence on each outcome variable (gender, marital status, parenthood status and age). For the prediction task, we use character, lexical, grammatical, semantic, and syntactic features in a machine learning document classification approach. The classification algorithms used include logistic regression, gradient boosting, and fastText. Our results show that textual data expressing moments of happiness can be quite beneficial in understanding the “causes of happiness” for different social groups, and that social characteristics like gender, marital status, parenthood status, and, to some extent age, can be successfully predicted form such textual data. This research aims to bring together elements from philosophy and psychology to be examined by computational corpus linguistics methods in a way that promotes the use of Natural Language Processing for the Humanities

Vol. 48 No. 3 - Whole No. 344

Mythprint is the monthly bulletin of the Mythopoeic Society, a nonprofit educational organization devoted to the study, discussion, and enjoyment of myth and fantasy literature, especially the works of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, and Charles Williams. To promote these interests, the Society publishes three magazines, maintains a World Wide Web site, and sponsors the annual Mythopoeic Conference and awards for fiction and scholarship, as well as local and written discussion groups

The interjection "cheers" in British and American English: collocations, meanings and functions

Interjections are linguistic expressions that reflect the emotions and feelings of the speakers with an exclamative intonation. They are complete communicative messages; they constitute an open word-class, and they are present in all languages. There is little research on this field, an especially on individual interjections. This study focuses on the secondary interjection "cheers" used to toast and to express good wishes. "Cheers" also means ‘thank you’ and ‘goodbye’ in informal British English. By analysing results of the BNC and COCA corpora, this study aims to determine in a quantitative manner the frequency of the use of "cheers" in British and American English, as well as the main set of combinations with which "cheers" occurs, and to identify its main discursive-pragmatic functions. "Cheers" has different meanings and functions depending on the regional variety and it is a cheerful word that fills the discourse with positivity.Las interjecciones son expresiones lingüísticas que reflejan las emociones y los sentimientos de los hablantes con una entonación exclamativa. Son mensajes comunicativos completos que constituyen una clase de palabra abierta y están presentes en todas las lenguas. Hay poca investigación en este campo, especialmente sobre las interjecciones individuales. Este estudio se centra en la interjección secundaria "cheers" la cual se utiliza para brindar y expresar buenos deseos. "Cheers" también significa ‘gracias’ y ‘adiós’ en el inglés británico informal. Mediante el análisis de los resultados de los corpus BNC y COCA, este estudio pretende determinar de forma cuantitativa la frecuencia de uso de "cheers" en inglés británico y americano, así como el principal conjunto de combinaciones con las que aparece, e identificar sus principales funciones discursivo-pragmáticas. "Cheers" tiene diferentes significados y funciones según la variedad regional y es una palabra alegre que llena de positividad el discurso.Depto. de Estudios Ingleses: Lingüística y LiteraturaFac. de FilologíaTRUEunpu

Homo Mimeticus

Genealogy of one of the most ancient and influential concepts in western thought: Mimesis Imitation is, perhaps more than ever, constitutive of human originality. Many things have changed since the emergence of an original species called Homo sapiens, but in the digital age humans remain mimetic creatures: from the development of consciousness to education, aesthetics to politics, mirror neurons to brain plasticity, digital simulations to emotional contagion, (new) fascist insurrections to viral contagion, we are unconsciously formed, deformed, and transformed by the all too human tendency to imitate—for both good and ill. Crossing disciplines as diverse as philosophy, aesthetics, and politics, Homo Mimeticus proposes a new theory of one of the most influential concepts in western thought (mimesis) to confront some of the hypermimetic challenges of the present and future. Written in an accessible yet rigorous style, Homo Mimeticus appeals to both a specialized and general readership. It can be used in courses of modern and contemporary philosophy, aesthetics, political theory, literary criticism/theory, media studies, and new mimetic studies. Ebook available in Open Access. This publication is GPRC-labeled (Guaranteed Peer-Reviewed Content)

Physiology and neuroanatomy of emotional reactivity in frontotemporal dementia

ABSTRACT AND SUMMARY OF EXPERIMENTAL FINDINGS The frontotemporal dementias (FTD) are a heterogeneous group of neurodegenerative diseases that cause variable profiles of fronto-insulo-temporal network disintegration. Loss of empathy and dysfunctional social interaction are a leading features of FTD and major determinants of care burden, but remain poorly understood and difficult to measure with conventional neuropsychological instruments. Building on a large body of work in the healthy brain showing that embodied responses are important components of emotional responses and empathy, I performed a series of experiments to examine the extent to which the induction and decoding of somatic physiological responses to the emotions of others are degraded in FTD, and to define the underlying neuroanatomical changes responsible for these deficits. I systematically studied a range of modalities across the entire syndromic spectrum of FTD, including daily life emotional sensitivity, the cognitive categorisation of emotions, interoceptive accuracy, automatic facial mimicry, autonomic responses, and structural and functional neuroanatomy to deconstruct aberrant emotional reactivity in these diseases. My results provide proof of principle for the utility of physiological measures in deconstructing complex socioemotional symptoms and suggest that these warrant further investigation as clinical biomarkers in FTD. Chapter 3: Using a heartbeat counting task, I found that interoceptive accuracy is impaired in semantic variant primary progressive aphasia, but correlates with sensitivity to the emotions of others across FTD syndromes. Voxel based morphometry demonstrated that impaired interoceptive accuracy correlates with grey matter volume in anterior cingulate, insula and amygdala. Chapter 4: Using facial electromyography to index automatic imitation, I showed that mimicry of emotional facial expressions is impaired in the behavioural and right temporal variants of FTD. Automatic imitation predicted correct identification of facial emotions in healthy controls and syndromes focussed on the frontal lobes and insula, but not in syndromes focussed on the temporal lobes, suggesting that automatic imitation aids emotion recognition only when social concepts and semantic stores are intact. Voxel based morphometry replicated previously identified neuroanatomical correlates of emotion identification ability, while automatic imitation was associated with grey matter volume in a visuomotor network including primary visual and motor cortices, visual motion area (MT/V5) and supplementary motor cortex. Chapter 5: By recording heart rate during viewing of facial emotions, I showed that the normal cardiac reactivity to emotion is impaired in FTD syndromes with fronto-insular atrophy (behavioural variant FTD and nonfluent variant primary progressive aphasia) but not in syndromes focussed on the temporal lobes (right temporal variant FTD and semantic variant primary progressive aphasia). Unlike automatic imitation, cardiac reactivity dissociated from emotion identification ability. Voxel based morphometry revealed grey matter correlates of cardiac reactivity in anterior cingulate, insula and orbitofrontal cortex. Chapter 6: Subjects viewed videos of facial emotions during fMRI scanning, with concomitant recording of heart rate and pupil size. I identified syndromic profiles of reduced activity in posterior face responsive regions including posterior superior temporal sulcus and fusiform face area. Emotion identification ability was predicted by activity in more anterior areas including anterior cingulate, insula, inferior frontal gyrus and temporal pole. Autonomic reactivity related to activity in both components of the central autonomic control network and regions responsible for processing the sensory properties of the stimuli

Homo Mimeticus

Genealogy of one of the most ancient and influential concepts in western thought: Mimesis Imitation is, perhaps more than ever, constitutive of human originality. Many things have changed since the emergence of an original species called Homo sapiens, but in the digital age humans remain mimetic creatures: from the development of consciousness to education, aesthetics to politics, mirror neurons to brain plasticity, digital simulations to emotional contagion, (new) fascist insurrections to viral contagion, we are unconsciously formed, deformed, and transformed by the all too human tendency to imitate—for both good and ill. Crossing disciplines as diverse as philosophy, aesthetics, and politics, Homo Mimeticus proposes a new theory of one of the most influential concepts in western thought (mimesis) to confront some of the hypermimetic challenges of the present and future. Written in an accessible yet rigorous style, Homo Mimeticus appeals to both a specialized and general readership. It can be used in courses of modern and contemporary philosophy, aesthetics, political theory, literary criticism/theory, media studies, and new mimetic studies. Ebook available in Open Access. This publication is GPRC-labeled (Guaranteed Peer-Reviewed Content)

Secret Signals from Another World: Walter Benjamin’s Concept of Innervation

Walter Benjamin refers to the “idea of revolution as an innervation of the technical organs of the collective” as one of the articles of his politics. The significance of this assertion has received relatively little attention in the philosophical reception of his political thought compared to the alternative model of revolution – made famous from the paralipomena to the late theses ‘On the Concept of History’ – as the emergency handbrake of history. Drawing on some of the debates and tensions generated by the work of Miriam Bratu Hansen, this discussion aims at an exegesis of some of the lesser known intellectual sources that influenced Benjamin’s theory of innervation. The purpose in doing so is not an attempt to reconcile or integrate these sources with dominant philosophical reconstructions of what is sometimes characterized as Benjamin’s “Western Marxism” and elaborated, in the more familiar context of Surrealist innervation, as a synthesis of Freud and Marx, but rather to reveal an alternative constellation of Soviet biomechanics and reactionary anti-capitalist Lebensphilosophie, united in their shared rejection of Freudian psychoanalysis