Silent, but salient: gestures in simultaneous interpreting

This study is aimed at studying the saliency in the gestures of simultaneous interpreters. To distinguish between distinguished gestures and non-selected ones, two groups of parameters are proposed - main and auxiliary, which are evaluated in relation to the general gesticulation style of the same interprete

Gesture in Automatic Discourse Processing

Computers cannot fully understand spoken language without access to the wide range of modalities that accompany speech. This thesis addresses the particularly expressive modality of hand gesture, and focuses on building structured statistical models at the intersection of speech, vision, and meaning.My approach is distinguished in two key respects. First, gestural patterns are leveraged to discover parallel structures in the meaning of the associated speech. This differs from prior work that attempted to interpret individual gestures directly, an approach that was prone to a lack of generality across speakers. Second, I present novel, structured statistical models for multimodal language processing, which enable learning about gesture in its linguistic context, rather than in the abstract.These ideas find successful application in a variety of language processing tasks: resolving ambiguous noun phrases, segmenting speech into topics, and producing keyframe summaries of spoken language. In all three cases, the addition of gestural features -- extracted automatically from video -- yields significantly improved performance over a state-of-the-art text-only alternative. This marks the first demonstration that hand gesture improves automatic discourse processing

Discourses, Modes, Media and Meaning in an Era of Pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic has affected all aspects of our everyday lives – from the political to the economic to the social. Using a multimodal discourse analysis approach, this dynamic collection examines various discourses, modes and media in circulation during the early stages of the pandemic, and how these have impacted our daily lives in terms of the various meanings they express. Examples include how national and international news organisations communicate important information about the virus and the crisis, the public’s reactions to such communications, the resultant (counter-)discourses as manifested in social media posts and memes, as well as the impact social distancing policies and mobility restrictions have had on people’s communication and interaction practices. The book offers a synoptic view of how the pandemic was communicated, represented and (re-)contextualised across different spheres, and ultimately hopes to help account for the significant changes we are continuing to witness in our everyday lives as the pandemic unfolds. This volume will appeal primarily to scholars in the field of (multimodal) discourse analysis. It will also be of interest to researchers and graduate students in other fields whose work focuses on the use of multimodal artefacts for communication and meaning making

Emojis as pictures

I argue that emojis are essentially little pictures, rather than words, gestures, expressives, or diagrams. ???? means that the world looks like that, from some viewpoint. I flesh out a pictorial semantics in terms of geometric projection with abstraction and stylization. Since such a semantics delivers only very minimal contents I add an account of pragmatic enrichment, driven by coherence and nonliteral interpretation. The apparent semantic distinction between emojis depicting entities (like ????) and those depicting facial expressions (like ????) I analyze as a difference between truth-conditional and use-conditional pictorial content: ???? depicts what the world of evaluation looks like, while ???? depicts what the utterance context looks like

Discourses, Modes, Media and Meaning in an Era of Pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic has affected all aspects of our everyday lives – from the political to the economic to the social. Using a multimodal discourse analysis approach, this dynamic collection examines various discourses, modes and media in circulation during the early stages of the pandemic, and how these have impacted our daily lives in terms of the various meanings they express. Examples include how national and international news organisations communicate important information about the virus and the crisis, the public’s reactions to such communications, the resultant (counter-)discourses as manifested in social media posts and memes, as well as the impact social distancing policies and mobility restrictions have had on people’s communication and interaction practices. The book offers a synoptic view of how the pandemic was communicated, represented and (re-)contextualised across different spheres, and ultimately hopes to help account for the significant changes we are continuing to witness in our everyday lives as the pandemic unfolds. This volume will appeal primarily to scholars in the field of (multimodal) discourse analysis. It will also be of interest to researchers and graduate students in other fields whose work focuses on the use of multimodal artefacts for communication and meaning making

The Foreign Ear: Elizabeth Bishop\u27s Proliferal Wit & the Chances of Change

Abstract The Foreign Ear: Elizabeth Bishop\u27s Proliferal Wit & the Chances of Change Elizabeth Bishop has been widely celebrated as a painterly or photographic poet, a naturalist and geographer, and yet she was a subtly exquisite musician of wordplay attuned to subvocal effects. This dissertation examines a network of Bishop\u27s affinities and aesthetic commitments, including her wish to say the most difficult things and be funny, if possible. One surprising claim regarding the poet\u27s variously called All Eye, the famous eye, etc., is that her sense of the spiritual is rather antithetical to an ocular regime: even those extremely fluid, revising, surprising land and seascapes for which she is celebrated, are but the tip of the seas we are to attend. Tracing her more properly experimental challenge to her explorations at Vassar, humoring her interest to get an intense sense of consciousness in the tongue, in sensational revisionary moments, I argue that she is a much more radical: and witty) poet than has been granted, and that even those taking her up in a postmodern vein have underappreciated this. Hers is the Emersonian/Pragmatist challenge of transition, and she positioned it particularly in the surface sounds of her words, profoundly attuned as she was to the liminal fringes of a Jamesian stream of thought. Her wish to portray not a thought, but a mind thinking is a commonplace in the criticism, whereas the discussion of the phonotextual creations of sound by way of breath, gestures of transformation, and the affirmation of play, are less lit up. Her poems early to late, and comments outside them, assert her Transcendentalist and Pragmatist affinities, folding them into a radical aesthetic she called the proliferal style. Though her use of religious imagery and language are often believed to evince nostalgic longings, or signal her entrapment in outmoded forms of thinking, I argue that, as part of this project, she made a canny and rigorous effort to adapt her religious inheritance toward the Darwininan understandings of proliferation, error and the ear-rational, pleasure and the chances of change

The pornographical: a mimetic ethics of bodies

This thesis is situated across the fields of contemporary political philosophy, critical theory and feminist/gender studies. It argues that the notion of an ‘ana-aesthetic’ is required in order to provide a fuller sense of the conceptual nuances regarding pornography. The ‘ana-aesthetic’ is suggested as the ground and surface economy for this ‘unsayable something’ that is so much a part of the everyday common senses of contemporary life and art. Distinct from the ‘anti-aesthetic’, the ‘ana-aesthetic’ utilises a discursive methodology, and in sidestepping the usual moral entanglements found in attempts to analyse sexually explicit and often misogynistic pornographies, this thesis shows how the ‘ana-aesthetic’ surface of ‘the pornographical’ generates a mimetic and bodily ethics. ‘The pornographical’ is discussed in terms of its techne of comic humour, as a way of creating substance without lapsing into abyssal logics of lack; and the manner in which sexual meaning of fantasy is pleasurable, forming compressed data. The comic is suggested as something found, a cultural ‘ready-made’ gesture, of pleasure, produced through an economic expenditure of ideational mimetics (upon cathexis). This thesis suggests that through the comic, ‘the pornographical’ creates mimetic economies of witnessing. ‘The pornographical’ occupies a strange cultural position in its relationship to both the body and to technology. It is this relationship that gives ‘the pornographical’ its paradoxical ‘ana-linguistic’/’a-radical’ (without a ‘root’) structure, that generates a way of thinking that is related to and also embodies and mediates the body, without positing sexuality as an essentialism

Transcending the panels: varieties of experience and selfhood in comics.

In this dissertation, I argue that the typical formal features of American comics over the past century have influenced the types of narrative content that tend to be communicated by said medium. I argue that the types of reader experiences that are afforded by the comics form, in part, shape the types of stories told through comics. The experiences that result from the ways we engage perceptually, cognitively, emotionally, and conceptually with comics imply a certain view of selfhood that is potentially subversive in the context of American cultural religiosity and spirituality. The formal features of comics, and the resulting reader experiences, imply an understanding of selfhood as being conventional, narrativized, and made possible by active interpretation. The view that selves are constituted by narratives also can be found in the work of various philosophers of self. Narrative understandings of selfhood stand in stark contrast to the traditional entrenched Western view that selves consist of the unified and continuous essences of individuals. Because comics’ formal features highlight the actively interpreted and constructed nature of the selves of characters in comics, they are fitting for the communication of narratives that engage with traditions of thought in which selves are considered to be malleable, interpretable, and narrative in nature. This includes many traditions of occultism and esotericism. Chapter one examines readers’ typical perceptual and cognitive engagements with the comics form and expounds the process of “closure” as a means by which readers understand a comic as representing a coherent storyworld. Chapter two offers a theoretical model of emotions as processes, which can best account for the range of emotional affordances offered by comics’ character depictions, artistic and design elements, and the processes that constitute closure. Chapter three illuminates the conceptual implications of the perceptual, cognitive, and emotional affordances of comics, arguing that comics imply a conventional and narrativized understanding of selfhood. Finally, chapter four examines the American cultural history of comics and highlights examples of esoteric and occultist themes and traditions appearing in ways that highlight a narrative understanding of selfhood

The Levels of Ambience: An Introduction to Integrative Rhetoric

Although felt as a vague though often powerful sense of the world’s presence as we engage in a rhetorical situation, ambience is the highly complex and integrated totality of the world’s environmental, behavioral, symbolic, and temporal dimensions and their fields of objects, agents, relations, and forces of which we may or may not become aware and with which we may or may not intentionally engage. Although we may feel it so, ambience is not merely a vague, amorphous background to our conscious acts which gives it meaning; rather, it is itself highly organized and organizing, developing from our interactions with the world in a series of succeeding integrative levels, each with its own structures based upon and providing purpose to the lower, earlier developed structures it supervenes and each providing meaning to the higher, later developed structures that depend upon it

Manga Vision

Manga Vision examines cultural and communicative aspects of Japanese comics, drawing together scholars from Japan, Australia and Europe working in areas as diverse as cultural studies, linguistics, education, music, art, anthropology, and translation, to explore the influence of manga in Japan and worldwide via translation, OEL manga and fan engagement. This volume includes a mix of theoretical, methodological, empirical and professional practice-based chapters, examining manga from both academic and artistic perspectives. Manga Vision also provides the reader with a multimedia experience, featuring original artwork by Australian manga artist Queenie Chan, cosplay photographs, and an online supplement offering musical compositions inspired by manga, and downloadable manga-related teaching resources