27,612 research outputs found
Upright posture and the meaning of meronymy: A synthesis of metaphoric and analytic accounts
Cross-linguistic strategies for mapping lexical and spatial relations from body partonym systems to external object meronymies (as in English âtable legâ, âmountain faceâ) have attracted substantial research and debate over the past three decades. Due to the systematic mappings, lexical productivity and geometric complexities of body-based meronymies found in many Mesoamerican languages, the region has become focal for these discussions, prominently including contrastive accounts of the phenomenon in Zapotec and Tzeltal, leading researchers to question whether such systems should be explained as global metaphorical mappings from bodily source to target holonym or as vector mappings of shape and axis generated âalgorithmicallyâ. I propose a synthesis of these accounts in this paper by drawing on the species-specific cognitive affordances of human upright posture grounded in the reorganization of the anatomical planes, with a special emphasis on antisymmetrical relations that emerge between arm-leg and face-groin antinomies cross-culturally. Whereas Levinson argues that the internal geometry of objects âstripped of their bodily associationsâ (1994: 821) is sufficient to account for Tzeltal meronymy, making metaphorical explanations entirely unnecessary, I propose a more powerful, elegant explanation of Tzeltal meronymic mapping that affirms both the geometric-analytic and the global-metaphorical nature of Tzeltal meaning construal. I do this by demonstrating that the âalgorithmâ in question arises from the phenomenology of movement and correlative body memoriesâan experiential ground which generates a culturally selected pair of inverse contrastive paradigm sets with marked and unmarked membership emerging antithetically relative to the transverse anatomical plane. These relations are then selected diagrammatically for the classification of object orientations according to systematic geometric iconicities. Results not only serve to clarify the case in question but also point to the relatively untapped potential that upright posture holds for theorizing the emergence of human cognition, highlighting in the process the nature, origins and theoretical validity of markedness and double scope conceptual integration
Graphical modelling language for spycifying concurrency based on CSP
Introduced in this (shortened) paper is a graphical modelling language for specifying concurrency in software designs. The language notations are derived from CSP and the resulting designs form CSP diagrams. The notations reflect both data-flow and control-flow aspects of concurrent software architectures. These designs can automatically be described by CSP algebraic expressions that can be used for formal analysis. The designer does not have to be aware of the underlying mathematics. The techniques and rules presented provide guidance to the development of concurrent software architectures. One can detect and reason about compositional conflicts (errors in design), potential deadlocks (errors at run-time), and priority inversion problems (performance burden) at a high level of abstraction. The CSP diagram collaborates with objectoriented modelling languages and structured methods
Improving Usability of Interactive Graphics Specification and Implementation with Picking Views and Inverse Transformations
Specifying and programming graphical interactions are difficult tasks,
notably because designers have difficulties to express the dynamics of the
interaction. This paper shows how the MDPC architecture improves the usability
of the specification and the implementation of graphical interaction. The
architecture is based on the use of picking views and inverse transforms from
the graphics to the data. With three examples of graphical interaction, we show
how to express them with the architecture, how to implement them, and how this
improves programming usability. Moreover, we show that it enables implementing
graphical interaction without a scene graph. This kind of code prevents from
errors due to cache consistency management
Symbiotic modeling: Linguistic Anthropology and the promise of chiasmus
Reflexive observations and observations of reflexivity: such agendas are by now standard practice in anthropology. Dynamic feedback loops between self and other, cause and effect, represented and representamen may no longer seem surprising; but, in spite of our enhanced awareness, little deliberate attention is devoted to modeling or grounding such phenomena. Attending to both linguistic and extra-linguistic modalities of chiasmus (the X figure), a group of anthropologists has recently embraced this challenge. Applied to contemporary problems in linguistic anthropology, chiasmus functions to highlight and enhance relationships of interdependence or symbiosis between contraries, including anthropologyâs four fields, the nature of human being and facets of being human
Object orientation and visualization of physics in two dimensions
We present a generalized framework for cellular/lattice based visualizations
in two dimensions based on state of the art computing abstractions. Our
implementation takes the form of a library of reusable functions written in C++
which hides complex graphical programming issues from the user and mimics the
algebraic structure of physics at the Hamiltonian level. Our toolkit is not
just a graphics library but an object analysis of physical systems which
disentangles separate concepts in a faithful analytical way. It could be
rewritten in other languages such as Java and extended to three dimensional
systems straightforwardly. We illustrate the usefulness of our analysis with
implementations of spin-films (the two-dimensional XY model with and without an
external magnetic field) and a model for diffusion through a triangular
lattice.Comment: 12 pages, 10 figure
- âŠ