Uncertainty and Conflict Handling in the ATT-Meta Context-Based System for Metaphorical Reasoning

At CONTEXT’99, the author described the ATT-Meta context-based system for (a) reasoning uncertainly about agents ’ beliefs and (b) performing some of the uncertain reasoning needed for the understanding of metaphorical language. ATT-Meta’s handling of uncertainty is qualitative, and includes provisions for adjudicating conflicts between different lines of reasoning. But most of the detail on conflict-handling given in the earlier paper concerned conflicts arising for the special requirements of (a). Furthermore, there have been major recent changes in the conflict-handling approach. The present paper provides a detailed account of major parts of the current approach, stressing how it operates in metaphorical reasoning. In concentrating on uncertainty-handling, this paper does not seek to repeat the justifications given elsewhere for ATT-Meta’s approach to metaphor

Assembling activity/setting participation with disabled young people

Rehabilitation research investigating activity participation has been largely conducted in a realist tradition that under-theorises the relationship between persons, technologies, and socio-material places. In this Canadian study we used a post-critical approach to explore activity/setting participation with 19 young people aged 14 to 23 years with complex communication and/or mobility impairments. Methods included integrated photo-elicitation, interviews, and participant observations of community-based activities. We present our results using the conceptual lens of assemblages to surface how different combinations of bodies, social meanings, and technologies enabled or constrained particular activities. Assemblages were analysed in terms of how they organised what was possible and practical for participants and their families in different contexts. The results illuminate how young people negotiated activity needs and desires in particular ‘spacings’ each with its own material, temporal, and social constraints and affordances. The focus on assemblages provides a dynamic analysis of how dis/abilities are enacted in and across geotemporal spaces, and avoids a reductive focus on evaluating the accessibility of static environmental features. In doing so the study reveals possible ‘lines of flight’ for healthcare, rehabilitation, and social care practices

Patterns of metaphor use in reconciliation talk

In a violent world, reconciliation between perpetrators and victims offers an alternative to revenge or retaliation. In such discourse, participants must make extended efforts to explain themselves to, and to understand, the Other. This article investigates emergent patterns of metaphor in reconciliation talk between an IRA bomber and victim, recorded over two and a half years. The analysis starts from identification of linguistic metaphors and works recursively between levels of discourse, revealing how micro-level negotiation of metaphors contributes to emergent macro-level metaphor systems. Metaphors frame the reconciliation process as A JOURNEY, as CONNECTION, as CHANGING A DISTORTED IMAGE and as LISTENING TO THE OTHER’S STORY. The metaphors vary in their lexicogrammatical patterns and in the degree to which they are extended and developed. Contrasting metaphors are shown to be particularly valuable, as is ‘symbolic literalization’ in which the use of words across metaphor, metonymy and the literal creates useful indeterminacy