Studies in Dhāraṇī Literature II: Pragmatics of Dhāraṇīs

This article is one of a series that reassesses the dhāraṇī texts of Mahāyāna Buddhism. The article seeks to examine dhāraṇī texts by using the linguistic tools of pragmatics, especially historical pragmatics, to assist the understanding of their statements. Rather than the meaning of the term dhāraṇī as a subject term, the domain of truth-conditional semantics, this paper examines statements in texts labelled dhāraṇī. Pragmatics examines meaning in context, and the categories of speech acts developed by Searle has been especially helpful in mapping out differences within such texts and the formalization of statements across texts. The grammaticalization of specific speech elements, especially interjections, in the context of mantra-dhāraṇīs is also discussed

Experiential Hierarchies of Streets

Mental representations of spatial knowledge are organized hierarchically. Among people familiar with an urban environment, common spatial knowledge from these spatial mental representations enables successful communication of place and route descriptions, consisting of hierarchically-ordered references to prominent spatial features, such as streets. The more prominent a street is, the more likely it is to be known by the wayfinder receiving the directions. The automated construction of such descriptions therefore requires hierarchical data models ranking streets in street networks. This paper explores the reasons of overlaps in the content and hierarchical organization of common spatial knowledge among locals. We introduce a novel measure allowing to rank streets in a street network. This ranking allows to construct experiential hierarchies reflecting the shared experience of the streets in a city. The measure is derived from network connectivity measures, and takes into account the structure of the street network as well as the higher-order partition of the urban space into suburbs