scholarly journals CONTRASTING ENGLISH AND SERBIAN THROUGH THE LENSES OF MULTILEVEL-GROUNDED SEMANTICS

2021 ◽  
Vol 18 (48) ◽  
pp. 167-183
Author(s):  
Mihailo Antović ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Mental Representations ◽  
General Knowledge ◽  
Embodied Experience ◽  
Modal Interaction ◽  
Implicit Information ◽  
Two Agents ◽  
Cross Domain ◽  
Grammatical Construction ◽  
Multi Level ◽  
Grounded Semantics

The paper illustrates how the author’s emerging theory of “multi-level grounding” may be applied to some contrastive phenomena in English and Serbian. The theory argues that classic semantic approaches based on cross-space interaction may profit enormously from a more thorough consideration of contextual constraints on meaning generation. For example, to understand even a fairly simple comparison such as “Achilles is a lion”, one needs to know a lot more than just how to, depending on the paradigm of choice, “cross-domain map”, “blend”, or “analogize” appropriate formal elements of the two concepts understood as mere mental representations. Rather, to be meaningful in more than just an academic sense, the interpretation needs to call layers of context, from the very general knowledge of who Achilles is and what lions are to specific cultural and even personal connotations appropriate to the two agents and their interaction. In relation to the earlier work of Searle and Langacker, cognitive linguists Coulson and Oakley propose to allocate such knowledge to the construct of the “grounding box” (containing implicit information on the agents, forum, and circumstances surrounding the utterance). The author’s theory makes this concept more refined, suggesting a series of at least six hierarchical and partly recursive grounding boxes constraining meaning generation – from the perceptual attributes of objects cognized to such percepts’ cross-modal interaction with the interlocutors’ embodied experience, to their affective, conceptual, and discourse-driven (re) interpretations. The analysis in this paper aims to show how this approach may be instrumental in disentangling the (seemingly) shared and different semantic strategies in the way English and Serbian treat a simple stock expression (“You are right” / “U pravu si”), grammatical construction (“tolerant of” / “tolerantan prema”), and widely used idiom (“a finger in every pie” / “u svakoj čorbi mirođija”).

scholarly journals mlCAF: Multi-Level Cross-Domain Semantic Context Fusioning for Behavior Identification

Sensors ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 17 (10) ◽  
pp. 2433 ◽  
Author(s):  
Muhammad Razzaq ◽  
Claudia Villalonga ◽  
Sungyoung Lee ◽  
Usman Akhtar ◽  
Maqbool Ali ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Semantic Context ◽  
Cross Domain ◽  
Multi Level

The Mimetic Hypothesis and Embodied Musical Meaning

2001 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 195-212 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arnie Cox
Keyword(s):  
Sound Production ◽  
Musical Experience ◽  
Aural Skills ◽  
Embodied Experience ◽  
Musical Meaning ◽  
Musical Imagery ◽  
Cross Domain ◽  
Musical Concepts ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Music And Gender

Research into the bodily basis of musical meaning has focused on conceptual metaphor and image schemata, but the processes whereby embodied experience becomes relevant to music conceptualization remains largely unexplained. This paper offers an account of music conceptualization that helps explain how embodied experience motivates and constrains the formation of basic musical meaning. The core of the “mimetic hypothesis” holds that 1) we understand sounds in comparison to sounds we have made ourselves, and that 2) this process of comparison involves tacit imitation, or mimetic participation, which in turn draws on the prior embodied experience of sound production. Evidence for the hypothesis comes from developmental and neuropsychological studies, and from speech imagery, motor imagery, and musical imagery studies. The embodied experience activated during mimetic participation motivates and constrains the cross-domain mappings on which so many musical concepts depend. For example, the metaphoric concept of musical verticality cannot be accounted for without acknowledging the role of mimetic participation. If this participation is as fundamental to musical experience as the hypothesis suggests, not only will it allow us to account for music's most fundamental concepts, but it will also help account for the affective features of musical experience and meaning. Furthermore, the proposed view of mimetic participation helps establish a physical grounding for theories of musical gesture, semiotics, music and gender, music and drama, aural skills pedagogy, music and society, music and dance, and music therapy.

scholarly journals Trusting the experts: the domain-specificity of prestige-biased social learning

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charlotte Olivia Brand ◽  
Alex Mesoudi ◽  
Tom Morgan
Keyword(s):  
Social Learning ◽  
Learning Strategy ◽  
Emergent Property ◽  
Domain Specificity ◽  
General Knowledge ◽  
Online Experiment ◽  
Domain Specific ◽  
Cross Domain ◽  
Successful Group ◽  
Group Members

Prestige-biased social learning (henceforth “prestige-bias”) occurs when individuals predominantly choose to learn from a prestigious member of their group, i.e. someone who has gained attention, respect and admiration for their success in some domain. Prestige-bias is proposed as an adaptive social-learning strategy as it provides a short-cut to identifying successful group members, without having to assess each person’s success individually. Previous work has documented prestige-bias and verified that it is used adaptively. However, the domain-specificity and generality of prestige-bias has not yet been explicitly addressed experimentally. By domain-specific prestige-bias we mean that individuals choose to learn from a prestigious model only within the domain of expertise in which the model acquired their prestige. By domain-general prestige-bias we mean that individuals choose to learn from prestigious models in general, regardless of the domain in which their prestige was earned. To distinguish between domain specific and domain general prestige we ran an online experiment (n=397) in which participants could copy each other to score points on a general-knowledge quiz with varying topics (domains). Prestige in our task was an emergent property of participants’ copying behaviour. We found participants overwhelmingly preferred domain-specific (same topic) prestige cues to domain-general (across topic) prestige cues. However, when only domain-general or cross-domain (different topic) cues were available, participants overwhelmingly favoured domain-general cues. Finally, when given the choice between cross-domain prestige cues and randomly generated Player IDs, participants favoured cross-domain prestige cues. These results suggest participants were sensitive to the source of prestige, and that they preferred domain-specific cues even though these cues were based on fewer samples (being calculated from one topic) than the domain-general cues (being calculated from all topics). We suggest that the extent to which people employ a domain-specific or domain-general prestige-bias may depend on their experience and understanding of the relationships between domains.

scholarly journals Modeling Discontinuities in Cultural Evolution

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Liane Gabora ◽  
Mike Steel
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Evolution ◽  
Mental Representations ◽  
Cognitive Structure ◽  
Cross Domain ◽  
Formidable Challenge ◽  
New Information ◽  
Self Organized Criticality ◽  
Domain Transfer ◽  
Cultural Discontinuities

Discontinuities permeate culture, and present a formidable challenge to mathematical models of cultural evolution. Cultural discontinuities have their origin in cognitive processes that include metaphor, analogy, cross-domain transfer, and self-organized criticality. This paper shows how cultural discontinuities can be accommodated by a theory of cultural evolution using cognitive reflexively autocatalytic foodset-generated (RAF) networks. RAF networks, originally developed to model the origin of life, have been used to models the origin of cognitive structure capable of evolving culture. Mental representations of knowledge and experience play the role of catalytic molecules, interactions amongst them (e.g., associations, affordances, or concept combinations) play the role of reactions, and thought processes are modelled as chains of such interactions. The approach tags mental representations with their source, i.e., whether they were acquired through social learning, individual learning (of pre-existing information), or creative thought (resulting in new information). This makes it possible to track the emergence and transformation of cultural novelty. We illustrate how the approach accommodates discontinuities using a historical example, and show how it is amenable to modelling cultural contributions of groups. We provide a RAF interpretation of the self-made worldview, and discuss how the approach can be used to think more concretely about possible future cultural trajectories. Because cross-domain thinking produces cultural discontinuities, it is impossible to pre-specify what features or traits will be present in future iterations of a cultural output. This suggests that cultural lineages are comprised not of external outputs or ‘memes’, but the conceptual networks that generate them.

scholarly journals Trusting the experts: The domain-specificity of prestige-biased social learning

PLoS ONE ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 16 (8) ◽  
pp. e0255346
Author(s):  
Charlotte O. Brand ◽  
Alex Mesoudi ◽  
Thomas J. H. Morgan
Keyword(s):  
Social Learning ◽  
Learning Strategy ◽  
Emergent Property ◽  
Domain Specificity ◽  
General Knowledge ◽  
Online Experiment ◽  
Domain Specific ◽  
Cross Domain ◽  
Successful Group ◽  
Group Members

Prestige-biased social learning (henceforth “prestige-bias”) occurs when individuals predominantly choose to learn from a prestigious member of their group, i.e. someone who has gained attention, respect and admiration for their success in some domain. Prestige-bias is proposed as an adaptive social-learning strategy as it provides a short-cut to identifying successful group members, without having to assess each person’s success individually. Previous work has documented prestige-bias and verified that it is used adaptively. However, the domain-specificity and generality of prestige-bias has not yet been explicitly addressed experimentally. By domain-specific prestige-bias we mean that individuals choose to learn from a prestigious model only within the domain of expertise in which the model acquired their prestige. By domain-general prestige-bias we mean that individuals choose to learn from prestigious models in general, regardless of the domain in which their prestige was earned. To distinguish between domain specific and domain general prestige we ran an online experiment (n = 397) in which participants could copy each other to score points on a general-knowledge quiz with varying topics (domains). Prestige in our task was an emergent property of participants’ copying behaviour. We found participants overwhelmingly preferred domain-specific (same topic) prestige cues to domain-general (across topic) prestige cues. However, when only domain-general or cross-domain (different topic) cues were available, participants overwhelmingly favoured domain-general cues. Finally, when given the choice between cross-domain prestige cues and randomly generated Player IDs, participants favoured cross-domain prestige cues. These results suggest participants were sensitive to the source of prestige, and that they preferred domain-specific cues even though these cues were based on fewer samples (being calculated from one topic) than the domain-general cues (being calculated from all topics). We suggest that the extent to which people employ a domain-specific or domain-general prestige-bias may depend on their experience and understanding of the relationships between domains.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document