Figurativity has attracted scholars’ attention for thousands of years and yet there are still open questions concerning its nature. Figurativity and Human Ecology endorses a view of figurativity as ubiquitous in human reasoning and language, and as a key example of how a human organism and its perceived or imagined environment co-function as a system. The volume sees figurativity not only as embedded in an environment but also as a way of acting within that environment. It places figurativity within an ecological context, and approaches it as a phenomenon which cuts across bodily, psychological, linguistic, social, cultural and natural environments. Figurativity and Human Ecology will appeal to those interested in the analysis of the all-encompassing creativity of the human mind and in the methodological difficulties associated with the study of cognition.

The book explores the multifaceted nature of media and communication by challenging traditional views that consider media solely as technical infrastructures for transmitting information. Instead, it focuses on mediality as an empirically relevant concept and proposes to understand media as socially constituted semiotic procedures that shape and are shaped by communicative practices. The book is structured around this central idea, with four main sections. Part I examines digital environments, analyzing the interplay between multimodal approaches and mediality through case studies such as digital learning platforms and Zoom seminars. Part II focuses on journalistic procedures, investigating how media shapes political debates and news presentation on platforms like Instagram. Part III delves into embodied processes, particularly the role of the body movements and gestures in communication, illustrated through analyses of yoga tutorials and family dinner conversations. Part IV combines diverse semiotic and medial resources, with studies on historical data interpretation and virtual reality gaming practices. The book aims to provide a comprehensive understanding of the role of different media in constituting meaning and shaping social interactions.

Natural language understanding systems require a knowledge base provided with formal representations reflecting the structure of human beings' cognitive system. Although surface semantics can be sufficient in some other systems, the construction of a robust knowledge base guarantees its use in most natural language processing applications, thus consolidating the concept of resource reuse. This conference deals with meaning and knowledge representation in the context of natural language understanding from the perspective of theoretical linguistics, computational linguistics, cognitive science, knowledge engineering, artificial intelligence, natural language processing, text analytics or linked data and semantic web technologies.

The human ability to think non-literally has attracted the interest of various scholars for thousands of years. Over the centuries, they have defined and studied an extensive variety of tropes, such as metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, allegory, and irony, in terms of their communicative effectiveness and stylistic aesthetics and basically interpreted these simply as figurative linguistic expressions and mere flourishes adding flavour to underlying non-figurative content. Today, figurativity is understood as constitutive of various processes of human comprehension of the world, human communicative interactions, and everyday human functioning. This volume constitutes a representative selection of studies that provide novel answers to the open questions of how non-literal thought and non-literal expression in various media and discourses (co-)exist. The book focuses on figurative cognitive operations enabling non-literal thought, language and other semiotic expressions. The unique set of viewpoints and authors’ contributions upholds the cognitive approach to figurativity; it positions figurativity in various discursive environments, compares and contrasts figurativity in various languages and cultures, and traces the multimodal interplay of figurativity.

The human ability to think non-literally has attracted the interest of various scholars for thousands of years. Over the centuries, they have defined and studied an extensive variety of tropes, such as metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, allegory, and irony, in terms of their communicative effectiveness and stylistic aesthetics and basically interpreted these simply as figurative linguistic expressions and mere flourishes adding flavour to underlying non-figurative content. Today, figurativity is understood as constitutive of various processes of human comprehension of the world, human communicative interactions, and everyday human functioning. This volume constitutes a representative selection of studies that provide novel answers to the open questions of how non-literal thought and non-literal expression in various media and discourses (co-)exist. The book focuses on figurative cognitive operations enabling non-literal thought, language and other semiotic expressions. The unique set of viewpoints and authorsâ (TM) contributions upholds the cognitive approach to figurativity; it positions figurativity in various discursive environments, compares and contrasts figurativity in various languages and cultures, and traces the multimodal interplay of figurativity.

What are the arts? What functions do the arts serve in human life? There has been a surge of cognitive, biological, and evolutionary interest in the arts in recent years, most of it oriented towards individual artforms. However, there has been virtually no bridging work to integrate the arts under a single theoretical perspective. This book presents the first integrated cognitive account of the arts that unites visual art, theatre, literature, dance, and music into a single framework, with supporting discussions about creativity and aesthetics. Its comparative approach identifies both what is unique to each artform and what they share, shedding light on how the arts can combine with one another to form syntheses, such as choreographing dance movements to music, or setting lyrics to music to create a song. While studies in the psychology of the arts tend to focus on perceptual processes and aesthetic responses alone, this book offers a holistic sensorimotor account that examines the full gamut of processes from creation to perception. This allows for a broad discussion of the evolution of the arts, including the origins of rhythm, the co-evolution of music and language, the evolution of drawing, and cultural evolution of the arts. Finally, the book unifies a number of topics that have not previously been fully related to one another, including theatre and literature, music and language, creativity and aesthetics, dancing and acting, and visual art and music. A unique volume providing a bold new approach to the integration of the arts, for academics or general readers of the arts, psychology, cognitive neuroscience, anthropology, and evolutionary studies.

This book presents the first book-length study of ambient sound as a key issue in sound studies and sonic philosophy. Taking a broad, media-philosophical approach, it explores ambient sound as a basic dimension of the sonic environment, sonic technologies, sonic arts and the material staging of listening. Through analyses of key concepts such as surroundability, mediatization, immanence, synthetization and continuous variation, the book elucidates how ambient aspects of sound influence our conceptions of what sound is and how it affects us by exposing sound’s relation to basic categories such as space, time, environment, medium and materiality. It also illuminates how the strategic production of ambient sound constitutes a leading aesthetic paradigm that has been a decisive factor in the shaping of the modern sonic environment – from key developments in experimental and popular music, sound art and cinematic sound design to the architectural-technological construction of listening spaces in concert halls and theaters and in current streaming infrastructures, digital surround sound and the everyday aesthetics of headphone listening.

This book adopts a broad cognitive-pragmatic perspective on irony which sees ironic meaning as the result of complex inferential activity arising from conflicting conceptual scenarios. This view of irony is the basis for an analytically productive integrative account capable of bridging gaps among disciplines and of recontextualizing and solving some controversies. Among the topics covered in its pages, readers will find an overview of previous linguistic and non-linguistic approaches. They will also find definitional and taxonomic criteria, an exhaustive exploration of the elements of the ironic act, and a study of their complex forms of interaction. The book also explores the relationship between irony, banter and sarcasm, and it studies how irony interacts with other figurative uses of language. Finally, the book spells out the conditions for “felicitous” irony and re-interprets traditional ironic types (e.g., Socratic, rhetoric, satiric, etc.), in the light of the unified approach it proposes.

Doris Salcedo, a Colombian-born artist, addresses the politics of memory and forgetting in work that embraces fraught situations in dangerous places. Noted critic and theorist Mieke Bal narrates between the disciplines of contemporary culture in order to boldly reimagine the role of the visual arts. Both women are pathbreaking figures, globally renowned and widely respected. Doris Salcedo, meet Mieke Bal. In Of What One Cannot Speak, Bal leads us into intimate encounters with Salcedo’s art, encouraging us to consider each work as a “theoretical object” that invites—and demands—certain kinds of considerations about history, death, erasure, and grief. Bal ranges widely through Salcedo’s work, from Salcedo’s Atrabiliarios series—in which the artist uses worn shoes to retrace los desaparecidos (“the disappeared”) from nations like Argentina, Chile, and Colombia—to Shibboleth, Salcedo’s once-in-a-lifetime commission by the Tate Modern, for which she created a rupture, as if by earthquake, that stretched the length of the museum hall’s concrete floor. In each instance, Salcedo’s installations speak for themselves, utilizing household items, human bones, and common domestic architecture to explore the silent spaces between violence, trauma, and identity. Yet Bal draws out even deeper responses to the work, questioning the nature of political art altogether and introducing concepts of metaphor, time, and space in order to contend with Salcedo’s powerful sculptures and installations. An unforgettable fusion of art and essay, Of What One Cannot Speak takes us to the very core of events we are capable of remembering—yet still uncomfortably cannot speak aloud.

This books aims to demonstrate how semiotic models of textual analysis can be used to study any social reality or cultural process. In addition, it shows how semiotic models work by using examples from everyday life and social praxis, communicative processes and modes of consumption, online interactions and cross-media procedures, political experiences and scientific universes.