It is widely believed by historians of linguistics that the 19th-century was largely devoted to historical and comparative studies, with the main emphasis on the discovery of soundlaws. Syntax is typically portrayed as a mere sideline of these studies, while semantics is seldom even mentioned. If it comes into view at all, it is usually assumed to have been confined to diachronic lexical semantics and the construction of some (mostly ill-conceived) typologies of semantic change. This book aims to destroy some (...) of these prejudices and to show that in Europe semantics was an important, although controversial, area at that time. Synchronic mechanisms of semantic change were discovered and increasing attention was paid to the context of the sentence, to the speech situation and the users of the language. From being a semantics of transformations', a child of the biological-geological paradigm of historical linguistics with its close links to etymology and lexicography, the field matured into a semantics of comprehension and communication, set within a general linguistics and closely related to the emerging fields of psychology and sociology. (shrink)

Climate scepticism in the sense of climate denialism or contrarianism is not a new phenomenon, but it has recently been very much in the media spotlight. When, in November 2009, emails by climate scientists were published on the internet without their authors' consent, a debate began in which climate sceptic bloggers used an extended network of metaphors to contest science. This article follows the so-called 'climategate' debate on the web and shows how a paradoxical mixture of religious metaphors and demands (...) for 'better science' allowed those disagreeing with the theory of anthropogenic climate change to undermine the authority of science and call for political inaction with regard to climate change. (shrink)

In 2001 a highly infectious animal disease, foot and mouth disease, broke out in the UK and spread rapidly. In May, when the spread seemed to be slowing down, new disease hotspots appeared in previously little affected regions, such as North Yorkshire. New biosecurity rules were imposed. Based on a series of semi-structured interviews with stakeholders, this article shows that the biosecurity measures farmers implemented during the epidemic meant more than just reducing the risk of spreading FMD. For many, cleansing (...) and disinfecting became Foot and Mouth. Biosecurity actions became invested with symbolic values and, in particular, were ritualised as part of the symbolic spatial construction of an otherwise 'invisible' enemy. (shrink)

Grace de Laguna was a philosopher working in the first part of the twentieth century on analytic and speculative philosophy, as well as on the psychology and philosophy of language, especially the social function of language. Joel Katzav’s lead essay focuses mainly on the former part of her work, while my commentary focuses mostly on the latter. Katzav shows how her work played a role in the development of analytic philosophy, I try to show how her work played a role (...) in the development of pragmatic linguistics, whose development overlapped with some aspects of analytic philosophy. I situate it in the context of an emerging ‘pragmatic Weltanschauung’ that was embraced by many working in linguistics, philology, philosophy, psychology, anthropology and what would later be called linguistic pragmatics. (shrink)

A central problem for the international governance of heritable germline gene editing is that there are important differences in attitudes and values as well as ethical and health care considerations around the world. These differences are reflected in a complicated and diverse regulatory landscape. Several publications have discussed whether reproductive uses would be legally permissible in individual countries and whether clinical applications could emerge in the context of regulatory gaps and gray areas. Systematic comparative studies that explore issues related to (...) the governance of this technology from different national and international perspectives are needed to address the lack of knowledge in this area. In this research report, we contribute to filling this gap by presenting views of stakeholders in the United Kingdom on challenges to the governance of heritable genome editing. We present findings from a multistakeholder study conducted in the United Kingdom between October 2016 and January 2018 and funded by the Wellcome Trust. This research included interviews, literature analysis, and a workshop. We involved leading U.K. scientists, in vitro fertilization clinicians, and representatives from regulatory bodies, patient organizations, and other civil societal organizations, as well as fertility companies. Part one of this article explores stakeholder perceptions of possible global developments in heritable genome editing and associated risks and governance challenges. Part two presents a range of policy options that were generated during the workshop in relation to the challenges discussed in part one. (shrink)

The 18 contributions to this volume deal with a variety of 'tropes', such as metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, irony, euphemism, antonomasia and hyperbole. Using various approaches or paradigms the authors aim to find answers to the crucial epistemological questions, namely whether and to what extent utterances containing tropes can be said to be true or false.

In December 2019, 18 years after the outbreak of SARS, a new SARS-like virus began to circulate and rapidly spread in the People's R...

This article applies some ofthe insights from framing studies in policyresearch, metaphor analysis, and the history ofmedicine to a cultural understanding ofagriculture, using the 2001 outbreak of footand mouth disease in the UK as a case study.The article will show how metaphors of war wereused as a “rhetorical frame” by the media andas an implicit “action frame” by policy makers.It will be argued that although the war framemight initially have been useful in rallyingsupport for the slaughter policy, the metaphorlater backfired, (...) when a metaphorical war turnedinto a literal holocaust. This might haveencouraged the public to perceive the policy asmedieval, brutal, and misguided, thuspotentially undermining the willingness ofsections of the public to support the slaughterpolicy in future outbreaks. If, on the otherhand, a vaccination policy were adopted in thefuture, care would need to be taken to avoidmetaphorical linkages with other controversiesover vaccination in other domains. (shrink)

Communicating Biological Sciences discusses the 'ethics' of science communication in light of recent developments in biotechnology and biomedicine. It focuses on the role of metaphors in the creation of visions and the framing of scientific advances, as well as their impact on patterns of public acceptance and rejection, trust and scepticism. Its rigorous investigation will appeal not only to science writers and scientists, but also to scholars of sociology, science and technology studies, media and journalism.

RESUMENSe asume normalmente que, en las conversaciones ordinarias, los hablantes evitan los significados múltiplesy que los oyentes desambiguan automáticamente las proferencias en función del contexto. En contraste, nosotros queremos hacer ver que la gente explota activamente la polisemia en la conversación a fin de establecer y consolidar los lazos sociales entre los hablantes. y esto también consolida a la larga, el sistema compartido de significados. nuestra investigación sobre el uso pragmático de la polisemia constrasta con la investigación tradicional sobre la (...) polisemia, que se ha centrado en oraciones artificiales tomadas fuera de contexto. En vez de estudira esta "polisemia muerta", nosotros queremos estudiar la "polisemia viva", y en la medida en que es creada y explotada en la integración lingüística. PALABRAS CLAVEAMBIGÜEDAD-CHISTE-METÁFORA-POLISEMIAABSTRACTIt is normally asumed that in ordinary discourse speakers avoid multiple meanings and hearesrs disambiguate utterances automatically in context. We want to show by contrast that people actively exploit polysemy in conversation so as to establish and strengthen social bonds between speakers. In the long run this also streghens the shared system of meanings. our research into the pragmatic use o polysemy contrast with traditional research into polysemy wich has focused on artificial sentences taken out of context. instead of studying this "dead polisemy" we want to study "live polysemy", as it is created and exploited in linguistic interactionKEYWORDSAMBIGUITY-JOKE-METHAPHOR-POLYSEMY. (shrink)

On 14 July 2021, the western states of Germany, Rheinland Palatinate and North-Rhein-Westphalia experienced major flash floods and about two hundred people died. This article explores how those affected and journalists they spoke to created meaning from the mayhem of an unprecedented disaster and how social representations of flooding emerged in which language, politics and values were intimately intertwined. Combining thematic analysis with elements of social representations theory, and analysing a sample of articles from a national news magazine, we show (...) how social representations of the floods were shaped by the objectification of the floods through metonymy (mud and debris) and the anchoring of the floods through personification and metaphors (natural and mechanical forces), thus adding a new dimension to the existing body of work on flood and metaphors. We claim that the immediate focus on the extreme force of the 2021 floods, on the one hand, and the weakness of political response, on the other, may entrench feelings of helplessness and divert attention away from more systematic and long-term engagement with flood dangers in the context of climate change, including extreme weather events. (shrink)

This article explores a German philosophy of metaphor, which proposed a close link between the body and the mind as the basis for metaphor, debunked the view that metaphor is just a decorative rhetorical device and questioned the distinction between the literal and the figurative. This philosophy of metaphor developed at the intersection between a reflection on language and thought and a reflection on the nature of beauty in aesthetics. Thinkers such as Giambattista Vico, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Jean Paul (...) and others laid the foundations for this philosophy and it was successively refined by Gustav Gerber, Alfred Biese and Friedrich Nietzsche. It influenced in its turn in various ways the linguistic study of metaphor and the psychology of metaphor as elaborated, for instance, by a lesser-known American scholar, Gertrude Buck. All these thinkers contributed to a philosophy and psychology of the metaphoric according to which metaphors are not only nice, but necessary for the structure and growth of human thought and language. Obvious parallels between this 19th-century philosophy of metaphor and the 20th-century theory of metaphor developed by Lakoff and his followers are examined throughout. (shrink)

Fracking or the extraction of shale gas through hydraulic fracturing of rock has become a contested topic, especially in the United States, where it has been deployed on a large scale, and in Europe where it is still largely speculative. Research is beginning to investigate the environmental and economic costs and benefits as well as public perceptions of this new energy technology. However, so far the social and psychological impact of fracking on those involved in it, such as gas workers, (...) or those living in the vicinity of fracking sites, has escaped the attention of the social science research community. In this article we begin to fill this gap through a small-scale thematic analysis of representations of fracking in fifty YouTube videos, where the trailer of a controversial film, Gasland (Fox, 2010), has had a marked impact. Results show that the videos discuss not only environmental and economic costs and benefits of fracking but also social and psychological impacts on individuals and communities. These videos reveal a human face of fracking that remains all too often hidden from view. (shrink)

For language to function we clearly need two formal ordering principles: lexical entries and rules. Clahsen's target article provides multiple empirical evidence for this distinction, but this may be simply to overconfirm the undeniable and to overlook the hidden motor of language use and language development, namely, function. Since at least 1859, linguists have argued for the primacy of function, and these arguments are worth rediscovering today.

The roots of pragmatics reach back to Antiquity, especially to rhetoric as one of the three liberal arts. However, until the end of the 18th century proto-pragmatic insights tended to be consigned to the pragmatic, that is rhetoric, wastepaper basket and thus excluded from serious philosophical consideration. It can be said that pragmatics was conceived between 1780 and 1830 in Britain, but also in Germany and in France in post-Lockian and post-Kantian philosophies of language. These early ‘conceptions’ of pragmatics are (...) described in the first part of the book. The second part of the book looks at pragmatic insights made between 1830 and 1880, when they were once more relegated to the philosophical and linguistic underground. The main stage was then occupied by a fact-hunting historical comparative linguistics on the one hand and a newly spiritualised philosophy on the other. In the last part the period between 1880 and 1930 is presented, when pragmatic insights flourished and were sought after systematically. This was due in part to a new upsurge in empiricism, positivism and later behaviourism in philosophy, linguistics and psychology. Between 1780 and 1930 philosophers, psychologists, sociologists and linguists came to see that language could only be studied in the context of dialogue, in the context of human life and finally as being a kind of human action itself. (shrink)

The relation between theoretical models and metaphors has been studied since at least the 1950s. The relation between metaphors and mathematical modelling is less well researched. This article takes the media coverage of the foot and mouth modelling exercise in 2001 as an occasion to examine the metaphors of mathematical modelling that were proposed by the UK press during that time to make sense of this new scientific policy tool. One can detect a gradual change in metaphor use by the (...) newspapers from conceptualizing modellers as detectives and models as mapping tools to modellers as soldiers and heroes, to modellers as liars and models as tools to distort the truth. This seems to indicate a shift in reporting from seeing models as a legitimate and "objective" basis used by decision makers to pursue science-based policies towards seeing models as tools used to legitimize increasingly difficult political decisions. (shrink)

In 2019 a novel coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, spread around the world and a global pandemic was declared early in 2020. Currently, the pandemic has still not been brought under control. Over time, many new words have seeped into ordinary language and old words have changed their meanings. In this article, I trace the semantic development of the word ‘endemic’ which spread from science discourse into political discourse and then into public discourse and became a euphemism. People are told that they should (...) now ‘live with’ the pandemic, a pandemic that is no longer dangerous, because it has turned endemic. This euphemistic use of ‘endemic’ has serious consequences for pandemic management and disease control, not only in countries like the UK, where the word has, indeed, become ‘endemic’, but around the world, as the word has the social function of concealing the circulation of the virus and normalising the spread of infection, even death. (shrink)

This article applies some ofthe insights from framing studies in policyresearch, metaphor analysis, and the history ofmedicine to a cultural understanding ofagriculture, using the 2001 outbreak of footand mouth disease in the UK as a case study.The article will show how metaphors of war wereused as a “rhetorical frame” by the media andas an implicit “action frame” by policy makers.It will be argued that although the war framemight initially have been useful in rallyingsupport for the slaughter policy, the metaphorlater backfired, (...) when a metaphorical war turnedinto a literal holocaust. This might haveencouraged the public to perceive the policy asmedieval, brutal, and misguided, thuspotentially undermining the willingness ofsections of the public to support the slaughterpolicy in future outbreaks. If, on the otherhand, a vaccination policy were adopted in thefuture, care would need to be taken to avoidmetaphorical linkages with other controversiesover vaccination in other domains. (shrink)

Genome editing enables very accurate alterations to DNA. It promises profound and potentially disruptive changes in healthcare, agriculture, industry, and the environment. This paper presents a multidisciplinary analysis of the contemporary development of genome editing and the tension between continuity and change. It draws on the idea that actors involved in innovation are guided by “sociotechnical regimes” composed of practices, institutions, norms, and cultural beliefs. The analysis focuses on how genome editing is emerging in different domains and whether this marks (...) continuity or disruption of the established biotechnology regime. In conclusion, it will be argued that genome editing is best understood as a technology platform that is being powerfully shaped by this existing regime but is starting to disrupt the governance of biotechnology. In the longer term is it set to converge with other powerful technology platforms, which together will fundamentally transform the capacity to engineer life. (shrink)

The phrase 'here be monsters' or 'here be dragons' is commonly believed to have been used on ancient maps to indicate unexplored territories which might hide unknown beasts. This book maps and explores places between science and politics that have been left unexplored, sometimes hiding in plain sight - in an era when increased emphasis was put on 'openness'. The book is rooted in a programme of research funded by the Leverhulme Trust entitled: 'Making Science Public: Challenges and opportunities, which (...) runs from 2014 to 2017. One focus of our research was to critically question the assumption that making science more open and public could solve various issues around scientific credibility, trust, and legitimacy. Chapters in this book explore the risks and benefits of this perspective with relation to transparency, responsibility, experts and faith. (shrink)

This is the first day of our confinement here in Paris, which soon will feel a bit like house arrest. So, to help cheer you up, in these times of doom and gloom, I have decided to bring the museum to you in the form of a virtual exhibition thrice weekly. I have picked 25 photos from a work in progress I started years ago. The photos are portraits of visitors or guards in museums. It's candid photography, capturing life on (...) the run, a moment in time. I hope you will find many other ways to - Résidence numérique - Brigitte Cavanagh. (shrink)

Die kantische Ethik steht im Spannungsfeld von Rationalismus und Unmittelbarkeit, welche von der Vernunft nicht mehr zu fassen ist. Es ist das Faszinierende an der Theorie Kants, dass Moralität als vernünftiges Phänomen erkannt wird, welches intersubjektive Geltung beanspruchen muss. Gleichwohl kommt praktische Vernunft im Begriff des Gewissens in einen rational nicht mehr einholbaren Bereich.

Welche Erkenntnisse bietet Michel Foucaults Ansatz der Gouvernementalität für eine politische Theorie, die Geschlecht als zentrale Kategorie setzt? In diesem Band werden Grundbegriffe aus Foucaults Spätwerk aus feministischer Sicht beleuchtet, z.B. Gouvernementalität, Macht, Staat, Subjekt, Sicherheit, Wissen und Kritik. Diese Re-Lektüre möchte zum einen Foucaults Ansatz geschlechtertheoretisch weiterentwickeln und vertiefen, zum anderen Anstöße für eine politische Theoretisierung von Geschlecht geben.

This book analyzes--in terms of branching--the pervasive reorganization of Latin syntactic and morphological structures: in the development from Latin to French, a shift can be observed from the archaic, left-branching structures (which Latin inherited from Proto-Indo-European) to modern right-branching equivalents. Brigitte Bauer presents a detailed analysis of this development based on the theoretical discussion and definition of "branching" and "head." Subsequently she relates the diachronic shift to psycholinguistic evidence, arguing that the difficuly of LB complex structures as reflected in (...) their painstaking and delayed acquisition accounts for the extensive typological shift from left to right branching that took place in Latin/French and the other Indo-European languages. (shrink)

This paper aims to determine whether we can locate temporal passage in a non-dynamical (block universe) world. In particular, we seek to determine both whether temporal passage can be located somewhere in our world if it is non-dynamical, and also to home in on where in such a world temporal passage can be located, if it can be located anywhere. We investigate this question by seeking to determine, across three experiments, whether the folk concept of temporal passage can be satisfied (...) in our world if it is non-dynamical, and, if it can, what sort of thing in our world satisfies that concept. In particular, we focus on the question of whether that concept (if satisfied) is satisfied by something mind-dependent or something mind-independent. In other words, we ask, is temporal passage something that is at least partially in the mind, or is it entirely external to the mind? We find, contrary to what is often assumed by dynamists and non-dynamists alike, that the folk concept of temporal passage is satisfied in our world conditional on it being non-dynamical, and that the concept is satisfied by something mind-independent. This provides further ammunition for recent deflationary accounts of temporal passage that attempt to locate passage somewhere in our non-dynamical world. (shrink)

This provocative book argues that people are naturally endowed with the ability to speak an articulate language and to form a culture. Language and cultural life require self-appraisal, and hence an evolution--through self-conflict--of desires into values. Nerlich demonstrates that this valuing is a natural process, one that underlies the morals of duty and obligation. He concludes that such valuing will be good only if it results in objective values that are authentic to the individual's nature and surrounding culture.

Currently, affect and emotions are a widely discussed political topic. At least since the early 1990s, different disciplines—from the social sciences and humanities to science and technoscience—have increasingly engaged in studying and conceptualizing affect, emotion, feeling, and sensation, evoking yet another turn that is frequently framed as the “affective turn.” Within queer feminist affect theory, two positions have emerged: following Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's well-known critique, there are either more “paranoid” or more “reparative” approaches toward affect. Whereas the latter emphasize the (...) potentialities of affect, the former argue that one should question the mere idea of affect as liberation and promise. Here, I suggest moving beyond a critique or celebration of affect by embracing the political ambivalence of affect. For this queer feminist theorizing of affective politics, I adapt Jacques Rancière's theory of the political and particularly his understanding of emancipation. Rancière takes emancipation into account without, however, uncritically endorsing or celebrating a politics of liberation. I draw on his famous idea of the “distribution of the sensible” and reframe it as the “distribution of emotions,” by which I develop a multilayered approach toward a nonidentitarian, nondichotomous, and emancipatory queer feminist theory of affective politics. (shrink)

This paper deals with some structural properties of the sequent calculus and describes strong symmetries between cut-free derivations and derivations, which do not make use of identity axioms. Both of them are discussed from a semantic and syntactic point of view. Identity axioms and cuts are closely related to the treatment of negation in the sequent calculus, so the results of this article explain some nice symmetries of negation.