Wittgenstein hérite de Frege l’idée d’une égalité de statut entre affirmation et négation, mais au lieu d’en tirer la thèse d’une absence de force de la négation, il en restaure au contraire la force alors même qu’il ne lui correspond aucune objectivité. D’où vient cette force? Cette force serait d’expression. Dans cet article, je montre que Wittgenstein n’est finalement pas intéressé par la question sémantique de la négation, mais plutôt par cette attitude propre au philosophe consistant à ne pas faire (...) cas de son symbolisme opératoire, ce qui l’entraîne indûment à s’interroger sur son essence cachée. S’agissant du cas de la négation, Wittgenstein montre comment s’attaquer à la source de notre errement plutôt qu’à la source de la signification justifiant son usage. Il « traite » ainsi ce qu’il appelle dans une de ses Dictées le « problème de Socrate ». L’impasse sur le symbolisme de la négation est un symptôme d’aveuglement au symbolisme. Reste donc à saisir l’articulation du signe avec le symptôme, soit entre deux espèces de traits que Wittgenstein tient pour hétérogènes. Pourtant, dans son combat contre les préjugés grammaticaux, Wittgenstein entend bien redonner à l’expression du signe une importance qui permet de comprendre en même temps son action sur le symptôme (sa disparition). Dans la « résolution », une certaine concomitance freudienne entre les deux est donc présupposée. Nous examinons ce point de rencontre avec Freud tout en distinguant leurs conceptions respectives du grammatical. (shrink)

The paper analyzes the nature and scope of Moore’s paradox, articulates the desiderata of a successful solution and claims that psychological expressivism best meets these desiderata. After a brief discussion of prominent responses to Moore’s paradox, the paper offers a solution based on a theory of expressive acts: a Moorean utterance is absurd because the speaker expresses mental states with conflicting contents in commissive versions of the paradox and conflicting states of mind in omissive versions. The paper presents a (...) theory of expressivism for self-ascriptions of mental states. In addition, it introduces the idea of expressive denegation—the speaker’s expressing the absence of a mental state—as an analysis of negative self-ascriptions of mental states. Some of the consequences of expressivism for avowals are explored. (shrink)

This is a paper about trauma and ineloquence, violence and banality, and the utopian conventions of self‐expression in liberal mass society: the U.S. is the scene of the case. The essay pursues relations among the post‐traumatic reparative contexts of the law, religion, therapy and popular culture, all under the sign of autobiography. These domains articulate generic conventions of self‐expressivity with the formalism of self‐reflective liberal personhood. They link norms of expressive denegation to genres that conventionalize, and make false (...) equivalents among, diverse traumatic consequences. When scenes of post‐traumatic ineloquence morph into modes of transformative‐style rhetoric, does the eloquent form distract from, become a mask for, or intensify the unreachable or inarticulable thought that wants to change the norms of negation? A short history of the soundtrack as a site that marks the centrality of ineloquence to traumatic expression condenses the paradox of the moment, where a post‐traumatic desire to become undefensive meets up with pop banality and therapeutic cliche. (shrink)

In this paper, we study dialogue as a game, but not only in the sense in which there would exist winning strategies and a priori rules. Dialogue is not governed by game rules like for chess or other games, since even if we start from a priori rules, it is always possible to play with them, provided that some invariant properties are preserved. An important discovery of Ludics is that such properties may be expressed in geometrical terms. The main feature (...) of a dialogue is “convergence”. Intuitively, a dialogue “diverges” when it stops prematurely by some disruption, or a violation of the tacit agreed upon conditions of the discourse. It converges when the two speakers go together towards a situation where they agree at least on some points. As we shall see, convergence may be thought of through the geometrical concept of orthogonality . Utterances in a dialogue have as their content, not only the processes (similar to proofs) which lead to them from a monologic view, but also their interactions with other utterances. Finally, any utterance must be seen as co-constructed in an interaction between two processes. That is to say that it not only contains one speaker’s intentions but also his or her expectations from the other interlocutor. From our viewpoint, discursive strategies like narration , elaboration , topicalization may derive from such interactions, as well as speech acts like assertion, question and denegation. (shrink)

The superlative quantifiers, at least and at most, are commonly assumed to have the same truth-conditions as the comparative quantifiers more than and fewer than. However, as Geurts & Nouwen have demonstrated, this is wrong, and several theories have been proposed to account for them. In this paper we propose that superlative quantifiers are illocutionary operators; specifically, they modify meta-speech acts.Meta speech-acts are operators that do not express a speech act, but a willingness to make or refrain from making a (...) certain speech act. The classic example is speech act denegation, e.g. I don't promise to come, where the speaker is explicitly refraining from performing the speech act of promising What denegations do is to delimit the future development of conversation, that is, they delimit future admissible speech acts. Hence we call them meta-speech acts. They are not moves in a game, but rather commitments to behave in certain ways in the future. We formalize the notion of meta speech acts as commitment development spaces, which are rooted graphs: The root of the graph describes the commitment development up to the current point in conversation; the continuations from the root describe the admissible future directions.We define and formalize the meta-speech act GRANT, which indicates that the speaker, while not necessarily subscribing to a proposition, refrains from asserting its negation. We propose that superlative quantifiers are quantifiers over GRANTs. Thus, Mary petted at least three rabbits means that the minimal number n such that the speaker GRANTs that Mary petted n rabbits is n = 3. In other words, the speaker denies that Mary petted two, one, or no rabbits, but GRANTs that she petted more.We formalize this interpretation of superlative quantifiers in terms of commitment development spaces, and show how the truth conditions that are derived from it are partly entailed and partly conversationally implicated. We demonstrates how the theory accounts for a wide variety of phenomena regarding the interpretation of superlative quantifiers, their distribution, and the contexts in which they can be embedded. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:On Deconstructing Life-Worlds: Buddhism, Christianity, CultureRoger CorlessOn Deconstructing Life-Worlds: Buddhism, Christianity, Culture. By Robert Magliola. Preface by Edith Wyschogrod. American Academy of Religion Cultural Criticism Series, edited by Cleo McNelly Kearns, Number 3. Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1997. xxii + 202 pp.How does one review a deconstructionist book—a book that seeks not only to discuss deconstruction but to be deconstructionist, a book that simultaneously takes books seriously and mocks (...) both the author and the reader for imagining there could ever be such a thing as a book, a something that is written and then read, a writing that says that everything is Writing but that all Writing/writing is written under erasure and so is (as p. 202 explicitly, self-reflexively proclaims itself) an empty page that is, by that very emptiness, marked? Derrida derides the Introduction, for, he asks (without speaking, parlant avec dénégations, denying that he is expressing denials) what is being Introduced? What do we think we are doing when we lead a reader into (introducere) something that is not there to be lead into until a reader is lead or leads himself or herself into it? Do we not, thus, need an Introduction to the Introduction, and another Introduction to that Introduction, a regressus ad infinitum introductionum? Edith Wyschogrod writes a Preface. Does she mean us to think that the book has a Face, and that it therefore needs a pre-Face? Does she think that she/we face toward the book, or does the book face toward her/us, or does/do she/we both together face toward the putative subject matter, which itself has two faces, Buddhism and Christianity? And who am I, the reviewer?This cannot be a review (a looking-over), but it might be a re-view (a looking-again), which informs (in-forms, incarnates) itself so that you, dear Introducer of Yourself, can review (look over) your presuppositions about Buddhism, Christianity, life-worlds, and reality in general, and re-view them (re-visit them, look again at them) so as to reform (re-view, see-again, as formless, and thus re-form) them.One draws a circle, says Charles Fort, beginning anywhere. So let us open the book at random. On page 84 we find: “Taiwan has over 25,000 students studying in the United States, the largest foreign contingent in American universities.” This aggressively logocentric sentence is provided with a footnote: “Statistic of 1987. Since then, the proportion of Chinese from the People’ [sic] Republic has become much more noticeable.” Hmm—a little typo, but nevertheless we are, to our surprise, deep in the overheated hotel conference rooms of the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion. So, why are we told this? It is part of a section that cuts (“Lt. sect-, cut”, we are reminded on p. 175) across (cross-hatches) Magliola’s life/lives run/runs (Curriculum Vitae, Curricula Vitae, Curricula Vitae Novae, Curricula Vitarum, as the chapter headings have it) as an academic, a Catholic, an almost-priest, a Buddhist meditator, a husband, a divorcé, an Italian, an American, [End Page 216] a resident of Taiwan. All these spill out from the overstuffed closet of Magliola’s life/lives, which, without warning, he opens upon us and then sits among the salade challenging the reader to become bricoleur. But if we do, we feel we have missed the point. Or we have seen the point—which is just as bad.Crosshatch: that’s the theme, I think. Cross, “X” (both the Roman character “eks” and the Greek character “chi”), crucifix, saltire, cross-religions, cross-cultures, cross-countries, cross-country, crossing-out (rature), and finally, revelation by relationis oppositio under/through four forks (“Il ne s’écrit que sous la grille des quatre fourches”—p. 177, quoting Derrida).Magliola is on this cross, he is cross (angry/mad), he is crucified by it, he hopes to cross over by means of it. “This book is not written for the arrived by the arrived” (p. xix), yet he is “on the water, not at sea” (p. xx).It may not be incorrect to say that the book is in... (shrink)

A dialogue is a strategic activity characterized by an intentional structure of competition and/or cooperation. The truth of the statements is far from being the most important thing in many dialogical situations. It is a commonplace to stress that many linguistic constructions, even if they provoke agreement or disagreement have nothing to do with truth or falsity.In particular the ≪prescriptive≫ or ≪projective≫ formulas express that an action must be done or that it is forbidden. These statements are not upon the (...) world but upon a project of action that cannot in a strict sense be said to be ≪true≫ or ≪false≫.Nevertheless, it appears to be a permanent or at least a recurrent temptation as well as a strategic attitude for a tenant of the ethical naturalism to maintain that some prescriptions are true or false. Fanaticism can be regarded as the assumption that it is true that certain acts of speech are to be morally condemned or forbidden.I consider that every asserted projective statement can be legitimately denied in four different ways: one can reject the normative dimension, the proposed action, the potential actor, the time table. Leaving aside the last two, I use a simple formula to describe the first two moves: A weak form of negation is to deny that there is a prescription to do: ¬JP ≡ I do not judge prescribed to do ‘A’. A stronger opposition is to judge that there exists a norm commanding not to do the action: JP ≡ I judge prescribed not to do ‘A’.As every judgement is itself a speech act exposed to denegation, the action ‘A’ can very well be another judgement and, in particular, another prescriptive statement. For example: JP≫) ≡ I judge as prescribed that you judge as prescribed that ‘A’. We find here one of the expressions of fanaticism.Following the logical type of judgement exposed to condemnation, — do they belong to the category of prescriptions, evaluations, or observations? — I suggest the following hierarchy: 1a. JP≫) 1b. JP≫) 2a. JP≫) 2b. JP≫) 3a. JP≫) 3b. JP≫) In the most ≪fundamentalist≫ of its forms , fanaticism invests a lot of energy to sanction a series of norms concerning observations.Note the apparent paradox: If you consider that this paper defends the prescription not to speak like a fanatic, does it illustrate a weak expression of fanaticism?Hint: My answer would be NO. (shrink)

One of science's greatest intellects examines how people and animals display fear, anger, and pleasure. Darwin based this 1872 study on his personal observations, which anticipated later findings in neuroscience. Abounding in anecdotes and literary quotations, the book is illustrated with 21 figures and seven photographic plates. Its direct approach, accessible to professionals and amateurs alike, continues to inspire and inform modern research in psychology.

Kaplan (1999) argued that a different dimension of expressive meaning (“use-conditional”, as opposed to truth-conditional) is required to characterize the meaning of pejoratives, including slurs and racial epithets. Elaborating on this, writers have argued that the expressive meaning of pejoratives and slurs is either a conventional implicature (Potts 2007) or a presupposition (Macià 2002 and 2014, Schlenker 2007, Cepollaro and Stojanovic 2016). We argue that an expressive presuppositional theory accounts well for the data, but that expressive (...) presuppositions are not just propositions to be added to a common ground. We hold that expressives, including pejoratives and slurs, make requirements on a contextual record governed by sui generis norms specific to affective attitudes and their expressions. (shrink)

It is widely assumed that the expression of an emotion is the external bodily manifestation of an internal psychological state. In contrast to this “general view”, this paper presents and discusses an alternative view put forward by Scheler and developed by authors close to the phenomenological tradition. According to the “phenomenological view”, emotional expression is a phenomenon of the lived body. In exploring this view, the paper analyzes four of its main tenets: a) the concept of the lived body as (...) distinct from the physical body; b) the idea that emotional expression functions as a symbol; c) the thesis of the universal grammar of emotions; and d) the distinction between final and expressive movements. In the conclusion, I discuss the value and relevance of the phenomenological view to contemporary research. (shrink)

Pride expressions draw attention to one’s achievement, and therefore can enhance one’s status. However, such attention has been linked to negative interpersonal consequences (i.e. envy). Fortunately, people have been found to regulate their pride expressions accordingly. Specifically, pride expressions are lower when the domain of the achievement is of high relevance to observers. We set out to replicate this effect in a non-Western sample. Additionally, we extended the current finding by investigating the moderating role of self-monitoring, an individual’s ability and (...) willingness to adjust their behaviours under different social contexts to cultivate status. This allows us to explore the previously assumed underlying status motive in regulating pride expressions. Data from two preregistered studies (N1 = 913; N2 = 1081) replicated the effect that pride expressions are inhibited when the achievement domain is relevant. A significant main effect of self-monitoring was found, such that high self-monitors express more pride than low self-monitors, consistent with the conceptualisation of self-monitoring as rooted within a status-enhancement motive. The assumed interaction effect between domain relevance and self-monitoring was not significant. Our findings suggest that the effect of domain relevance on pride expression is robust and status driven. (shrink)

This review begins with a detailed focus on the Turnaway Study, which addresses associations among early abortion, later abortion, and denied abortion relative to various outcomes including mental health indicators. The Turnaway Study was comprised of 516 women; however, an exact percentage of the population is not discernable due to missing information. Extrapolating from what is known reveals a likely low of 0.32% to a maximum of 3.18% of participants sampled from the available the pool. Motivation for conducting the Turnaway (...) Study, methodological deficiencies (sampling issues and others), and bias are specifically addressed. Despite serious departures from accepted scientific practices, journals in psychology and medicine have published dozens of articles generated from the study’s data. The high volume of one-sided publications has stifled dialogue on potential adverse psychological consequences of this common procedure. Following a critical analysis of the Turnaway Study, an overview of the strongest studies on abortion and mental health is offered. This comprehensive literature comprised of numerous large-scale studies from across the globe has been largely overlooked by scientists and the public, while the Turnaway Study dominates the media, information provided to women, and legal challenges involving abortion restrictions. In the final section of this article, literature reviews by professional organizations are considered, demonstrating that the biased science characterizing the Turnaway Study is aligned with a pervasive and systemic phenomenon wherein deriving reliable and valid results via careful attention to methodology and scrutiny by the scientific community have been supplanted by politics. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to study the use of “UP–DOWN” metaphors in Russian and French material. A list of 10 conceptual metaphors expressing up–down movement was proposed by CitationLakoff and Johnson (1980), and this list has been reproduced many times since. However, this analysis shows that the list is not fully accurate. In addition to the conceptual metaphors proposed by Lakoff and Johnson, the authors find it important to include 5 more metaphorical models expressing vertical movement. On the (...) other hand, 5 of the conceptual metaphors in Lakoff and Johnson's list turned out not to be relevant to this analysis. The authors also attempt to describe the connections between different metaphoric models and observe that not all metaphoric models are equally important in their evidential and conceptual power. (shrink)

This volume provides a detailed account of the syntax of expressive language, that is, utterances that express, rather than describe, the emotions and attitudes of the speaker... Daniel Gutzmann demonstrates that expressivity has strong syntactic reflexes that interact with the semantic and pragmatic interpretation of these utterances, and argues that expressivity is in fact a syntactic feature on a par with other established features such as tense and gender. Evidence for this claim is drawn from three detailed case studies (...) of expressive adjectives, intensifiers, and vocatives; their puzzling properties are accounted for through a minimalist approach to syntactic features and agreement, which shows that expressivity can partake in agreement operations, trigger movement, and be selected for syntactically. The analysis not only supports the hypothesis of expressive syntax, but also highlights the hidden role that grammar may play in phenomena that are traditionally considered to be solely semantic in nature" -- Publisher. (shrink)

Expressivism, broadly construed, is the view that the function of utterances in a given area of discourse is to give expression to our sentiments or other (non-cognitive) mental states or attitudes, rather than report or describe some range of facts. This view naturally seems an attractive option wherever it is suspected that there may not be a domain of facts for the given discourse to be describing. Familiarly, to avoid commitment to ethical facts, the ethical expressivist suggests that ethical utterances (...) (e.g., “Gratuitous torture is wrong”, “What John did was morally good”) do not serve to ascribe ethical properties to objects, actions, persons, or states of affairs. Instead, they simply function to give voice to certain of our sentiments (or ‘pro/con’ attitudes). Along similar lines, philosophers have entertained versions of expressivism about the aesthetic, the modal, the mental, what is funny, even about theoretical science and knowledge ascriptions. (shrink)

Mitchell S. Green presents a systematic philosophical study of self-expression - a pervasive phenomenon of the everyday life of humans and other species, which has received scant attention in its own right. He explores the ways in which self-expression reveals our states of thought, feeling, and experience, and he defends striking new theses concerning a wide range of fascinating topics: our ability to perceive emotion in others, artistic expression, empathy, expressive language, meaning, facial expression, and speech acts. He draws (...) on insights from evolutionary game theory, ethology, the philosophy of language, social psychology, pragmatics, aesthetics, and neuroscience to present a stimulating and accessible interdisciplinary work. (shrink)

This book reports on the contrastive-semantic investigation of sadness expressions between English and Chinese, based on two monolingual general corpora and a parallel corpus. The exploration adopts a unique theoretical approach which integrates corpus-linguistic theories on meaning (as a social construct, usage and paraphrase) with a corpus-linguistic lexical model. It employs a new complex but workable methodology which combines computational tools with manual examination to tease meaning out of corpus evidence, to compare and contrast lexical items that do not match (...) up neatly between languages. It looks at sadness expressions both within and across languages in terms of three corpus-linguistic structural categories, i.e. colligation, collocation and semantic association/preference, and paraphrase (both explicit and implicit) to capture their subtle nuances of meaning, disclose the culture-specific conceptualisations encoded in them, and highlight their respective cultural distinctiveness of emotion. By presenting multidisciplinary original work, Sadness Expressions in English and Chinese will be of interest to researchers in corpus linguistics, contrastive lexical semantics, psychology, bilingual lexicography and language pedagogy. (shrink)

This chapter examines the concepts of expression and affect in the works of Heinrich von Kleist, Samuel Beckett, and Gilles Deleuze. It suggests that Kleist, Beckett, and Edward Gordon-Craig belong a minor tradition of acting and explains that this minor tradition is one that aims to create a theatre which moves away from the inner world of an actor in favour of developing affects which express an external composite world. It also analyses Kleist's short story ‘On the Marionette Theatre’ and (...) Deleuze's Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza. (shrink)

Scepticism has been the driving force in the development of Greco-Roman culture in the past, and the impetus for far-reaching scientific achievements and philosophical investigation. Early Jewish culture, in contrast, avoided creating consistent representations of its philosophical doctrines. Sceptical notions can nevertheless be found in some early Jewish literature such as the Book of Ecclesiastes. One encounters there expressions of doubt with respect to Divine justice or even Divine involvement in earthly affairs. During the first centuries of the common era, (...) however, Jewish thought, as reflected in rabbinic works, was engaged in persistent intellectual activity devoted to the laws, norms, regulations, exegesis and other traditional areas of Jewish religious knowledge. An effort to detect sceptical ideas in ancient Judaism, therefore, requires a closer analysis of this literary heritage and its cultural context. This volume of collected essays seeks to tackle the question of scepticism in an Early Jewish context, including Ecclesiastes and other Jewish Second Temple works, rabbinic midrashic and talmudic literature, and reflections of Jewish thought in early Christian and patristic writings. Contributors are: Tali Artman, Geoffrey Herman, Reuven Kiperwasser, Serge Ruzer, Giuseppe Veltri, Cana Werman, and Casten Wilke. (shrink)

Expressions of emotion pose a serious challenge to the view that we perceive other people’s emotions directly. If we must perceive expressions in order to perceive emotions, then it is only ever the expressions that we are directly aware of, not emotions themselves. This paper develops a new response to this challenge by drawing an analogy between expressions of emotion and perceptual media. It is through illumination and sound, the paradigmatic examples of perceptual media, that we can see and hear (...) objects around us. Instead of screening these objects from view, however, they enable our perception while being transparent to us. With reference to perceptual constancy and transparency, I show how expressions show up in our experience of emotions in a surprisingly similar way. Given this, we can understand expressions as the media _through_ which we perceive emotions and overcome the above challenge to an otherwise attractive view. (shrink)

Kant’s The Critique of Judgment laid the groundwork of modern aesthetics when it appeared in 1790. Eli Friedlander’s reappraisal emphasizes the internal connection of judgment and meaning, showing how the pleasure in judging is intimately related to our capacity to draw meaning from our encounter with beauty.

This Great Debates volume grew out of exchanges that followed the 2012 publication of a Festschrift volume for Crispin Wright, just over a decade ago (Coliva 2012). As often happens in Philosophy, the process of trying to clarify and iron out apparently local points of disagreement between us has unearthed deeper divergences concerning larger issues in the philosophy of language and mind, in epistemology, and in the theory of action. Such is our profession.

This paper elaborates on the deliberative democracy argument for freedom of expression in terms of its relationship to different dimensions of autonomy. It engages the objection that Enlightenment theories pose a threat to cultures that reject autonomy and argues that autonomy-based democracy is not only compatible with but necessary for respect for cultural diversity. On the basis of an intersubjective epistemology, it argues that people cannot know how to live on mutually respectful terms without engaging in public deliberation and developing (...) some degree of personal autonomy. While freedom of expression is indispensable for deliberation and autonomy, this does not mean that people have no obligations regarding how they speak to each other. The moral insights provided by deliberation depend on the participants in the process treating one another with respect. The argument is related to the Danish cartoon controversy. (shrink)

Many philosophers favour the simple knowledge account of assertion, which says you may assert something only if you know it. The simple account is true but importantly incomplete. I defend a more informative thesis, namely, that you may assert something only if your assertion expresses knowledge. I call this 'the express knowledge account of assertion', which I argue better handles a wider range of cases while at the same time explaining the simple knowledge account's appeal. §1 introduces some new data (...) that a knowledge account of assertion well explains. §2 explains the simple knowledge account's advantage over two of its main competitors. §3 presents a problem for the simple account and offers a solution, which is to adopt the express knowledge account. §4 encapsulates the case for the express knowledge account, and offers a unifying vision for the epistemology of belief and assertion. §5 answers an objection. §6 briefly sums up. Even those who ultimately reject my conclusion can still benefit from the new data presented in §1, and learn an important lesson from the problem discussed in §3, which demonstrates a general constraint on an acceptable account of the norm of assertion. (shrink)

According to Dewey, we are responsible for our conduct because it is “ourselves objectified in action”. This idea lies at the heart of an increasingly influential deep self approach to moral responsibility. Existing formulations of deep self views have two major problems: They are often underspecified, and they tend to understand the nature of the deep self in excessively rationalistic terms. Here I propose a new deep self theory of moral responsibility called the Self-Expression account that addresses these issues. The (...) account is composed of two parts. The first part answers the question, What is a deep self? Theorists have tended to favor cognitive views that understand the deep self in terms of rationally formed evaluative judgment. I propose instead a conative view that says one’s deep self consists of a distinctive kind of pro-attitude, cares, and I provide an account of cares in terms of their distinctive psychological functional role. The second part answers the question, When does an action express one’s deep self? I criticize the agentially demanding conditions set out in existing views and propose a more minimalist alternative. I show that the Self-Expression account handles issues that bedeviled traditional deep self views, including how to explain moral responsibility for spontaneous, out of character, and weak-willed actions. (shrink)

Among emotions, surprise has been extensively studied in psychology. In linguistics, surprise, like other emotions, has mainly been studied through the syntactic patterns involving surprise lexemes. However, little has been done so far to correlate the reaction of surprise investigated in psychological approaches and the effects of surprise on language. This cross-disciplinary volume aims to bridge the gap between emotion, cognition and language by bringing together nine contributions on surprise from different backgrounds - psychology, human-agent interaction, linguistics. Using different methods (...) at different levels of analysis, all contributors concur in defining surprise as a cognitive operation and as a component of emotion rather than as a pure emotion. Surprise results from expectations not being met and is therefore related to epistemicity. Linguistically, there does not exist an unequivocal marker of surprise. Surprise may be either described by surprise lexemes, which are often associated with figurative language, or it may be expressed by grammatical and syntactic constructions. Originally published as a special issue of Review of Cognitive Linguistics 13:2 (2015). (shrink)

Video game spaces have vastly expanded the built environment, offering new worlds to explore and inhabit. Like buildings, cities, and gardens before them, these virtual environments express meaning and communicate ideas and affects through the spatial experiences they afford. Drawing on the emerging field of embodied cognition, this book explores the dynamic interplay between mind, body, and environment that sits at the heart of spatial communication. To capture the wide diversity of forms that spatial expression can take, the book builds (...) a comparative analysis of twelve video games across four types of space, spanning ones designed for exploration and inhabitation, kinetic enjoyment, enacting a situated role, and enhancing perception. Together, these diverse virtual environments suggest the many ways that video games enhance and extend our embodied lives."--Publisher's website. (shrink)

Expressives like damn and bastard have, when uttered, an immediate and powerful impact on the context. They are performative, often destructively so. They are revealing of the perspective from which the utterance is made, and they can have a dramatic impact on how current and future utterances are perceived. This, despite the fact that speakers are invariably hard-pressed to articulate what they mean. I develop a general theory of these volatile, indispensable meanings. The theory is built around a class of (...) expressive indices. These determine the expressive setting of the context of interpretation. Expressives morphemes act on that context, actively changing its expressive setting. The theory is multidimensional in the sense that descriptives and expressives are fundamentally different but receive a unified logical treatment. (shrink)

According to an influential view about directed expressive duties (e.g., duties to express gratitude to benefactors, remorse to victims, forgiveness to wrongdoers), these duties do not have rights as their correlates, because they are not demandable and enforceable. The chapter argues that this view is mistaken. Like other directed duties, directed expressive duties are demandable and enforceable. While this does not entail that these duties have rights as their correlates, it does create a strong presumption of this being (...) the case. This shifts the burden of proof from those who hold that expressive duties correlate with rights to those who deny it. (shrink)

This paper examines implicaturist hybrid theories by examining how closely attitude expression by moral utterances fits with the varieties of implicature (conventional, particular conversational, generalized conversational) using five standard criteria for implicature: indeterminacy (§3), reinforceability (§4), non-detachability (§5), cancellability (§6), and calculability (§7). I argue (1) that conventional implicature is a clear non-starter as a model of attitude expression by moral utterances (2) that generalised conversational implicature yields the most plausible implicaturist hybrid but (3) that a non-implicaturist, and non-hybrid, alternative (...) might in fact be superior. (shrink)

Critics have argued that human-controlled avatar interactions fail to facilitate the kinds of expressivity and social understanding afforded by our physical bodies. We identify three claims meant to justify the supposed expressive limits of avatar interactions compared to our physical interactions. First, “The Limited Expressivity Claim”: avatars have a more limited expressive range than our physical bodies. Second, “The Inputted Expressivity Claim”: any expressive avatarial behaviour must be deliberately inputted by the user. Third, “The Decoding Claim”: users (...) must infer or figure out the expressive meaning of human-controlled avatars’ behaviour through cognitively onerous processes. With the aim of critically assessing all three claims, we analyze data collected through observations of and interviews with expert players of the avatar-based video game League of Legends. Focusing on Daniel Stern’s (2010) notion of vitality, we analyze the participants’ descriptions of seeing and interacting with other avatars during performance. Our analysis shows that the informants experience human-based avatarial interactions as qualitatively different than interactions with bots, that the informants see the movements of other players’ avatars as having different expressive styles, and that the informants actively use and manipulate this avatarial expressivity during performance. The results of our analysis, we argue, provide reasons for loosening or resisting the three claims concerning the limits of avatarial expressivity. (shrink)

This book reports on the contrastive-semantic investigation of sadness expressions between English and Chinese, based on two monolingual general corpora and a parallel corpus. The exploration adopts a unique theoretical approach which integrates corpus-linguistic theories on meaning (as a social construct, usage and paraphrase) with a corpus-linguistic lexical model. It employs a new complex but workable methodology which combines computational tools with manual examination to tease meaning out of corpus evidence, to compare and contrast lexical items that do not match (...) up neatly between languages. It looks at sadness expressions both within and across languages in terms of three corpus-linguistic structural categories, i.e. colligation, collocation and semantic association/preference, and paraphrase (both explicit and implicit) to capture their subtle nuances of meaning, disclose the culture-specific conceptualisations encoded in them, and highlight their respective cultural distinctiveness of emotion. By presenting multidisciplinary original work, Sadness Expressions in English and Chinese will be of interest to researchers in corpus linguistics, contrastive lexical semantics, psychology, bilingual lexicography and language pedagogy. (shrink)

The French philosopher Renaud Barbaras remarked that late in Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s career, “The phenomenology of perception fulfills itself as a philosophy of expression.” In _Tracing Expression in Merleau-Ponty: Aesthetics, Philosophy of Biology, and Ontology, _Véronique M. Fóti_ _addresses the guiding yet neglected theme of expression in Merleau-Ponty’s thought. She traces Merleau-Ponty’s ideas about how individuals express creative or artistic impulses through his three essays on aesthetics, his engagement with animality and the “new biology” in the second of his lecture courses (...) on nature of 1957–58, and in his late ontology, articulated in 1964 in the fragmentary text of _Le visible et l’invisible _. With the exception of a discussion of Merleau-Ponty’s 1945 essay “Cezanne’s Doubt,” Fóti engages with Merleau-Ponty’s late and final thought, with close attention to both his scientific and philosophical interlocutors, especially the continental rationalists. Expression shows itself, in Merleau-Ponty’s thought, to be primordial, and this innate and fundamental nature of expression has implications for his understanding of artistic creation, science, and philosophy. (shrink)