1,720,957 research outputs found
From Ethological Linguistics to Animal Linguistics and Ecolinguistics
No full textBiosemiotics and biolinguistics share some common origins in comparative psychology and ethology, both viewing language as a species-specific cognitive capacity whose main purpose is not communication but thought. From this perspective, biosemiotics should be at the center of cognitive science. However, biolinguistics and biosemiotics (or linguistics and semiotics) have been marginalized in the context of cognitive science and neuroscience; nonetheless there are currents in mainstream linguistics and cognitive science operating from a biosemiotic perspective without overtly articulating their research agendas as such. I believe that the future success of the biosemiotic movement will depend on recognizing and connecting with those research agendas.La biosémiotique et la biolinguistique partagent des origines communes en psychologie comparative et en éthologie, deux disciplines qui considèrent le langage comme une capacité cognitive propre à une espèce et dont la finalité n’est pas la communication, mais la pensée. De cette perspective, la biosémiotique devrait se retrouver au centre des sciences cognitives. Toutefois, la biolinguistique et la biosémiotique (ou la linguistique et la sémiotique) ont été marginalisées par les sciences cognitives et les neurosciences. Il y a cependant des tendances dans la linguistique et les sciences cognitives conventionnelles d’opérationnaliser une perspective biosémiotique, sans pour autant le faire de façon explicite. Je crois que les succès à venir de la biosémiotique dépendront de son aptitude à reconnaître ces programmes de recherche et de s’y lier
Man, nature, and semiotic modelling or How to create forests and backyards with language
Get PDFThis paper explains how we create concepts such as the forest or the backyard through language. Reflecting on Andreas Weber’s hope for a revolution of the life sciences and a re-evaluation of the role human beings play in nature, this paper adopts as a starting point Bruno Latour’s characterization of the distinction between nature and culture as an illusion that came with Modernity. Theoretical notions from modelling systems theory and cognitive linguistics explain that while language plays a key role in constructing new models of nature, new cognitive habits and changes of belief depend on face-to-face and non-verbal communication with other organisms, human and non-human
Solar energy discourse in the Sunshine State
Get PDFThis case study of a 2016 Florida constitutional amendment analyses the semiotic devices and mechanisms of shaping public opinion on solar energy and beliefs about energy distribution. After a nationwide rise in rooftop solar installations between 2014 and 2015, utilities in several US states were faced with challenges to their business models. Anticipating similar problems in Florida, utilities and energy corporations promoted constitutional amendments. This semiotic analysis follows the voter from the billboards and flyers to the text on the ballot. Starting from Peirce’s phenomenological categories, this critical analysis of the campaign reveals how the goals of the amendment were shrouded in positive environmental and consumer protection narratives. Lakoff ’s cognitive linguistics and Stibbe’s ecolinguistics support a deeper analysis of the ballot text. This study shows that by leaving key concepts (especially net metering) out of the discourse, the ballot text successfully framed an anti-solar amendment as a pro-consumer measure, while hiding the direct legal implications concerning alternative energy distribution. In particular, this study explains the opposition to the sharing of surplus in the context of neoclassical economics as a key factor in shaping beliefs about alternative energy distribution.
 
What Connects Biolinguistics and Biosemiotics?
No full textThis paper reviews the background, fundamental questions, current issues, and goals of the intellectual movements initiated by Noam Chomsky’s biolinguistics and Thomas A. Sebeok’s (1920-2001) biosemiotics. The purpose of this paper is to give a brief history of these movements, to clarify the common objectives and areas of overlap between them, and to address some aspects of focus and terminology that may stand in the way of productive collaboration among the disciplines involved in the biology of language
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Get PDFWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Get PDFWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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