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Copyright of Zeitschrift für Slawistik is the property of De Gruyter and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Whitehead's process philosophy offers a wide range of speculatively generalized concepts that allow for an application in transdisciplinary research. The notion of projection is an often-overlooked detail of his philosophy that not only appears in his far-reaching theory of perception, but also constitutes an integral part of his theory of extension as the formal foundation of his metaphysical project. His perceptive theory relies on the idea of projection as the fundamental ontological relationship that lifts the past into the present. Projections of sensa describe one side of the 'double-barreled' theory of perception and the spatial relations of the contemporary world. The microscopic projection is just as fundamental for perception and for the integrity of a relational theory of becoming, as the perceptual projection is necessary ingredient for symbolic modes of experience. The simple projection in the mode of presentational immediacy is the basis of temporary stability of events and of any perceptual situation in the biological realm. Whitehead was aware of the possible misconceptions that this term might lead to. Discussing his remarks on the hierarchical variety of different modes of projection can resolve those misconceptions and throw a new light on the importance of projection for interdisciplinary inquiries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study employs social semiotics as a multimodal analytical framework to explore various communication modes employed in Bob Marley's 1974 "Natty Dread" album to describe the Rastaman. The album's cover design, including images, font style, and colours, carry significant meanings that contribute to the representation of the Rasta identity. Marley's lexical choices, such as nouns, verbs, adjectives and noun phrases also play a crucial role in presenting the Rasta identity. Additionally, Marley utilises various literary devices such as repetition, metaphor, allusion, and imagery to vividly describe the Rastaman. The song titles and their arrangement on the album form a cohesive narrative depicting the Rastaman's life. In essence, the "Natty Dread" album portrays the Rastaman as a humble individual connected to the streets. The Rastaman's physical appearance is distinguished by his distinctive dreadlocks. His lifestyle embraces simplicity, a deep connection with nature, the pursuit of freedom and happiness, love, peace, unity, and rebellion against the oppressive establishment. Material possessions hold little importance for the Rastaman as he considers his spiritual devotion to Jah (God) and his commitment to his community paramount. Furthermore, an inseparable part of the Rastaman's culture is his use of marijuana and music, particularly reggae, which serves as a powerful tool with which he combats social injustices and inequalities in the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sounds play crucial roles in a poem's meaning (re)construction. Grasping the content of a literary work such as poetry often requires a profound interpretation of the underlying linguistic cum phonetic codes of its discourse. Extant studies on Nigerian children's poetry have paid little attention to this aspect of meaning conception, thereby concentrating mainly on the surface lexical constructs. Hence, this study aims to examine imagic iconicity in children's poems in order to demonstrate how a poem's thematic realization is inferred through the interpretation of the phonic and acoustic nature of the sounds employed. The study involves five poems: three from Ossie Enekwe's Gentle Birds Come to me and two from Ikeogu Oke's Song of Success and Other Poems for Children. The analysis is anchored to insights from Charles Sanders Peirce's concept of the iconic sign, and exploits the action of acoustic and phonetic articulation of sounds to determine their functions and effects in the poems. The study reveals how specialized lexemic choices and onomatopoeia (kinaesthemes, phonaestheme or sound symbolism) in children's poems make each poem functional and purposeful. Thus, children's poetry contains language structures and configurations that transmit sense and embody what the poem is asserting in a way that interestingly engages the reader. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This work argues that because Quantum Mechanics (QM) is superb at simulating natural, physical phenomena, so-called quantum-native phenomena, and that Quantum Natural Language Processing (QNLP), its child, is also quantum-native, God’s generative language of physical creation is native to a quantum world; therefore, it is now possible to postulate an argument for God’s creation of the world through language without requiring divine revelation. This argument is, in essence, an extension of the Augustinian argument – the baseline argument from mathematics and abstract objects – for the existence of God that accounts for contemporary advances in QM. Additionally, this work invites further research and investigation into applying category theory to model the theistic universe thereby allowing both modeling and simulations of the symbolic world.

Despite the rapidly growing body of research on sound symbolism, one issue that remains understudied is whether different types of sensory information interact in their sound symbolic effects. The experimental study reported here consisted of two tasks and focused on one such potential interaction: size associations and cuteness. First, a forced-choice task was conducted in which size ratings were elicited for pseudowords containing different vowels and consonants. The pseudowords were introduced as names of alien creatures, which were used as visual stimuli in the experiment. Second, the cuteness of alien creatures was assessed in a judgement task. Both tasks were completed by the same group of German speakers. In line with previous research, /aː/ was associated with largeness and /iː/ was associated with smallness. Further, we found that cuteness modulates size associations in /aː/ and /iː/. For /aː/ judged size increased, while for /iː/ judged size decreased with increasing cuteness. Regarding consonants, we found that /ʁ/ evoked higher size associations than other consonants under investigation. Interactions of cuteness and consonants did not reach significance. Our findings call for the integration of other possible factors and features that might show sound symbolic effects or interactions with such in sound symbolism research.

This article will describe the long-time use of sound symbolic forms (including ideophones and interjections) in Italian Disney comic book publications, from the 1930s until recent times. This is achieved through the diachronic analysis of ∼4,700 entries coming from a corpus of sound symbolic forms as compiled by the author, taken from 210 Disney stories. Each of the entries was classified according to five different sound symbolic types based on the event, scenario, or situation they referred to. This analysis will provide an ideal chance to comment on several features exploited in the creation and use of sound symbolic forms and will be offered together with elucidations on a few under-researched areas within the linguistic study of sound symbolism. Quantitative data will be provided on (1) the lexical status of these forms, (2) their language of origin, and (3) the frequency of the five sound symbolic types. Additional commentary will also be offered on the various lexical and phonaesthetic experimentations featured in the comic strips. The results will be based on the comparison of the data coming from the corpus with existing research on these topics.

This paper considers archaeological evidence for various aspects of early Christian church building and comes to the conclusion that diversity was an essential quality of late antique Christianity. The diversity in question is ill-attested in written sources, but becomes apparent when the material record and everyday life are taken into consideration (cultural/material/pictorial/iconic turn). Church buildings looked and functioned differently in various regions and provinces of the late Roman empire. The diversity does not appear to have been accidental, but was cultivated throughout late antiquity. It was sometimes related to, but did not depend on, differences in liturgical practice, nor was it a matter of knowledge, ability, and workshop tradition alone. Provincial diversity was maintained even when and where the metropolitan alternative was manifestly known and available and although secular art and architecture continued to uniformly emulate the capital cities. A combination of written and material evidence suggests that the diverse formal repertoire of early Christian art and architecture was chosen and decided individually, but tended to form local/provincial/regional clusters. The decision makers seem to have been guided by religious conventions as well as by personal or political allegiances, many of which appear to have been determined locally, each province or region onto itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When I began working on narrative empathy, from a home base of rhetorical narratology, I couldn't have anticipated how far the ideas I put forward in "A Theory of Narrative Empathy" ([5]) and I Empathy and the Novel i ([6]) would travel, especially beyond literary studies. The authors follow [2] advice about the interaction of textual features and diversely experienced readers: "empathy should be seen as a complex and context-dependent phenomenon where both textual and reader factors can influence" outcomes. For example, the authors focus on short-term effects of narrative empathy on readers, observed during reading or immediately afterwards, rather than assuming or attempting to demonstrate either long-term impacts or prosocial outcomes of empathetic reading. What was occurring in the communication transaction between author and readers, mediated by empathy-inviting narratives?. [Extracted from the article]

G. next turns to the alleged Romance cognates found in Rumanian, Dolomitic Ladin, Friulian, Romanche, Portuguese, Asturian, Spanish and Catalan. From this starting point the Romance descendants of the bases followed the divergent semantic paths identified by [19] (1914, 1918), upon which G. elaborates within the framework of diachronic cognitive semantics (especially as set out in the writings based on Romance data of the late Peter Koch). G. next surveys the wide range of meanings displayed by the descendants of spoken Latin *toccare in all standard and numerous regional Romance varieties (Rom. I toca i , It. I toccare i , Fr. I toucher i , Sp. Ptg. Despite the enormous advances made in the field of Romance etymology since the publication in 1853 of Friedrich Diez's pioneering I Etymologisches Wörterbuch der Romanischen Sprachen i , there remains a very sizeable residue of words of unknown or, at best, controversial origin in every Romance variety. [Extracted from the article]

In different languages around the world, morphemes representing the (cooked form of) staple food or food in general tend to begin with a [+labial] phoneme followed by a [+low] phoneme (/pa-/, /ma-/, /fa-/, /wa-/, etc.). This article provides evidence for this phonological similarity by analyzing 66 sample languages’ morphemes representing the staple food within the society where each language is spoken. About a fourth of the morphemes referring to staple food begin with a [+labial] first phoneme followed by a [+low] second phoneme, which is a much higher proportion compared to another list of basic morphemes in the same 66 languages. I further argue that the motivation for this crosslinguistic tendency is the iconic association between the mouth-opening gesture and the concept of eating.

Gallery II is a rich conglomerate of examples, descriptions, analyses and interpretations of artefacts and museums. It is the result of the research network Dynamics of Religious Things in Museums (REDIM), 2018-2022, and draws from exhibitions and artefacts of three German museums as well as museums in Iran and Japan. In Gallery II, the largest part, the authors portray various examples of museums and particular artefacts and examine their histories and effects. [Extracted from the article]

As a unique literary theory, Andrei Bely's symbolism is a religious world view, and his "symbols" are deeply rooted in the symbolist's cognition of world structure. This distinct world view exerts a special effect on Bely's exploration of the poetic mechanism of symbolism. In the practice of completing the creation of symbolic image, the construction of symbolic text, and the achievement of artistic function, word, rhythm, and color are among the most important and necessary conditions to help Bely produce a polyphonic aesthetic effect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article "The Early Neolithic Cultural Transformation in the Targowisko Settlement Region, SE Poland" deals with the cultural change in the early Neolithic settlement region of Targowisko in southeastern Poland. The study examines various aspects such as settlement phases, the function of "pseudo-ditches," and the organization of the settlement space. Fundamental cultural changes have been identified, particularly in terms of symbolism, while continuity mainly concerns everyday objects. The results suggest a connection between the late Linearbandkeramik (LBK) and the Middle Culture (MC). The study shows that there was continuity of settlement in the region, although sociocultural and genetic aspects changed. Remains of cereal crops were also found, indicating continued agricultural activity. The results demonstrate that the cultural change in the Targowisko settlement region was complex and requires further investigation. [Extracted from the article]

The relation between avant-garde and modernism has always been an issue in dispute, partly because the hypothetical nature of the terms makes them hard to cover the all-encompassing artistic reality, and partly because discussion of their relation is always in a macroscopic perspective, which makes it difficult to produce detailed and concrete research results. This paper compares Russian futurism and symbolism to analyze the similarities and differences between avantgarde and modernism in terms of their ontological, artistic, and linguistic views in creation. It has, to some extent, obtained a relatively clear answer to the relation between avant-garde and modernism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the color symbolic values in two different and unrelated languages, Arabic and English. It analyses the colors mentioned in the Qur'an semiotically and their translation based on Peirce's semiotic model of sign interpretation, while considering the socio-cultural differences that influence the understanding and rendering of color signs, informed by corpus-based analysis. Although the Qur'an contains the most basic colors like other languages, the semiotic values of some colors are different. The study shows that colors in the Qur'an, and Arabic in general, are tightly linked to the environment and culture of the early Muslims who received the Qur'an first-hand from the Prophet. These colors as situated in their culture could appear positively or negatively to users in other languages in a way that is not intended in the source text. Therefore, the translator's awareness of the socio-cultural signs could bridge the gap between the different systems of codification and recodification of signs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we present and analyse phonaesthemic alternations as they appear in Flemish dialects of Dutch, that is when a root-initial consonant or consonant cluster is replaced by a post-alveolar affricate /ʧ/ or /ʤ/ in order to create a phonaesthemically marked variant of a neutral base word. Although no longer productive in Flemish dialects, we show that such phonaesthemic alternations exhibit strong functional similarities to those found in other languages, in particular the evaluative notions of diminutivity and augmentativity. We also show that, formally speaking, Flemish phonaesthemic alternations differ from those attested in other languages in only targeting a single consonant or consonant cluster. We then put forward the hypothesis that Flemish speakers may have copied this mechanism to produce phonaesthemic alternations from Picard speakers, corroborating the notion that phonaesthemic alternations may emerge from language contact. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The current study experimentally examined whether labial consonants were sound-symbolically associated with the images of softness and cuteness in Japanese and English. The results showed that all the bilabial consonants [p, b, m, ɸ, w] used in Japanese convey such images. In English, the consonants evoking the image of softness were bilabials but not labiodentals, and those linked to the image of cuteness were unaspirated, low-frequency bilabials. These results demonstrated the pluripotentiality of sound symbolism, meaning that a certain set of linguistic sounds evokes different meanings and images both within a single language and across languages (e.g. Winter et al. 2019; Kawahara and Kumagai to appear). Moreover, under the backcloth that the description of the glide /w/ concerning the place of articulation in Japanese and English is not uncontroversial, the current paper indicates – based on the current sound-symbolic experimental results – that the glide /w/ is phonologically labial in each language.

5.3.3 Character name-size subset There were no remarkably different distributions of phonemes or tones between large animal names and small animal names according to the I size i dataset (all I p- i values >0.05). Comparing the pattern of gender-sound association in fictional character names in children's books with that found by [113] in real human Chinese names showed that, in both studies, female names contained more nasals and fricatives than occlusives. 5.3.2 Character name-gender subset The iconic association between phonemes and gender was demonstrated by using nasal and fricative consonants in human character names (Figure 5). Human names showed preference in using rising tones compared to animal and monster names. 5.3.4 Character name-personality traits subset Positive and negative personality of characters influenced phoneme and tone choices in their names (Figure 6). [Extracted from the article]

Ancient writers, including Socrates and the Upanishads, argued that sibilants are associated with the notions of wind, air and sky. From modern perspectives, these statements can be understood as an assertion about sound symbolism, i.e., systematic connections between sounds and meanings. Inspired by these writers, this article reports on an experiment that tests a sound symbolic value of sibilants. The experiment is a case study situated within the Pokémonastics research paradigm, in which the researchers explore the sound symbolic patterns in natural languages using Pokémon names. The current experiment shows that when presented with pairs of a flying-type Pokémon character and a normal-type Pokémon character, Japanese speakers are more likely to associate the flying-type Pokémons with names that contain sibilants than those names that do not contain sibilants. As was pointed out by Socrates, the sound symbolic connection identified in the experiment is likely to be grounded in the articulatory properties of sibilants – the large amount of oral airflow that accompanies the production of sibilants. Various implications of the current experiment for the sound symbolism research are discussed throughout the article.

Phonosymbolic elements such as ideophones and interjections test the translator’s ability in various ways. These forms would, in theory, require a complete change of form and substance of the source text but this has not always been possible because of graphical, cultural and linguistic reasons, and this led, in certain cases, to a foreignized target-text environment. Recent research has started to consider the relationship between verbal and visual modes as beneficial and not just as a mere constraint for the translator. This research aims to align itself with this approach in order to analyze how verbal and visual modes in Disney comic books have come together to welcome sound symbolic forms and how translators have dealt with them in Italian Disney comics, in particular. In order to clarify the behavior, function, translation and use of expressive sound symbolic devices in Italian Disney comics, this article will offer a diachronic analysis of these strategies as found in a diachronic bidirectional corpus compiled through extensive archival research.

The cognitive paradigm of symbols in ancient Chinese philosophy is quite distinct from that of Western semiotic circles. Chuang Tzu, one of the most influential ancient Chinese philosophers, concentrates his study on exploring the state of the subject's selflessness and establishes his own cognitive paradigm of jingshen. This paper uses his statements of "I lost myself" and "The Perfect Man uses his mind like a mirror" in The adjustment of controversies of The Chuang Tzu, to investigate the ideal selfless mind-state and selflessness. It attempts to transfer the relationship between subject and object in symbolic cognition into the connection of intersubjectivity to construct jingshen's cognitive paradigm of releasing symbolic meaning. The task of this research is to overcome the limitation created by the subject–object relation and finally to be "the Perfect Man" who can know the Dao. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Genre mixing and hybrid genre have been vital concepts in genre studies. With the increasing popularity of WeChat, a social media platform in China, a new type of hybrid genre comprised of media content and advertisements is emerging on WeChat subscription accounts. The present study collects 28 hybrid texts from a movie review subscription account in order to closely examine their communicative purposes and generic structure. It is found that instead of being fused into a monocentric entity, these hybrid texts are divided into movie review and advertisement parts, both functionally and structurally dichotomous. This expands and complements the existing understanding of concepts like hybrid genre and genre mixing. It also brings into focus the anti-monocentric nature of these concepts and questions the logocentric framework advocated in genre mixing studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our article is dedicated to the relation of a given name's phonological structure and the gender of the referent. Phonology has been shown to play an important role with regard to gender marking on a name in some (Germanic) languages. For example, studies on English and on German have shown in detail that female and male names have significantly different phonological structures. However, little is known whether these phonological patterns are valid beyond (closely related) individual languages. This study, therefore, sets out to assess the relation of gender and the phonological structures of names across different languages/cultures. In order to do so, we analyzed a sample of popular given names from 13 countries. Our results indicate that there are both language/culture-overarching similarities between names used for people of the same gender and language/culture-specific correlations. Finally, our results are interpreted against the backdrop of conventional and synesthetic sound symbolism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Zeitschrift für Slawistik is the property of De Gruyter and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Sound symbolism refers to stochastic and systematic associations between sounds and meanings. Sound symbolism has not received much serious attention in the generative phonology literature, perhaps because most if not all sound symbolic patterns are probabilistic. Building on the recent proposal to analyze sound symbolic patterns within a formal phonological framework (Alderete and Kochetov 2017), this paper shows that MaxEnt grammars allow us to model stochastic sound symbolic patterns in a very natural way. The analyses presented in the paper show that sound symbolic relationships can be modeled in the same way that we model phonological patterns. We suggest that there is nothing fundamental that prohibits formal phonologists from analyzing sound symbolic patterns, and that studying sound symbolism using a formal framework may open up a new, interesting research domain. The current study also reports two hitherto unnoticed cases of sound symbolism, thereby expanding the empirical scope of sound symbolic patterns in natural languages.

This article contributes to the studies of sound symbolism, systematic relationships between sounds and meanings. Specifically, we build on a series of studies conducted within a research paradigm called "Pokémonastics," which uses the Pokémon universe to explore sound symbolic patterns. Inspired by a study of existing English Pokémon names, two experiments were conducted in which English speakers were provided with pairs of pre-evolution and post-evolution Pokémon characters, the latter of which were larger. The participants were given two name choices whose members were systematically different in some phonological properties. The results show the following sound symbolic patterns to be productive: (1) names with higher segment counts are more likely to be associated with post-evolution characters than names with lower segment counts, (2) names containing [a] are more likely to be associated with post-evolution characters than names containing [i], (3) names containing [u] are more likely to be associated with post-evolution characters than names containing [i], and (4) names containing coronal consonants are more likely to be associated with post-evolution characters than names containing labial consonants. Overall, the current results suggest that phonological considerations come into play when English speakers name new fictional creatures. Implications of the current results for the theories of sound symbolism are discussed throughout the paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Kawahara, Noto, and Kumagai (2018b) found that within the corpus of existing Pokémon names, the number of voiced obstruents in the characters' names correlates positively with their weight, height, evolution levels and attack values. While later experimental studies to some extent confirmed the productivity of these sound symbolic relationships (e.g. Kawahara and Kumagai 2019a), they are limited, due to the fact that the visual images presented to the participants primarily differed with regard to evolution levels. The current experiments thus for the first time directly explored how each of these semantic dimensions—weight, height, evolution levels, and attack values—correlates with the number of voiced obstruents in nonce names. The results of two judgment experiments show that all of these parameters indeed correlate positively with the number of voiced obstruents in the names. Overall, the results show that a particular class of sounds—in our case, a set of voiced obstruents—can signal different semantic meanings within a single language, supporting the pluripotentiality of sound symbolism (Winter, Pérez-Sobrino, and Brown 2019). We also address another general issue that has been under-explored in the literature on sound symbolism; namely, its cumulative nature. In both of the experiments, we observe that two voiced obstruents evoke stronger images than one voiced obstruent, instantiating what is known as the counting cumulativity effect (Jäger and Rosenbach 2006). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I seek to defend three main claims: Firstly, that the kinds of practices that are the object of study of constitutional theorists are undergirded by certain fundamental shared understandings. Secondly, that these shared understandings together form a rich fabric of meaning that is, broadly speaking, held in common across modern western societies, which I call the 'constitutional imaginary'. Thirdly, that political institutions play a symbolic role as 'repositories' of shared understandings, which is crucial for the development, maintenance, propagation and evolution of the constitutional imaginary. On the basis of these claims, I propose a distinctive role for constitutional theory: the interpretation of the social meaning of political institutions and the actions and events that take place in and around them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines the symbolic use of stone beyond its basic function as a construction material in architecture. It investigates the meaning of stone using Iraqi Kurdistan residential architecture as a case study. The theoretical framework of the study is developed through the content analysis method, by applying Hershberger's basic model of meaning, and by exploring Krampen's writings on semiotics in architecture. The relevant theoretical framework was tested through systematic physical observation of selected houses in Iraqi Kurdistan and by using the inductive reasoning method. The study recognises that stone, beyond being a construction material, conveys the symbolic meaning of "power," "wealth," and "belonging" in contemporary houses of Iraqi Kurdistan. Based on that, a meaningful situation model was created to evaluate the phenomenon. The model can also be useful in analysing similar cases and research situations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reviews recent research using participant ratings to measure the iconicity (form-meaning resemblance) of words and signs. This method, by enabling wide coverage of lexical items and cross-linguistic comparison, has revealed systematic patterns in how iconicity is distributed across the vocabularies of different languages. These findings are consistent with established linguistic and psychological theory on iconicity, and they connect iconicity to factors like learning and acquisition, semantics, pragmatic aspects of language like playfulness, and to the semantic neighborhood density of words and signs. After taking stock of this research, we look critically at the construct validity of iconicity ratings, considering an alternative account of iconicity ratings recently put forward by Thompson, Arthur Lewis, Kimi Akita & Youngah Do. 2020a. Iconicity ratings across the Japanese lexicon: A comparative study with English. Linguistics Vanguard 6. 20190088. They propose that, for most vocabulary, participants might rate the iconicity of different words based on their meaning alone – specifically the degree to which it relates to the senses – independently of actual form-meaning resemblance. We argue that their hypothesis cannot account for many of the various, theory-driven results from this line of research, which strongly support the conclusion that the ratings really do measure iconicity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While the only extensive discussion of music in Kierkegaard's work is the famous treatise based on Mozart's opera Don Giovanni in the first part of the pseudonymous Either/Or (1843), Kierkegaard did write other brief passages, in which he made comments on musical aspects. Two recent articles have pointed to attitudes toward music in such passages which seem to differ from the negative evaluation of music as a religious or theological medium in the first part of Either/Or by the fictitious aesthete A. With a point of departure in the two mentioned articles, I attempt to further discuss the possible relationship between the ethical and the aesthetic in Kierkegaard's musical thought, involving passages from both parts of Either/Or as well as a few journal-entries. Finally, Erika Fischer-Lichte's distinction between staging and performativity is brought to bear on these issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sound symbolism emerged as a prevalent component in the origin and development of language. However, as previous studies have either been lacking in scope or in phonetic granularity, the present study investigates the phonetic and semantic features involved from a bottom-up perspective. By analyzing the phonemes of 344 near-universal concepts in 245 language families, we establish 125 sound-meaning associations. The results also show that between 19 and 40 of the items of the Swadesh-100 list are sound symbolic, which calls into question the list's ability to determine genetic relationships. In addition, by combining co-occurring semantic and phonetic features between the sound symbolic concepts, 20 macro-concepts can be identified, e. g. basic descriptors, deictic distinctions and kinship attributes. Furthermore, all identified macroconcepts can be grounded in four types of sound symbolism: (a) unimodal imitation (onomatopoeia); (b) cross-modal imitation (vocal gestures); (c) diagrammatic mappings based on relation (relative); or (d) situational mappings (circumstantial). These findings show that sound symbolism is rooted in the human perception of the body and its interaction with the surrounding world, and could therefore have originated as a bootstrapping mechanism, which can help us understand the bio-cultural origins of human language, the mental lexicon and language diversity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Money is a symbol. Beginning with this simple notion, we have completed a qualitative study of how money exists in people's everyday lives and how it is used symbolically. A review of the financial, economic, psychological, and semiotic literature shows that even though money is written and talked about exhaustively, little symbol theory appears in economic writing, and we rarely found money mentioned in semiotic texts. We used a qualitative, phenomenological approach to identify critical thematic elements and underlying structures of participants' experience. We also incorporated an accepted symbol-structure template in our analysis of the functions, emotions, actions, and reactions in the transactions our participants described. Participants refer to money both as wealth in the abstract and as concrete amounts about to be used. Our analysis of money in the abstract describes a structure of experience involving belonging, privacy and secrecy, unequal distribution, quantitative uncertainty, reflections of life history, and values. Our analysis of money in the concrete reveals a symbolic intention and a variety of "Others" engaged in the symbolic action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Three Kentish laws (Æthelberht 9, Hloþære and Eadric 8 and 9) written in the 7th century mention the places where the men drink (þær mæn drincen).It has already been observed that drinking is not only a feature of a male warrior society, but represents a quasi-juridical institution which enjoys special protection (Renato Gendre 1992). However, the offences committed during these gatherings and the high fines duly paid can only partly be attributed to a general violation of the king's and house protection.Behind these laws there is an echo of more specific rituals. The legal character in drinking together, as it emerges in the symbolic offences described and fined in Hloþære and Eadric 8 and 9, has never been explored in the light of the recent works on ritual. The meaning of drinking (and toasting) as a binding moment inside some legal proceedings as well as its specific relation to consent are subject of the following investigation. As the most recent works on ritual show, the binding aspect and the creation of consent are among the major features of ritual. Only inside this discourse can thus be explained the meaning in the act of taking a cup from another where men are drinking (with no fault of the man from whom the cup was taken) and of drawing a weapon without doing any harm. These are two actions in which a boasting character is only an aspect, a superficial feature of a warrior society. The deep legal symbolism of both acts deserves further exploration, in which they prevent the participation of the concerned in a legal ceremony and disturb the building of the consensus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on the vocabulary of 66 genealogically distinct languages, this study reveals the biased association between phonological features and the 100 lexical meanings of the Leipzig-Jakarta List. Morphemes whose meanings are related to round shapes ('egg', 'navel', 'neck', and 'knee') tend to contain phonemes that bear the [+round] feature. Also observable is the positive association between buccal actions and the phonological features they resemble ('to blow' with [+labial] and 'to suck' with [+delayed release]). Grammatical morphemes related to proximity ('this', 'in', 1sg and 2sg pronoun) are positively associated with [+nasal]. The phonosemantic patterns found in the most basic vocabulary of spoken languages further confirm that the sound-meaning association in natural languages is not completely arbitrary but may be motivated by human cognitive biases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article will explore the linguistic implications of employing and creating sound symbolism (ideophones, onomatopoeia and interjections) in Italian Disney comics. It will endeavour to investigate the way sound symbolic forms in both imported Disney US comics and original Italian stories have profoundly influenced the development of Italian sound symbolism in the last century. The diachronic analysis is carried out thanks to the creation of a corpus of ideophones and interjections from 210 Disney stories published between 1932 and 2013. The corpus will allow the author to investigate how these forms have changed diachronically throughout the eighty years under investigation with the final aim of highlighting changes and patterns in both original and translated Italian stories. The unique status of ideophones, confirmed by language, sociological and neurological studies, has led to interesting experimentations but also to complicated dynamics. Certain linguistic settings seem to foster a better affinity towards the device- particularly if compared to Romance languages, such as Italian and Spanish, that often have to rely on Anglophone renditions. Anglicisation has indeed overshadowed previous original attempts. Nevertheless, recent creations, particularly from cartoonists, bear witness to a willingness to stretch language again in order to enhance language iconicity.

The fin de siècle period throughout Europe undoubtedly cultivated the “interdisciplinary principle of la fraternité des arts” (Genova 158). Literature, poetry, visual art and music superseded former hierarchical structures favouring the painterly. Correspondence between intellectuals would cross-fertilise between disparate realms through publishing in interdisciplinary cultural journals that were distributed internationally across cosmopolitan cityscapes. The ability for the photograph to be mechanically reproduced, postulated by Walter Benjamin in 1936, allowed for one of the first transmedial aesthetics, to become known as photo-literature. Previously, reproduction had been confined to the textual realm. Bruges La Morte by Georges Rodenbach was the first ever work of photo-literature to commingle these respective art forms, sixty-five years after the invention of photography in 1827. Rodenbach’s novella was first published in 1892 at the height of the symbolist movement which spanned literature, painting, photography and more. Its pseudo-progeny, Andre Breton’s surrealist text Nadja was published in 1928 depicting the author’s meandering through the Parisian cityscape. In these works, text and image engender a sense of cosmopolitanism through the function of transposition.

This article deals with sound symbolism and the ways to interpret sound symbolic phenomena. Sound symbolism appears to be a universal phenomenon but linguists tend to neglect it or offer heterogeneous approaches and definitions. This paper is concerned with the role of motivation, as assumed in cases like cuckoo, and the question whether some sound symbolic effects might be the result of acquired statistical knowledge about the language system. The author argues that several aspects of sound symbolism such as natural/iconic or habitual relationships between sound and (facets of) referents interact but should be considered separately to gain a more realistic insight into the working of sound symbolism.

She studied Classics, Byzantine and Modern Greek at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (1985-1989) and obtained her PhD in Classics at the Institute of Greek and Latin Languages and Literatures at the Freie Universität Berlin (1990-1994). B Eleni Chronopoulou b has studied Greek Philology and History of Art. She earned her PhD and holds a MA in Cognitive Science and the Study of Religion from Aristotle University and Aarhus University. [Extracted from the article]

In 2012, large amounts of white marble Buddhist statues of the Eastern Wei and Northern Qi Dynasties were unearthed from the Buddhist sculpture hoard at Bei Wuzhuang in Ye City Site. This paper makes a comparative study on a bodhisattva statue in meditation seated in half-lotus posture (resting right ankle on the knee of pendent left leg and holding right hand upward) among them and another sculpture of the same type and made in the same period unearthed at the Xiude Monastery site in Dingzhou; from the double-tree, stupa and coiling dragon designs shown by them, this paper explores the commonalities and differences of the Buddhist arts in these two areas. Moreover, this paper reveals that this motif emerged earlier in the Ye City area than in the Dingzhou area, and diffused to the latter after it became popular in the Ye City area. By these conclusions, this paper infers that the white marble meditating statue seated in half-lotus position with the date of the second year of Wuding Era (544 CE) in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, USA was produced in Ye City area. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fermat's Last Theorem, which appears as a symbol in Tom Stoppard's Arcadia, was announced to be solved only two months after the play premiered. When Stoppard was writing Arcadia, the Theorem was still an unsolvable mystery; to the first audiences who saw the play performed, the Theorem represented a triumph of rediscovery. We may therefore interpret the Theorem's symbolism in two different ways, both of which contribute to a different reading of the play's essential question: whether history, discoveries, and art, once lost, are lost forever, or whether they can be recovered in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

1915 ist Ernst Troeltsch nach Berlin gezogen, wo er Professor für Philosophie wurde. Sein Wechsel aus der Heidelberger Theologischen Fakultät in die Philosophische Fakultät der Berliner Universität und sein zunehmendes Interesse am Historismus hat ihn nicht daran gehindert, theologische Studien fortzuführen. Ein Ergebnis dieser Studien war eine noch in Heidelberg geschriebene detaillierte Untersuchung über Augustins Theologie und im besonderen über De Civitate Dei. Troeltsch hat diese Studie unternommen, um zum einen eine Lücke in seinen Soziallehren der christlichen Kirchen und Gruppen zu füllen und zum anderen wegen seinem zunehmenden Interesse an Augustins Philosophie. Das Ergebnis dieser Untersuchung ist Troeltschs Buch Augustin, die christliche Antike und das Mittelalter. Dieses Buch ist aus vielen Gründen ein bemerkenswertes Werk, unter anderem, weil es eine objektive und eine prägnante Untersuchung über Ethik und Naturgesetz darstellt. Troeltschs Buch über Augustin ist sehr wichtig zu untersuchen, aber genauso wichtig ist der Prozess, der ihn dazu geführt, es zu schreiben. Dabei handelt es sich um mehrere Rezensionen, die Troeltsch über Bücher zu Augustins Theologie, Ethik und politischer Philosophie geschrieben hat. Indem wir Troeltschs Rezensionen und sein Buch Augustin studieren, lernen wir nicht nur, was in seiner Sicht besonders wertvoll sei in den Schriften des großen Kirchenvaters, sondern wir lernen auch Troeltschs eigenes Denken zu Ethik, Geschichte und sogar Politik besser kennen. By 1915 Ernst Troeltsch had moved to Berlin where he became professor of philosophy. His move from the Faculty of Theology to philosophy and his increasing concern with historicism did not hinder him from continuing with his theological studies. One of the results of these studies was his detailed investigation of Augustine's theology and he focused specifically on de Civitate Dei. Troeltsch undertook this study partially to rectify an omission in his Soziallehren der christlichen Kirchen und Gruppen and partially because of his increasing interest in Augustine's philosophy. The result of this study was Troeltsch's book Augustin, die christliche Antike und das Mittelalter. This is a remarkable work for many reasons, including that it was an objective and appreciative investigations on ethics and natural law – and it was written by a prominent Protestant theologian. However, this book has been mostly neglected which is unfortunate. Troeltsch's book on Augustine is well-worth exploring but so is the process which led him to write it. That entails consulting the numerous reviews that Troeltsch wrote about a number of books devoted to certain aspects of Augustine's theology, ethics, and political philosophy. By studying Troeltsch's book reviews and his Augustin, we not only learn what Troeltsch regarded as so valuable in the writings of this particular Church Father, but we also learn about Troeltsch's own thinking about ethics, history, and even politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]