- http://ibl.bas.bg/en/struktura/obshto-i-sapostavitelno-ezikoznanie/satrudnitsi/prof-d-r-maksim-stamenov/edit
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When psycholinguists study the bilingual lexicon, they use priming procedures in their investigations. This paper proposes an application of priming to develop a prompting-based means of optimizing access to the bilingual lexicon during... more
When psycholinguists study the bilingual lexicon, they use priming procedures in their investigations. This paper proposes an application of priming to develop a prompting-based means of optimizing access to the bilingual lexicon during translation, applying what we know about priming for the specific purpose of supporting the translator. The function of prompting would be to help translators find “shortcuts” to the target language words they are seeking. The concepts of priming and prompting presented in the first section of the paper are put to the test in two experiments that form the content of the second section. They provide empirical evidence that, indeed, prompting has a facilitative effect during the online translation of single word false cognates and noncognates.
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... actions and reactions, remain unconscious and automatically carried out unless and until the mechanism of attention is directed toward and amplifies ... Stamenov & Gallese 2002, for an overview). The class of mirror neurons... more
... actions and reactions, remain unconscious and automatically carried out unless and until the mechanism of attention is directed toward and amplifies ... Stamenov & Gallese 2002, for an overview). The class of mirror neurons (MNs) possesses some highly specific charac-teristics ...
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ABSTRACT The scenario of origin and evolution of language faculty are usually sketched according to the logic of one-way cause-effect relationships developing one after another aspects of the future language faculty serially on the time... more
ABSTRACT The scenario of origin and evolution of language faculty are usually sketched according to the logic of one-way cause-effect relationships developing one after another aspects of the future language faculty serially on the time span of innumerable millennia. The problem with scenarios like this is that language faculty, as we see it currently in action, involves unprecedented in its complexity set of computations distributed among several central systems in the mind which are massively dependent on both feedforward and feedback processes. Different aspects of this capacity must have co-emerged in order to manage to be compatible on a wide scale. Is it possible to model co-emergence by means of serial cause-and-effect models? — this is a quite troublesome to face question. One straightforward way to respond to the challenge is frankly to admit that we have currently no means to face it. We possess the language faculty that makes us unlike any other biological species on earth. The characteristics of this faculty look like nothing else in the universe, as we know it. This faculty was somehow implanted in us during the evolution. Evolution also took care to implement the language faculty as a deeply unconscious way of mental information processing, i.e., we have in principle no access to the way of representation and computation of language structure. This is essentially the position of Noam Chomsky (1993, 1994, 1995). It is both a radical and safe in its agnosticism position. Correspondingly, for a linguist, the most consequent and the least troublesome way of dealing with Mirror Neurons System (MNS) discovery and its potential purport for explaining the origin of language faculty is to dismiss it altogether. The logic behind such a dismissal would be quite a straightforward one: The monkeys have Mirror Neurons (MNs); the humans have mirror neurons, too. The monkeys have no language; the humans have language. Ergo, MNS could not have been the causal agent initiating the ‘crusade’ toward the establishment of language. No technical elaborations and homologies in the anatomical structure of the brains of monkeys and men can help save the situation. If there was a significant breakthrough in the phylogenesis of humans leading to the formation of human language faculty, this was not the case because of MNS. To my mind, the simple logic supporting the thesis given above is unassailable if we are looking for a single causal factor triggering the development of the human language faculty. The point of view of a sober linguist seems quite evidently to contrast with the ‘linguistic turn’ of neuroscientists in interpreting the potential significance of the discovery of MNS. Fadiga & Gallese (1997) and Rizzolatti & Arbib (1998) explicitly interpreted this discovery as a way for reaching and deciphering the enigma of human language faculty. Their optimism was shared more recently by Ramachandran (2000). The proposals offered by Fadiga & Gallese (1997) and Rizzolatti & Arbib (1998) were founded, among others, on the following premises: (a) Language skill has emerged through evolution by means of a process of preadaptation: specific behaviors and the nervous structures supporting them, originally selected for other purposes, acquire new functions that side and eventually supersede the previous one. The discovery of MNs may indeed provide a new neurobiological basis to account for the emergence of them, originally selected for other purposes, acquire new functions that eventually supersede the previous one; (b) A continuity can be traced between language skill and pre-language brachio-manual behaviors, the primate premotor cortex being the common playground of this evolutionary continuity; (c) The specialization for language of human Broca's region derives from an ancient mechanism, the MNS, originally devised for action understanding. I think, however, that the prima facie purport for the fascination of the neuroscientists after discovering MNS specifically with language is due to a different reason: Only with the help of the comparison with language and the correlated with it potential for constructing mental representations as we have it today can we become aware of the real nature and specificity of MNS. In other words, before trying to construct scenarios of language origin and evolution based on MNS we must take care to analyse properly the nature of MNS itself. This can be achieved best by comparing it with the most advanced structurally and functionally mental representations of behavioral actions we are in possession of – the language-specific mental representations.
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ABSTRACT Included in the present volume are selected contributions to the International Symposium on "Models of Meaning" held September 25-28, 1988 in the Druzhba resort near Varna, Bulgaria. The meeting was organized... more
ABSTRACT Included in the present volume are selected contributions to the International Symposium on "Models of Meaning" held September 25-28, 1988 in the Druzhba resort near Varna, Bulgaria. The meeting was organized under the auspices of the Institute for Bulgarian Language, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. The idea of the Symposium ran opposite to the direction of the great majority of the semantic conferences which gather usually people who already share basic theoretical and methodological commitments. The explicit aim of this meeting was to broaden instead the scope of linguistic semantics, to try first to consider meaning as non-reductively as one can envisage in the hope of finding new horizons and contexts for the investigation and modelling semantics of natural language. Table of Contents Preface Introduction PART 1: Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Meaning Traces of Meaning and Reference: Phenomenological and Hermeneutical Explorations Calvin O. Schrag Meaning Prior to the Separation of the Five Senses Eugene T. Gendlin Model-Making Mind: Model of Meaning Roland Fischer Perceptual Meaning and the Holoworld Gordon G. Globus Consciousness and the Cognitive Psychology of Meaning Harry T. Hunt The Body of Discourse Pierre Solie Models of Interpretation Marcelo Dascal Word Meaning, Imagery and Action Johannes Engelkamp Meaning-Constellating Processes in Experientially Defined Human Events Gayle Privette and Charles M. Bundrick Movement Metaphors: Linking Theory and Therapeutic Practice Varda Dascal Relationship between Meaning and Representation: An Experimental Approach Mukesh J. Patel The Semantics of Emotion Words: A Comparison of Three Taxonomies Christine Storm and Thomas Storm Meaning and Semantic Power: Glimpses of the Philosophy of Śakti-Vāda Plamen Gradinarov Meaning, Perspective, and the Social Construction of Reality Fred Eidlin Philosophy of Language without Meaning, and without… Language Nikolay Milkov PART II: Toward Broadening the Scope of Linguistic Semantics Linguistic Relativity and Semantic Research Stefana Dimitrova The Pragmatics of Semeiosis Jacob L. Mey Integrational Semantics: An Integrative View of Linguistic Meaning Hans-Heinrich Lieb Sentence Type, Sentence Mood and Illocutionary Type Ferenc Kiefer Some Considerations on the Explicitness and Completeness of Semantic Descriptions Franz Hundsnurscher Linguistic Meaning and Semantic Interpretation Petr Sgall and Eva Hajičová The Problem of Literal Meaning Edda Weigand An Outline of Aspectuality in English within a Compromise Linguistic Model Andrei Danchev Semantic ‘Oppositions’: (Animacy) Maya Pencheva Semantic Similarity and Opposition: Methods of Establishment and Measurement Elena Todorova Semantic Elements in Machine Translation Makoto Nagao Situation Semantics Analysis of Some Nominals in Bulgarian Radoslav Pavlov and Rusanka Lukanova On Conventions and Contracts Peter Stockinger Tense Meaning and Pragmatics Andrei Stoevsky Ordinary Misunderstanding Elda Weizman and Shoshana Blum-Kulka Theses for an Ethnopragmatics Petko Staynov, Vasil Garnizov and Angel Angelov Lexical Meaning from Synchronic and Diachronic Points of View Ivan Duridanov Are There, from a Semantic Point of View, Proper Names Based on Mass-Names? Roland Harweg Pānini’s View of Meaning and its Western Counterpart Johannes Bronkhorst Buddhist Tantra and Lexical Meaning Alex Wayman In Praise of Wholeness Maxim I. Stamenov Types of Semantic Relations between Noun Groups in Binominative Sentences Kornelia Ilieva Towards an Updated Model of the Linguistic Sign Julian Konstantinov Meaning and Explicative Interpretation as Research Objects János Sánder Petöfi Natural Text Processing and Text Meaning Robert E. Longacre Is Interpretation an Illusion Roger Van de Velde Subject Index
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Research Interests: Bulgarian and Linguistics
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... cognitive psychology); -attention/awareness (cognitive psychology); -clearly conscious/vague [/clearly unconscious events](Baars 1993: 129); bright/dim (Galin 1994 ... of schemes of relation between terms, which hardly even as verbal... more
... cognitive psychology); -attention/awareness (cognitive psychology); -clearly conscious/vague [/clearly unconscious events](Baars 1993: 129); bright/dim (Galin 1994 ... of schemes of relation between terms, which hardly even as verbal images enter the mind, so rapid is the whole ...
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In this review article the subject under consideration is the status of the biolinguistics program as presented inThe Cambridge Handbook of Biolinguistics(2013). The discussion revolves around the problem of what its thematic coverage is... more
In this review article the subject under consideration is the status of the biolinguistics program as presented inThe Cambridge Handbook of Biolinguistics(2013). The discussion revolves around the problem of what its thematic coverage is and what the prospects of its expansion are according to this publication. The main challenges for biolinguistics are envisaged along the lines of the following three questions: Is it possible (and if yes under what conditions) for biolinguistics to broaden the spectrum of its program in terms of integration of theory, methods, and results from psycholinguistics, neurolinguistics, and cognitive neuroscience? Is it capable of expanding in a sensible way beyond the set of questions included in its agenda within the generative grammar framework? Is it tenable for the biolinguistics program, as a result of this expansion, to undergo the metamorphosis of becoming the science of language out of life, or is this ‘mission impossible’?
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ABSTRACT The aim of the present paper will be to display what the possibilities for fractals to ‘be’ mind are, in a sense more than just mathematical models of different processes in nature and in the brain. To prove that, we should give... more
ABSTRACT The aim of the present paper will be to display what the possibilities for fractals to ‘be’ mind are, in a sense more than just mathematical models of different processes in nature and in the brain. To prove that, we should give an account of how fractals become accessible, if at all, to consciousness. I chose for my argument the analysis of the work of two ‘phenomenologists’ — the phenomenologist of nature in experimental mathematics, Benoit Mandelbrot, and the phenomenologist of mind in psychology of perception, James J. Gibson. In the third part of this article I will discuss some implications of fractal mind hypothesis. A mathematician or computer scientist could benefit from this contribution in becoming aware of the psychological purport or significance of nonlinear dynamical modeling of different systems. A psychologist could become better oriented in the potential of a class of formal models which seem appropriately to approximate some aspects of perceptual processing. A brain scientist might benefit by considering the conjecture developed here about the ‘direct interface’ (no ‘hidden layers’) between mind and brain in the case of perceptual processing (among others). A linguist may become better oriented into the range of differences between language-specific and language-nonspecific mind processes and structures. A philosopher could consider the point about the margins-of-reality and the possibilities for formal specification of the latter.
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Keywords: Learning by Imitation - Neural Modelling Reference LSA3-CHAPTER-2002-003 URL: Advances in Consciousness Research"> Advances in Consciousness Research Record created on 2005-11-16, modified on 2016-08-08
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... tude. Special thanks go to Elena Andonova and Iliana Krupova who helped me by commenting critically both on the content and the English of my own contribution, as well as the text of the Introduction and Acknowledgments. Di ...
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The article presents and interprets the constructions consisting of a predicative referring to inner human experiences and a dative clitic denoting the human that experiences them. I begin by providing an analysis of the main features of... more
The article presents and interprets the constructions consisting of a predicative referring to inner human experiences and a dative clitic denoting the human that experiences them. I begin by providing an analysis of the main features of these constructions and the characteristics that distinguish them from dative predicate constructions and impersonal constructions which realise or imply a nominative or accusative human experiencer. Special attention is paid to the place and role of oblique case pronominal clitics. The grammatical functions and the content of these clitics are clarified. From a semantic point of view, a specific feature of the predicatives from the studied group is that they name unambiguously defined classes of words – perceptions, emotions and evaluations made on a cognitive and emotional-affective basis. An analysis of the peculiarities in the realisation of the category of person by the verb in these constructions is offered. I introduce the concept of body ima...
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The article offers an analysis of the similarities and differences between irony and ambivalence. The two phenomena share the ability to be expressed in linguistic form; both of them most often rely on the oscillation between a positive... more
The article offers an analysis of the similarities and differences between irony and ambivalence. The two phenomena share the ability to be expressed in linguistic form; both of them most often rely on the oscillation between a positive and a negative meaning of a single word or expression. The difference between them is that virtually any word denoting a positive characteristic of a person can be used ironically, given that irony is contextually conditioned. No matter how often we use 'genius' in the sense of 'mediocre' or 'stupid', the ironic use will not evolve into a distinct sense of the polysemous word 'genius'. Unlike irony, ambivalent meanings do not depend on the context of use in the same way and should be encoded in the dictionary. Thus, Bulgarian 'келеш' “squirt; fop” is defined in the Dictionary of the Bulgarian Language (RBE 1977–) as “2. coll. contempt. usually as a form of address. A boy or a young man who is or seems to be inexperienced, unfit for something, but who is self-confident, arrogant, daring or way-ward, headstrong. 3. rarely, iron. Used about a resourceful, deft, capable young man”. However, it is inaccurate to define these two senses as “contemptuous” and “ironic”. The first one is ambivalent and may hence imply contempt or ridicule, whereas the second one is, as the analysis shows, admiratively ambivalent and can express attitudes ranging from astonishment to envy resulting from prior underestimation of the qualities of the individual in question.
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The theory of conversation proposed by the philosopher of language Herbert Paul Grice (1957; 1975; 1989) remains up to the date the most popular one on the subject in the linguistic pragmatics, when it comes to consideration of the... more
The theory of conversation proposed by the philosopher of language Herbert Paul Grice (1957; 1975; 1989) remains up to the date the most popular one on the subject in the linguistic pragmatics, when it comes to consideration of the intentional component that drives the conversation to go on, and on, and on. This does not mean, however, that this theory does not have problems on its own that put into question its general applicability. This is the case, first of all, when we consider the scope of the validity of the cooperation principle (CP) that is presented as a condition sine qua non for any conversation to take place, as well as the way(s) of application of the conversational postulates/supermaxims offered in this theory. In the present article the general validity of CP is challenged taking as an example what happens with it and conversation postulates when one lies. The point is made that the CP must be supplemented not only with alternative and/or antagonistic ones, like Relevance Principle or Politeness Principle, but also with one that is superordinate to it – the Principle of Trust.
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This study was undertaken to verify whether different output variables or biosignals, measured during performance of a cognitive task, manifest common dynamical properties. Nonlinear properties of both response times (RTs) and... more
This study was undertaken to verify whether different output variables or biosignals, measured during performance of a cognitive task, manifest common dynamical properties. Nonlinear properties of both response times (RTs) and electroercephalograms (EEG) were tested. We asked subjects to generate mental images of actions following of auditorily presentation simple phrases suggesting the action. Analysis of RT series combined from many subjects and of EEG records from single subjects clearly manifested self-similarity and chaotic dynamics that provide insights into the self-organization of the brain/behavioral system.
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The first section of this paper provides justification for a prompting procedure proposed by the authors as a way of optimizing access to the bilingual mental lexicon during translation. The function of prompting would be to help the... more
The first section of this paper provides justification for a prompting procedure proposed by the authors as a way of optimizing access to the bilingual mental lexicon during translation. The function of prompting would be to help the bilingual find a ‘shortcut’ to the sought for target language word. In order to develop and justify such a procedure, we have to take into account in an informed manner what sort of difficulties translators potentially face during their work. Cognates, particularly false and partial cognates, are one of the main sources of interlanguage asymmetry at the level of lexis. Nowadays, they constitute a significant portion of bilingual dictionaries and, correspondingly, are internalized and made available in the bilingual mental lexicons of all speakers in command of more than one language. When psycholinguists study the bilingual lexicon, they probe it by means of the so-called priming procedure. The latter is used for purposes of experimental research. The p...
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The book is dedicated to systematic analysis of the set of Ottoman Turkish loan words in Bulgarian in terms of the history of their borrowing, distribution and use up to the present day. Its aim is to show why and how in them is... more
The book is dedicated to systematic analysis of the set of Ottoman Turkish loan words in Bulgarian in terms of the history of their borrowing, distribution and use up to the present day. Its aim is to show why and how in them is represented the impact of the Ottoman Turkish culture on the Bulgarian one, i.e., what is the nature of the so called Ottoman heritage in the Bulgarian language. The Ottoman Turkish loans offer unique opportunities to investigate the phenomenology of intercultural conflict and its most important consequences from different points of view. On the basis of rich empirical linguistic data (presentation and discussion of 515 lexical entries and their semantic analyses individually and in semantic groups) and generalizations and discussions based on them the reader acquires broad and detailed orientation how the process of radical dissimulation (falling apart) of two languages and cultures can happen after a long period of imposed cultural impact on a wide scale, ...
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ABSTRACT The scenario of origin and evolution of language faculty are usually sketched according to the logic of one-way cause-effect relationships developing one after another aspects of the future language faculty serially on the time... more
ABSTRACT The scenario of origin and evolution of language faculty are usually sketched according to the logic of one-way cause-effect relationships developing one after another aspects of the future language faculty serially on the time span of innumerable millennia. The problem with scenarios like this is that language faculty, as we see it currently in action, involves unprecedented in its complexity set of computations distributed among several central systems in the mind which are massively dependent on both feedforward and feedback processes. Different aspects of this capacity must have co-emerged in order to manage to be compatible on a wide scale. Is it possible to model co-emergence by means of serial cause-and-effect models? — this is a quite troublesome to face question. One straightforward way to respond to the challenge is frankly to admit that we have currently no means to face it. We possess the language faculty that makes us unlike any other biological species on earth. The characteristics of this faculty look like nothing else in the universe, as we know it. This faculty was somehow implanted in us during the evolution. Evolution also took care to implement the language faculty as a deeply unconscious way of mental information processing, i.e., we have in principle no access to the way of representation and computation of language structure. This is essentially the position of Noam Chomsky (1993, 1994, 1995). It is both a radical and safe in its agnosticism position. Correspondingly, for a linguist, the most consequent and the least troublesome way of dealing with Mirror Neurons System (MNS) discovery and its potential purport for explaining the origin of language faculty is to dismiss it altogether. The logic behind such a dismissal would be quite a straightforward one: The monkeys have Mirror Neurons (MNs); the humans have mirror neurons, too. The monkeys have no language; the humans have language. Ergo, MNS could not have been the causal agent initiating the ‘crusade’ toward the establishment of language. No technical elaborations and homologies in the anatomical structure of the brains of monkeys and men can help save the situation. If there was a significant breakthrough in the phylogenesis of humans leading to the formation of human language faculty, this was not the case because of MNS. To my mind, the simple logic supporting the thesis given above is unassailable if we are looking for a single causal factor triggering the development of the human language faculty. The point of view of a sober linguist seems quite evidently to contrast with the ‘linguistic turn’ of neuroscientists in interpreting the potential significance of the discovery of MNS. Fadiga & Gallese (1997) and Rizzolatti & Arbib (1998) explicitly interpreted this discovery as a way for reaching and deciphering the enigma of human language faculty. Their optimism was shared more recently by Ramachandran (2000). The proposals offered by Fadiga & Gallese (1997) and Rizzolatti & Arbib (1998) were founded, among others, on the following premises: (a) Language skill has emerged through evolution by means of a process of preadaptation: specific behaviors and the nervous structures supporting them, originally selected for other purposes, acquire new functions that side and eventually supersede the previous one. The discovery of MNs may indeed provide a new neurobiological basis to account for the emergence of them, originally selected for other purposes, acquire new functions that eventually supersede the previous one; (b) A continuity can be traced between language skill and pre-language brachio-manual behaviors, the primate premotor cortex being the common playground of this evolutionary continuity; (c) The specialization for language of human Broca's region derives from an ancient mechanism, the MNS, originally devised for action understanding. I think, however, that the prima facie purport for the fascination of the neuroscientists after discovering MNS specifically with language is due to a different reason: Only with the help of the comparison with language and the correlated with it potential for constructing mental representations as we have it today can we become aware of the real nature and specificity of MNS. In other words, before trying to construct scenarios of language origin and evolution based on MNS we must take care to analyse properly the nature of MNS itself. This can be achieved best by comparing it with the most advanced structurally and functionally mental representations of behavioral actions we are in possession of – the language-specific mental representations.
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The present article is dedicated to semantic analysis of a group of three verbs in Bulgarian that code in their meanings a special type of persuasive interaction. The verbs in question were borrowed from Ottoman Turkish and continue to be... more
The present article is dedicated to semantic analysis of a group of three verbs in Bulgarian that code in their meanings a special type of persuasive interaction. The verbs in question were borrowed from Ottoman Turkish and continue to be in use in contemporary colloquial Bulgarian. They include кандърдисвам, назлъндисвам се, and кандисвам, conventionally translated as “bring around; persuade”, “be reluctant, be sticky” and “consent, agree; accede (to)”. After discussing their semantic structure in order to make clear what is special in their meanings, a comparison is carried out between the way they envisage the patterns in which the mutually recognized intentionality becomes implemented during verbal interaction compared to the theory of conversation of H. Paul Grice. As a result of this juxtaposition it becomes clear that the interpersonal intentionality of Gricean type may be supplemented by one based on emotive-attitudinal grounds. The latter can be motivated not only by sympat...
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Във втория том на своята „История на българския език“ акад. Беньо Цонев (1934) представя таксономия на турските лексикални заемки в българския език с оглед на тяхното тематична дистрибуция. При разпределението им по групи авторът обаче се... more
Във втория том на своята „История на българския език“ акад. Беньо Цонев (1934) представя таксономия на турските лексикални заемки в българския език с оглед на тяхното тематична дистрибуция. При разпределението им по групи авторът обаче се сблъсква с определен нетривиален проблем. Като остатък от всички други групи, които той успява успешно да идентифицира въз основа на тяхната семантика, му остава определено количество думи, които той не намира друг начин да квалифицира освен с „Разни значения“, а сред тях той намира „съществителни, прилагателни, глаголи, неменливи думи и възклици“. Както се вижда, проблемите при „разните значения“ са налице още на формално равнище, тъй като при опит да бъдат разпределени с оглед на стандартно възприетите ва българския език части на речта се оказва, че се сблъскваме с „остатък“ от междуметия, междуметни думи, наречия и наречни думи, възклицателни думи и под., за които още по-неясно се оказва да се определи какво е точно тяхното място и функции в стр...
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ABSTRACT The aim of the present paper will be to display what the possibilities for fractals to ‘be’ mind are, in a sense more than just mathematical models of different processes in nature and in the brain. To prove that, we should give... more
ABSTRACT The aim of the present paper will be to display what the possibilities for fractals to ‘be’ mind are, in a sense more than just mathematical models of different processes in nature and in the brain. To prove that, we should give an account of how fractals become accessible, if at all, to consciousness. I chose for my argument the analysis of the work of two ‘phenomenologists’ — the phenomenologist of nature in experimental mathematics, Benoit Mandelbrot, and the phenomenologist of mind in psychology of perception, James J. Gibson. In the third part of this article I will discuss some implications of fractal mind hypothesis. A mathematician or computer scientist could benefit from this contribution in becoming aware of the psychological purport or significance of nonlinear dynamical modeling of different systems. A psychologist could become better oriented in the potential of a class of formal models which seem appropriately to approximate some aspects of perceptual processing. A brain scientist might benefit by considering the conjecture developed here about the ‘direct interface’ (no ‘hidden layers’) between mind and brain in the case of perceptual processing (among others). A linguist may become better oriented into the range of differences between language-specific and language-nonspecific mind processes and structures. A philosopher could consider the point about the margins-of-reality and the possibilities for formal specification of the latter.
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In this review article the subject under consideration is the status of the biolinguistics program as presented inThe Cambridge Handbook of Biolinguistics(2013). The discussion revolves around the problem of what its thematic coverage is... more
In this review article the subject under consideration is the status of the biolinguistics program as presented inThe Cambridge Handbook of Biolinguistics(2013). The discussion revolves around the problem of what its thematic coverage is and what the prospects of its expansion are according to this publication. The main challenges for biolinguistics are envisaged along the lines of the following three questions: Is it possible (and if yes under what conditions) for biolinguistics to broaden the spectrum of its program in terms of integration of theory, methods, and results from psycholinguistics, neurolinguistics, and cognitive neuroscience? Is it capable of expanding in a sensible way beyond the set of questions included in its agenda within the generative grammar framework? Is it tenable for the biolinguistics program, as a result of this expansion, to undergo the metamorphosis of becoming the science of language out of life, or is this ‘mission impossible’?
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The focus of this collective volume is on the mutual determination of language structure, discourse patterns and the accessibility to consciousness of mental contents of different types of organization and complexity. The contributions... more
The focus of this collective volume is on the mutual determination of language structure, discourse patterns and the accessibility to consciousness of mental contents of different types of organization and complexity. The contributions address the following problems, among others: the history of the interpretation of ‘conscious’ and ‘unconscious’ mind in the theoretical discourse of modern linguistics; the determination of the structure of consciousness by the grammatical structure; the levels of access of grammatical and lexical information to consciousness; the development of cognitive complexity and control in ontogeny; pathologies of consciousness access in discourse comprehension and production; the cognitive contextual prerequisites for the representation of meaning in consciousness; the relationships between language structure and qualia in the phenomenology of experience; the dialogical structure of intentionality and meaning representation, etc.
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ABSTRACT Included in the present volume are selected contributions to the International Symposium on "Models of Meaning" held September 25-28, 1988 in the Druzhba resort near Varna, Bulgaria. The meeting was organized... more
ABSTRACT Included in the present volume are selected contributions to the International Symposium on "Models of Meaning" held September 25-28, 1988 in the Druzhba resort near Varna, Bulgaria. The meeting was organized under the auspices of the Institute for Bulgarian Language, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. The idea of the Symposium ran opposite to the direction of the great majority of the semantic conferences which gather usually people who already share basic theoretical and methodological commitments. The explicit aim of this meeting was to broaden instead the scope of linguistic semantics, to try first to consider meaning as non-reductively as one can envisage in the hope of finding new horizons and contexts for the investigation and modelling semantics of natural language. Table of Contents Preface Introduction PART 1: Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Meaning Traces of Meaning and Reference: Phenomenological and Hermeneutical Explorations Calvin O. Schrag Meaning Prior to the Separation of the Five Senses Eugene T. Gendlin Model-Making Mind: Model of Meaning Roland Fischer Perceptual Meaning and the Holoworld Gordon G. Globus Consciousness and the Cognitive Psychology of Meaning Harry T. Hunt The Body of Discourse Pierre Solie Models of Interpretation Marcelo Dascal Word Meaning, Imagery and Action Johannes Engelkamp Meaning-Constellating Processes in Experientially Defined Human Events Gayle Privette and Charles M. Bundrick Movement Metaphors: Linking Theory and Therapeutic Practice Varda Dascal Relationship between Meaning and Representation: An Experimental Approach Mukesh J. Patel The Semantics of Emotion Words: A Comparison of Three Taxonomies Christine Storm and Thomas Storm Meaning and Semantic Power: Glimpses of the Philosophy of Śakti-Vāda Plamen Gradinarov Meaning, Perspective, and the Social Construction of Reality Fred Eidlin Philosophy of Language without Meaning, and without… Language Nikolay Milkov PART II: Toward Broadening the Scope of Linguistic Semantics Linguistic Relativity and Semantic Research Stefana Dimitrova The Pragmatics of Semeiosis Jacob L. Mey Integrational Semantics: An Integrative View of Linguistic Meaning Hans-Heinrich Lieb Sentence Type, Sentence Mood and Illocutionary Type Ferenc Kiefer Some Considerations on the Explicitness and Completeness of Semantic Descriptions Franz Hundsnurscher Linguistic Meaning and Semantic Interpretation Petr Sgall and Eva Hajičová The Problem of Literal Meaning Edda Weigand An Outline of Aspectuality in English within a Compromise Linguistic Model Andrei Danchev Semantic ‘Oppositions’: (Animacy) Maya Pencheva Semantic Similarity and Opposition: Methods of Establishment and Measurement Elena Todorova Semantic Elements in Machine Translation Makoto Nagao Situation Semantics Analysis of Some Nominals in Bulgarian Radoslav Pavlov and Rusanka Lukanova On Conventions and Contracts Peter Stockinger Tense Meaning and Pragmatics Andrei Stoevsky Ordinary Misunderstanding Elda Weizman and Shoshana Blum-Kulka Theses for an Ethnopragmatics Petko Staynov, Vasil Garnizov and Angel Angelov Lexical Meaning from Synchronic and Diachronic Points of View Ivan Duridanov Are There, from a Semantic Point of View, Proper Names Based on Mass-Names? Roland Harweg Pānini’s View of Meaning and its Western Counterpart Johannes Bronkhorst Buddhist Tantra and Lexical Meaning Alex Wayman In Praise of Wholeness Maxim I. Stamenov Types of Semantic Relations between Noun Groups in Binominative Sentences Kornelia Ilieva Towards an Updated Model of the Linguistic Sign Julian Konstantinov Meaning and Explicative Interpretation as Research Objects János Sánder Petöfi Natural Text Processing and Text Meaning Robert E. Longacre Is Interpretation an Illusion Roger Van de Velde Subject Index
Research Interests:
... It is on the basis of this trilingual lexical (word-form) relationship that I thought that I knew the word and afterwards with a degree of ... Cognates in language, in the mind, and in a prompting dictionary 233 7. Types of cognates... more
... It is on the basis of this trilingual lexical (word-form) relationship that I thought that I knew the word and afterwards with a degree of ... Cognates in language, in the mind, and in a prompting dictionary 233 7. Types of cognates with respect to meaning identity/difference Barnickel ...
Research Interests:
In this study, we presented sentences either ending with high or low probability cloze words or semantically incongruent words to investigate the influence of L2 proficiency on electrophysiological correlates of semantic processing in... more
In this study, we presented sentences either ending with high or low probability cloze words or semantically incongruent words to investigate the influence of L2 proficiency on electrophysiological correlates of semantic processing in bilinguals. Event-related potentials (ERPs) as well as the oscillatory dynamics of the EEG signal, specifically, frequency power changes expressed as event-related (de)synchronization (ERD/S), were analyzed. Replicating earlier results, we found an N400 on semantically incongruent words, as well as on low cloze probability words. For the bilinguals investigated in the present study, N400 latency in the low cloze probability condition was found to be modulated by L2 proficiency, indicating that L2 proficiency in our sample might have influenced the speed of semantic integration. Relative Theta power increased for all three word conditions, but no influence of proficiency was observed. Different from the ERP results, we found a stronger increase in theta...
Research Interests: Psychology, Cognitive Psychology, Cognitive Science, Mathematics, Electrophysiology, and 15 moreMultilingualism, Semantics, Visual perception, Electroencephalography, Medicine, Brain Mapping, Evoked Potentials, Humans, Female, Reaction Time, Young Adult, Adult, Time Factors, Neurosciences, and photic stimulation
The book is dedicated to systematic analysis of the set of Ottoman Turkish loan words in Bulgarian in terms of the history of their borrowing, distribution and use up to the present day. Its aim is to show why and how in them is... more
The book is dedicated to systematic analysis of the set of Ottoman Turkish loan words in Bulgarian in terms of the history of their borrowing, distribution and use up to the present day. Its aim is to show why and how in them is represented the impact of the Ottoman Turkish culture on the Bulgarian one, i.e., what is the nature of the so called Ottoman heritage in the Bulgarian language. The Ottoman Turkish loans offer unique opportunities to investigate the phenomenology of intercultural conflict and its most important consequences from different points of view. On the basis of rich empirical linguistic data (presentation and discussion of 515 lexical entries and their semantic analyses individually and in semantic groups) and generalizations and discussions based on them the reader acquires broad and detailed orientation how the process of radical dissimulation (falling apart) of two languages and cultures can happen after a long period of forced cultural impact on a wide scale, that was found in historical perspective not acceptable in the Bulgarian culture.
Research Interests:
The emergence of language, social intelligence, and tool development are what made homo sapiens sapiens differentiate itself from all other biological species in the world. The use of language and the management of social and instrumental... more
The emergence of language, social intelligence, and tool development are what made homo sapiens sapiens differentiate itself from all other biological species in the world. The use of language and the management of social and instrumental skills imply an awareness of intention and the consideration that one faces another individual with an attitude analogical to that of one’s own. The metaphor of ‘mirror’ aptly comes to mind.
Recent investigations have shown that the human ability to ‘mirror’ other’s actions originates in the brain at a much deeper level than phenomenal awareness. A new class of neurons has been discovered in the premotor area of the monkey brain: ‘mirror neurons’. Quite remarkably, they are tuned to fire to the enaction as well as observation of specific classes of behavior: fine manual actions and actions performed by mouth. They become activated independent of the agent, be it the self or a third person whose action is observed. The activation in mirror neurons is automatic and binds the observation and enaction of some behavior by the self or by the observed other. The peculiar first-to-third-person ‘intersubjectivity’ of the performance of mirror neurons and their surprising complementarity to the functioning of strategic communicative face-to-face (first-to-second person) interaction may shed new light on the functional architecture of conscious vs. unconscious mental processes and the relationship between behavioral and communicative action in monkeys, primates, and humans.
The present volume discusses the nature of mirror neurons as presented by the research team of Prof. Giacomo Rizzolatti (University of Parma), who originally discovered them, and the implications to our understanding of the evolution of brain, mind and communicative interaction in non-human primates and man.
Recent investigations have shown that the human ability to ‘mirror’ other’s actions originates in the brain at a much deeper level than phenomenal awareness. A new class of neurons has been discovered in the premotor area of the monkey brain: ‘mirror neurons’. Quite remarkably, they are tuned to fire to the enaction as well as observation of specific classes of behavior: fine manual actions and actions performed by mouth. They become activated independent of the agent, be it the self or a third person whose action is observed. The activation in mirror neurons is automatic and binds the observation and enaction of some behavior by the self or by the observed other. The peculiar first-to-third-person ‘intersubjectivity’ of the performance of mirror neurons and their surprising complementarity to the functioning of strategic communicative face-to-face (first-to-second person) interaction may shed new light on the functional architecture of conscious vs. unconscious mental processes and the relationship between behavioral and communicative action in monkeys, primates, and humans.
The present volume discusses the nature of mirror neurons as presented by the research team of Prof. Giacomo Rizzolatti (University of Parma), who originally discovered them, and the implications to our understanding of the evolution of brain, mind and communicative interaction in non-human primates and man.
Research Interests:
The focus of this collective volume is on the mutual determination of language structure, discourse patterns and the accessibility to consciousness of mental contents of different types of organization and complexity. The contributions... more
The focus of this collective volume is on the mutual determination of language structure, discourse patterns and the accessibility to consciousness of mental contents of different types of organization and complexity. The contributions address the following problems, among others: the history of the interpretation of 'conscious' and 'unconscious' mind in the theoretical discourse of modern linguistics; the determination of the structure of consciousness by the grammatical structure; the levels of access of grammatical and lexical information to consciousness; the development of cognitive complexity and control in ontogeny; pathologies of consciousness access in discourse comprehension and production; the cognitive contextual prerequisites for the representation of meaning in consciousness; the relationship between language structure and qualia in the phenomenology of experience; the dialogical structure of intentionality and meaning representation, etc.
Table of Contents
List of Contributors
Acknowledgements
Introduction
The Conscious and Unconscious Mind’ in the theoretical Discourse of Modern Linguistics
Robert de Beaugrande
Consciousness, Construal, and Subjectivity
Ronald W. Langacker
Language in Time: Lexical and structural ambiguity resolution
Dieter Hillert
Cognitive Complexity and Control: A theory of the development of deliberate reasoning and intentional action
Philip D. Zelazo and Douglas Frye
Discourse in Dementia: Consideration of consciousness
Sandra B. Chapman and Hanna K. Ulatowska
Cognitive Context Models and Discourse
Teun A. van Dijk
Language and an Epistemology of Dialogism
Ivana Marková
Adverbial Theories of Consciousness
Panayot Butchvarov
Grammar, Meaning and Consciousness: What sentence structure can tell us about the structure of consciousness
Maxim I. Stamenov
Author Index
Subject Index
Table of Contents
List of Contributors
Acknowledgements
Introduction
The Conscious and Unconscious Mind’ in the theoretical Discourse of Modern Linguistics
Robert de Beaugrande
Consciousness, Construal, and Subjectivity
Ronald W. Langacker
Language in Time: Lexical and structural ambiguity resolution
Dieter Hillert
Cognitive Complexity and Control: A theory of the development of deliberate reasoning and intentional action
Philip D. Zelazo and Douglas Frye
Discourse in Dementia: Consideration of consciousness
Sandra B. Chapman and Hanna K. Ulatowska
Cognitive Context Models and Discourse
Teun A. van Dijk
Language and an Epistemology of Dialogism
Ivana Marková
Adverbial Theories of Consciousness
Panayot Butchvarov
Grammar, Meaning and Consciousness: What sentence structure can tell us about the structure of consciousness
Maxim I. Stamenov
Author Index
Subject Index
Research Interests:
"This collective volume is the first to discuss systematically what are the possibilities to model different aspects of brain and mind functioning with the formal means of fractal geometry and deterministic chaos. At stake here is not an... more
"This collective volume is the first to discuss systematically what are the possibilities to model different aspects of brain and mind functioning with the formal means of fractal geometry and deterministic chaos. At stake here is not an approximation to the way of actual performance, but the possibility of brain and mind to implement nonlinear dynamic patterns in their functioning. The contributions discuss the following topics (among others): the edge-of-chaos dynamics in recursively organized neural systems and in intersensory interaction, the fractal timing of the neural functioning on different scales of brain networking, aspects of fractal neurodynamics and quantum chaos in novel biophysics, the fractal maximum-power evolution of brain and mind, the chaotic dynamics in the development of consciousness, etc. It is suggested that the 'margins' of our capacity for phenomenal experience are 'fractal limit phenomena'. Here the possibilities to prove the plausibility of fractal modeling with appropriate experimentation and rational reconstruction are also discussed. A conjecture is made that the brain vs. mind differentiation becomes possible, most probably, only with the imposition of appropriate symmetry groups implementing a flowing interface of features of local vs. global brain dynamics.
Table of Contents
List of Contributors
Preface
Introduction
Edge-of-Chaos Dynamics in Recursively Organized Neural Systems
David M. Alexander and Gordon G. Globus
Fractal Time and the Foundations of Consciousness: Vertical convergence of 1/f phenomena from ion channels to behavioral states
Carl M. Anderson and Arnold J. Mandell
Fractal Thinking: Self-organizing brain processing
Earl Mac Cormac
n-Dimensional Nonlinear Psychophysics: Intersensory interaction as a network at the edge of chaos
Robert A.M. Gregson
Fractal Neurodynamics and Quantum Chaos: Resolving the mind-brain paradox through novel biophysics
Chris King
The Fractal Maximum-Power Evolution of Brain, Mind, and Consciousness
Larry Vandervert
The Fractal-Like Roots of Mind: A tutorial in direct access
Maxim I. Stamenov
Chaotic Dynamics and the Development of Consciousness
John R. Van Eenwyk
Subject Index"
Table of Contents
List of Contributors
Preface
Introduction
Edge-of-Chaos Dynamics in Recursively Organized Neural Systems
David M. Alexander and Gordon G. Globus
Fractal Time and the Foundations of Consciousness: Vertical convergence of 1/f phenomena from ion channels to behavioral states
Carl M. Anderson and Arnold J. Mandell
Fractal Thinking: Self-organizing brain processing
Earl Mac Cormac
n-Dimensional Nonlinear Psychophysics: Intersensory interaction as a network at the edge of chaos
Robert A.M. Gregson
Fractal Neurodynamics and Quantum Chaos: Resolving the mind-brain paradox through novel biophysics
Chris King
The Fractal Maximum-Power Evolution of Brain, Mind, and Consciousness
Larry Vandervert
The Fractal-Like Roots of Mind: A tutorial in direct access
Maxim I. Stamenov
Chaotic Dynamics and the Development of Consciousness
John R. Van Eenwyk
Subject Index"
Research Interests:
"This volume contains selected contributions to the interdisciplinary symposium on 'Models of Meaning' held in Varna, September 25-28, 1988, under the auspices of the Institute of the Bulgarian Language of the Bulgarian Academy of... more
"This volume contains selected contributions to the interdisciplinary symposium on 'Models of Meaning' held in Varna, September 25-28, 1988, under the auspices of the Institute of the Bulgarian Language of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. The aim of the meeting was to broaden the horizons of meaning research and the modeling of linguistic semantics, with contributions centering on the appropriate modeling of lexical, syntactic, and textual-semantic representations. The papers challenge some basic notions of semantics and reveal two main avenues of development in contemporary investigations. One is toward broadening the scope of investigativeness, the second is toward a greater domain-specificity as expressed in a greater sensitivity to pragmatics and meta-pragmatic concerns.
Table of Contents
Preface
Introduction
PART 1: Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Meaning
Traces of Meaning and Reference: Phenomenological and Hermeneutical Explorations
Calvin O. Schrag
Meaning Prior to the Separation of the Five Senses
Eugene T. Gendlin
Model-Making Mind: Model of Meaning
Roland Fischer
Perceptual Meaning and the Holoworld
Gordon G. Globus
Consciousness and the Cognitive Psychology of Meaning
Harry T. Hunt
The Body of Discourse
Pierre Solie
Models of Interpretation
Marcelo Dascal
Word Meaning, Imagery and Action
Johannes Engelkamp
Meaning-Constellating Processes in Experientially Defined Human Events
Gayle Privette and Charles M. Bundrick
Movement Metaphors: Linking Theory and Therapeutic Practice
Varda Dascal
Relationship between Meaning and Representation: An Experimental Approach
Mukesh J. Patel
The Semantics of Emotion Words: A Comparison of Three Taxonomies
Christine Storm and Thomas Storm
Meaning and Semantic Power: Glimpses of the Philosophy of Śakti-Vāda
Plamen Gradinarov
Meaning, Perspective, and the Social Construction of Reality
Fred Eidlin
Philosophy of Language without Meaning, and without… Language
Nikolay Milkov
PART II: Toward Broadening the Scope of Linguistic Semantics
Linguistic Relativity and Semantic Research
Stefana Dimitrova
The Pragmatics of Semeiosis
Jacob L. Mey
Integrational Semantics: An Integrative View of Linguistic Meaning
Hans-Heinrich Lieb
Sentence Type, Sentence Mood and Illocutionary Type
Ferenc Kiefer
Some Considerations on the Explicitness and Completeness of Semantic Descriptions
Franz Hundsnurscher
Linguistic Meaning and Semantic Interpretation
Petr Sgall and Eva Hajičová
The Problem of Literal Meaning
Edda Weigand
An Outline of Aspectuality in English within a Compromise Linguistic Model
Andrei Danchev
Semantic ‘Oppositions’: (Animacy)
Maya Pencheva
Semantic Similarity and Opposition: Methods of Establishment and Measurement
Elena Todorova
Semantic Elements in Machine Translation
Makoto Nagao
Situation Semantics Analysis of Some Nominals in Bulgarian
Radoslav Pavlov and Rusanka Lukanova
On Conventions and Contracts
Peter Stockinger
Tense Meaning and Pragmatics
Andrei Stoevsky
Ordinary Misunderstanding
Elda Weizman and Shoshana Blum-Kulka
Theses for an Ethnopragmatics
Petko Staynov, Vasil Garnizov and Angel Angelov
Lexical Meaning from Synchronic and Diachronic Points of View
Ivan Duridanov
Are There, from a Semantic Point of View, Proper Names Based on Mass-Names?
Roland Harweg
Pānini’s View of Meaning and its Western Counterpart
Johannes Bronkhorst
Buddhist Tantra and Lexical Meaning
Alex Wayman
In Praise of Wholeness
Maxim I. Stamenov
Types of Semantic Relations between Noun Groups in Binominative Sentences
Kornelia Ilieva
Towards an Updated Model of the Linguistic Sign
Julian Konstantinov
Meaning and Explicative Interpretation as Research Objects
János Sánder Petöfi
Natural Text Processing and Text Meaning
Robert E. Longacre
Is Interpretation an Illusion
Roger Van de Velde
Subject Index"
Table of Contents
Preface
Introduction
PART 1: Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Meaning
Traces of Meaning and Reference: Phenomenological and Hermeneutical Explorations
Calvin O. Schrag
Meaning Prior to the Separation of the Five Senses
Eugene T. Gendlin
Model-Making Mind: Model of Meaning
Roland Fischer
Perceptual Meaning and the Holoworld
Gordon G. Globus
Consciousness and the Cognitive Psychology of Meaning
Harry T. Hunt
The Body of Discourse
Pierre Solie
Models of Interpretation
Marcelo Dascal
Word Meaning, Imagery and Action
Johannes Engelkamp
Meaning-Constellating Processes in Experientially Defined Human Events
Gayle Privette and Charles M. Bundrick
Movement Metaphors: Linking Theory and Therapeutic Practice
Varda Dascal
Relationship between Meaning and Representation: An Experimental Approach
Mukesh J. Patel
The Semantics of Emotion Words: A Comparison of Three Taxonomies
Christine Storm and Thomas Storm
Meaning and Semantic Power: Glimpses of the Philosophy of Śakti-Vāda
Plamen Gradinarov
Meaning, Perspective, and the Social Construction of Reality
Fred Eidlin
Philosophy of Language without Meaning, and without… Language
Nikolay Milkov
PART II: Toward Broadening the Scope of Linguistic Semantics
Linguistic Relativity and Semantic Research
Stefana Dimitrova
The Pragmatics of Semeiosis
Jacob L. Mey
Integrational Semantics: An Integrative View of Linguistic Meaning
Hans-Heinrich Lieb
Sentence Type, Sentence Mood and Illocutionary Type
Ferenc Kiefer
Some Considerations on the Explicitness and Completeness of Semantic Descriptions
Franz Hundsnurscher
Linguistic Meaning and Semantic Interpretation
Petr Sgall and Eva Hajičová
The Problem of Literal Meaning
Edda Weigand
An Outline of Aspectuality in English within a Compromise Linguistic Model
Andrei Danchev
Semantic ‘Oppositions’: (Animacy)
Maya Pencheva
Semantic Similarity and Opposition: Methods of Establishment and Measurement
Elena Todorova
Semantic Elements in Machine Translation
Makoto Nagao
Situation Semantics Analysis of Some Nominals in Bulgarian
Radoslav Pavlov and Rusanka Lukanova
On Conventions and Contracts
Peter Stockinger
Tense Meaning and Pragmatics
Andrei Stoevsky
Ordinary Misunderstanding
Elda Weizman and Shoshana Blum-Kulka
Theses for an Ethnopragmatics
Petko Staynov, Vasil Garnizov and Angel Angelov
Lexical Meaning from Synchronic and Diachronic Points of View
Ivan Duridanov
Are There, from a Semantic Point of View, Proper Names Based on Mass-Names?
Roland Harweg
Pānini’s View of Meaning and its Western Counterpart
Johannes Bronkhorst
Buddhist Tantra and Lexical Meaning
Alex Wayman
In Praise of Wholeness
Maxim I. Stamenov
Types of Semantic Relations between Noun Groups in Binominative Sentences
Kornelia Ilieva
Towards an Updated Model of the Linguistic Sign
Julian Konstantinov
Meaning and Explicative Interpretation as Research Objects
János Sánder Petöfi
Natural Text Processing and Text Meaning
Robert E. Longacre
Is Interpretation an Illusion
Roger Van de Velde
Subject Index"