Abstract Traditionally, spiritual experiences have been considered «ineffable», but metaphors per... more Abstract Traditionally, spiritual experiences have been considered «ineffable», but metaphors pervade the representations of certain concepts of the transcendental in people's attempts to talk about such abstract ideas. Whether it be during the description of a vision or simply talking about morality, people use conceptual metaphors to reason and talk about these concepts. Many representations of God, spirits or the afterlife are culturally based, but whereas some may differ based on individual experiences, others seem to have a more ...
I will explore some of my conclusions concerning conceptual metaphors collected during a series o... more I will explore some of my conclusions concerning conceptual metaphors collected during a series of interviews, in particular with two Christian street preachers. The data includes speech, gesture, and commented drawings of God, themselves and paradise. Some of the metaphors analyzed are: metaphors for God (FATHER, SHEPHERD, LOVER, etc); GOOD/GOD IS UP; BAD IS DOWN; STRICT FATHER vs. NURTURING PARENT; MORAL ACCOUNTABILITY. This data demonstrates that the more entrenched a frame of mind is, ...
AbstrAct Religion plays a crucial role in the way one conceives and perceives oneself and oneself... more AbstrAct Religion plays a crucial role in the way one conceives and perceives oneself and oneself respect to the world. Some people will admit that they need to construct their personhood actively, but with the help of God, and divinity is often viewed as a proxy agent (eg Saint ...
Abstract Traditionally, spiritual experiences have been considered «ineffable», but metaphors per... more Abstract Traditionally, spiritual experiences have been considered «ineffable», but metaphors pervade the representations of certain concepts of the transcendental in people's attempts to talk about such abstract ideas. Whether it be during the description of a vision or simply talking about morality, people use conceptual metaphors to reason and talk about these concepts. Many representations of God, spirits or the afterlife are culturally based, but whereas some may differ based on individual experiences, others seem to have a more ...
I will explore some of my conclusions concerning conceptual metaphors collected during a series o... more I will explore some of my conclusions concerning conceptual metaphors collected during a series of interviews, in particular with two Christian street preachers. The data includes speech, gesture, and commented drawings of God, themselves and paradise. Some of the metaphors analyzed are: metaphors for God (FATHER, SHEPHERD, LOVER, etc); GOOD/GOD IS UP; BAD IS DOWN; STRICT FATHER vs. NURTURING PARENT; MORAL ACCOUNTABILITY. This data demonstrates that the more entrenched a frame of mind is, ...
AbstrAct Religion plays a crucial role in the way one conceives and perceives oneself and oneself... more AbstrAct Religion plays a crucial role in the way one conceives and perceives oneself and oneself respect to the world. Some people will admit that they need to construct their personhood actively, but with the help of God, and divinity is often viewed as a proxy agent (eg Saint ...
I will explore some of my conclusions concerning conceptual metaphors collected during a series o... more I will explore some of my conclusions concerning conceptual metaphors collected during a series of interviews, in particular with two Christian street preachers. The data includes speech, gesture, and commented drawings of God, themselves and paradise. Some of the metaphors analyzed are: metaphors for God (FATHER, SHEPHERD, LOVER, etc); GOOD/GOD IS UP; BAD IS DOWN; STRICT FATHER vs. NURTURING PARENT; MORAL ACCOUNTABILITY. This data demonstrates that the more entrenched a frame of mind is, ...
The web has long since moved out of the IT and design departments and become a pervasive communic... more The web has long since moved out of the IT and design departments and become a pervasive communications medium. As a result, top-notch minds from other disciplines have begun to help make it more robust, vibrant and just plain useful than before.
Dr. Evola has one of these minds. He’s applying it to the web in part by teaching a course on web standards at the College of Letters and Philosophy at the University of Palermo, Italy. Dr. Evola’s linguistics background gives him a fresh perspective on web standards:
The first lessons deal with the “need” for XHTML and CSS, moving towards a more advanced knowledge of CSS1 and CSS2, keeping in mind that standards means nothing less than “speaking correctly” with our target.
Read the rest of the WaSP Education Task Force’s excellent interview for more from a linguist turned standardista.
Cognitive Linguistics as an enterprise provides new theoretical and methodological instruments in... more Cognitive Linguistics as an enterprise provides new theoretical and methodological instruments in understanding the relationship between people’s thoughts and the language they use. Spiritual and religious experiences (particularly the ones involving some type of revelation from or communication with a transcendent being) are especially interesting since they involve some type of external, physically invisible force or agent, contributing an “ineffable” quality to the phenomenon. However, people can and do describe such events, and metaphors and blends pervade the representations of certain concepts of the transcendental when attempting to talk about such abstract ideas. One of the main tenants of Cognitive Linguistics is that people’s views about themselves and the world around them are deeply rooted in their conceptual systems, created by their experiences and their bodily interactions with the world, whether they be physical, psychological or social. People who practice spirituality reach certain states by means of personal or collective rituals, such as prayer, meditation, and bodily procedures involving discipline, as is the case of fasting or re-understanding pain. When they then communicate certain religious and spiritual concepts, they are revealing a great deal about themselves and their world and the way they interact with it. Concepts dealing with people’s system of beliefs are very “meaningful” for the individual, and the more entrenched a frame of mind is, the less plastic it is, a fact confirmed by the neurosciences which claim that it is difficult to break down and reconstruct certain synaptic structures of the brain. But how do people who have had such awesome experiences represent these supernatural encounters and their states of being? What is the relationship between the concepts of body and soul in devotees who torture their bodies, who have out of body experiences or who describe a body possessed by other spirits? What does the language they use say about the individuals’ concept of themselves and their world? I will present some of my own research data containing conceptual metaphors and blends collected in various sacred texts and during a series of interviews of people who claim to have had such supernatural experiences. The data includes linguistic expressions as well as gesture. Moreover, the interviewees were asked to draw on paper certain experiences of spiritual nature and then to describe their pictures. My investigation will try to shed new light on the phenomenology of spiritual experiences and personhood, using cognitive linguistics as a prime tool of analysis.
Ancient Jewish teaching circa selfhood was quite holistic. The Hebrew word nefeš is often transla... more Ancient Jewish teaching circa selfhood was quite holistic. The Hebrew word nefeš is often translated as “soul” but also means “body”, whereas Paul clearly distinguishes the two, talking about a co-existence, “concupiscence”, and the necessity of dominating the body to exalt the spirit. I will examine the semantic changes in words dealing with body and soul, and how Paul’s authority eventually influenced the Western world’s way of reasoning about such concepts.
See also "Multimodal Semiotics of Spiritual Experiences: Representing Beliefs, Metaphors, and Act... more See also "Multimodal Semiotics of Spiritual Experiences: Representing Beliefs, Metaphors, and Actions", in Fey Parrill, Vera Tobin, and Mark Turner (eds.) (2010). Form, Meaning, and Body. Stanford: CSLI. pp. 41-60.
“Evoluzione” è una parola usata ormai frequentemente dall’uomo comune nonché in tutte le discipli... more “Evoluzione” è una parola usata ormai frequentemente dall’uomo comune nonché in tutte le discipline, umanistiche e scientifiche. Culturalmente radicata, è diventata una metafora potente. Una definizione corrente è “sviluppo lento e graduale; svolgimento da una forma a un’altra, generalmente più completa e perfetta” (Garzanti). In questi termini non si parla soltanto dell’evoluzione biologica dell’uomo, ma anche dell’evoluzione del linguaggio, della società, della cognizione umana – a prescindere da un’effettiva conoscenza delle teorie evoluzionistiche. L’evoluzione, in quanto teoria biologica, rimanda quasi automaticamente alla teoria di Darwin, il quale, tuttavia, ha usato il termine solo una volta, nel paragrafo finale del suo celeberrimo L’origine delle specie (1859). Nel concetto di evoluzione è comunemente implicato il passaggio da una specie “primitiva” ad una specie “progredita”, più avanzata o sofisticata e strutturalmente più complessa. Nei suoi scritti, Darwin preferiva parlare di “discendenza con modificazioni” anziché di “evoluzione”, termine usato invece da Bonnet (1762) nella sua teoria dell’homunculus, proprio perché portatore della valenza semantica di “progresso”, non presente nella teoria che Darwin proponeva. Infatti, per quest’ultimo “evoluzione” ha più a che fare con il cambiamento (x --> y) che con il progresso (x --> x+1). L’idea che il concetto di evoluzione abbia a che fare con quello di progresso è in realtà posteriore: nell’accezione più comune del termine è presente l’idea di una temporalità lineare, nella quale l’hic et nunc è visto come la massima compiutezza dello sviluppo, della complessità e della “modernità”, e il passato è visto da un punto di vista situato in un setting storico del presente (antropo-, etno-, euro-, ego-centrico etc), in un’opposizione binaria tra “adesso” e “allora”, tra “noi” e “loro”, tra “progredito” e “primitivo”. Eppure l’evoluzione, in senso stretto, non è teleologica e non c’è un “avanti” o un “indietro”, c’è solo un cambiamento causato dall’adattamento nell’ecosistema in cui l’essere storico si trova. Evoluzione non è necessariamente sinonimo di ottimizzazione (chi può dire che la “prossima generazione” sarà migliore?). La mia ipotesi è che questa metafora (linguaggio) influenza il nostro modo di concepire e ragionare circa un oggetto (pensiero). Anticipando qualche dato, mi avvalgo delle discipline linguistiche, nell’ambito delle quali si parla dell’evoluzione non solo del linguaggio, ma anche della lingua. Ad esempio l’idea che una lingua sia meno complessa sintatticamente, come nel caso della lingua dei Pirahã del Sudamerica, ha generato il giudizio di “primitivismo” nei confronti del popolo che la parla da parte soprattutto di alcuni filochomskyiani e altri1. In altre scienze sociali, alcune manifestazioni culturali, come l’arte, vengono intese come “primitive” o “moderne”, oppure si parla di evoluzione di generi letterari. La dimostrazione forse più eclatante di questo antropocentrismo riguarda il problema del genere Homo, in cui l’avvento dell’Uomo Anatomicamente Moderno si fa coincidere con la nascita della cultura, utilizzando un doppio standard di modernità, visto che Neandertal fu probabilmente molto più simile a noi di quanto si tende a pensare. L’utilizzo dell’idea di evoluzione come metafora può essere estremamente potente nell’ambiente accademico, ma occorre prestare attenzione alle sue possibili implicazioni. Il mio intento è quello di analizzare questa metafora usata comunemente all’interno delle varie discipline dal punto di vista della linguistica cognitiva (frames e metafore concettuali), mettendo in evidenza come il concetto target eredita delle implicazioni che emergono a causa delle qualità proprie del concetto source, per dimostrare che il modo in cui avviene il framing del concetto condiziona sovente la metodologia di studio, nonché la tassonomia applicata all’oggetto studiato.
This paper investigates a linguistic phenomenon generally and generically described as an ethical... more This paper investigates a linguistic phenomenon generally and generically described as an ethical dative. In particular, we focus on those second-person non-lexical datives in French and Italian used to draw the attention of the addressee on the event narrated, where the second-person dative referent can be aptly paraphrased as:“I'm telling you (that) P”,“you should keep in mind that P”. For example:
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Papers by Vito Evola
Dr. Evola has one of these minds. He’s applying it to the web in part by teaching a course on web standards at the College of Letters and Philosophy at the University of Palermo, Italy. Dr. Evola’s linguistics background gives him a fresh perspective on web standards:
The first lessons deal with the “need” for XHTML and CSS, moving towards a more advanced knowledge of CSS1 and CSS2, keeping in mind that standards means nothing less than “speaking correctly” with our target.
Read the rest of the WaSP Education Task Force’s excellent interview for more from a linguist turned standardista.
Vedi anche : http://rwth-aachen.academia.edu/VitoEvola/Papers/200284/Evoluzione_cambiamento_e_progresso_Tra_metafora_e_frame