Past Seminars Recent
Past Seminars 2: From Autumn Term 2017
The Autumn term will start in September, and the seminar will be moved to Friday, 1 to 3 p.m. Because of this change, the locale of the seminar will vary a lot, so please pay attention to the information which will be given below.
Autumn Term Seminars 2017
September 2017- 1/9. 428b. Jordan Zlatev (Cognitive Semiotics): The Sedimentation and Motivation Model in an Ecological Theory of Metaphor.
- 8/9. L303a. Minisymposium: "The Role of Pantomime in Cognitive-Semiotic Evolution"
- 13:00-14:00 Przemysław Żywiczyński and Slawomir Wacewicz (Torun University): Pantomime, turn-taking and the emergence of proto-symbols
- 14:00-15:00 Ines Adornetti, Alessandra Chiera & Francesco Ferretti (University Roma 3): The narrative dimension of pantomime: an evolutionary perspective
- There will be coffee and informal discussion in the corridor in front of H405 afterwards.
- 15/9. H405. Lorenzo Cigana (Copenhagen University). On norms and experience in structural linguistics.
- 22/9. B131 Fakultetsklubben (Note change of local from earlier announced). Michael Ranta (Cognitive Semiotics). General reflections and report on my 6 months scholarship in Chengdu, China — - On Linguistic and Cognitive Relativism: Reflections Based on the Film "Arrival" (2016)
- 29/9. L604. No seminar
- 6/10. L303a. No seminar.
- 13/10. H428b. No seminar
- 20/10. H405. Erik Rynell (Malmö Theatre Academy): Edith Stein’s empathic approach to intersubjectivity
- 27/10. L303a. Bilyana Martinovsky (Gothenburg): Virtual Human Simulation of Awareness.
- 3/11. No seminar. But you are welcome to follow the lecture of the course Mind, Meaning and Communication: Basic concepts and methods of cognitive semiotics
- 10/11. No seminar. But you are welcome to follow the lecture of the course Mind, Meaning and Communication: The phenomenological method
- 17/11. No seminar. But you are welcome to follow the lecture of the course Mind, Meaning and Communication: The cognitive semiotics of cultural evolution
- 20/11. H135b. (Note changed week day): Marianna Bolognesi (Oxford University): VisMet 1.0: A corpus of visual metaphors.
- 24/11. H428b. Junichi Toyota (Graduate School of Literature and Human Sciences, Osaka City University): Ethnolinguistics and the formation of future tense: with particular focus on greetings.
- 1/12. No seminar. But you are welcome to follow the lecture of the course Mind, Meaning and Communication: Pictorial development and evolution – Picture signs and verbal signs
- 8/12. H405. Travis J. Wiltshire (University of Southern Denmark). Examining collaborative cognition by modeling communication sequence dynamics and movement coordination
- 15/12. No seminar. But you are welcome to follow the lecture of the course Mind, Meaning and Communication: The cognitive semiotics of metaphor
- 22/12. No seminar.
- 5/1. No seminar
- 12/1. No seminar
Spring Term Seminars 2018
January 2018- 19/1. Joel Parthemore (Technical University Eindhoven & Skövde Högskola): Assessing Agency, Moral and Otherwise: Beyond the Machine Question
- 26/1. No seminar.
- 29/1, 15.00-17.00. H428b (Note changed weekday and time). Luis de Miranda (University of Edinburgh). Cosmic Anthrobots: Conjecturing Our Mode of Collaboration With Robonauts
- 2/2. LUX C126, 14-16 (Note changed place and time). Christopher Tilley (University College, London): From structuralism to phenomenology and back again: perspectives on Scandinavian rock art.
- Abstract: In this talk I consider ways of understanding rock art from my personal involvement in the field and new perspectives for the future. In particular I stress the significance of an embodied relation to the images and their platial context in relation to an approach stressing the importance of narratives of place in relation to the body and the social rhythms of producing and relating to the carvings as part and parcel of daily life in particular landscapes.
- 9/2. No seminar
- 16/2. Text seminar. We read together some papers representing the approach which Galentucci and others call "experimental semiotics" (much narrower defined than we should do). Anu Vasternius (doctorate student at Cognitive Semiotics) will introduce the seminar.
- "Note that 'experimental semiotics' (as defined by Galanticci et al) uses various experimental and interactive conditions in order to investigate the evolution of language – but in the process, studies the 'semiotic affordances' of all kinds of semiotic systems, including gestures, sounds, pictures and music. So it a field of much significance of cognitive semiotics." (Very pertinent description quoted from Jordan Zlatev)
- To obtain the relevant papers which should be read before the seminar, contact anu.vastenius@semiotik.lu.se
- 23/2 No seminar
- 28/2. H339, 13-15 (Please note changed place and week day). Iraide Ibarretxe-Antuñano (Universidad de Zaragoza): The role of ideophones in the lexicalisation of (caused) motion.
- Abstract: Ideophones are expressive marked linguistic units with a dramaturgic depictive function (Dingemanse 2012). They are described by a number of crosslinguistic structural as well as semantic-pragmatic characteristics (Ibarretxe-Antuñano 2017). Languages, regardless of the size of their ideophonic inventories, possess numerous ideophones to describe (caused) motion events. That is, how an entity moves (Aragonese china-chana ‘walk in small steps’), where the entity moves (English splish-splash), and even who/what moves (Basque kli-kli ‘fly (of insects)’). The main goal of this talk is to provide an overview of the role of ideophones in the lexicalization of (caused) motion events. After a brief introduction to the typological characteristics of ideophones, the talk focuses on the semantics and usage of motion ideophones.
Dingemanse, Mark. 2012. Advances in the Cross-Linguistic Study of Ideophones. Language and Linguistics Compass 6(10): 654–672.
Ibarretxe-Antuñano, I. 2017. Basque ideophones from a typological perspective. Canadian Journal of Linguistics/Revue canadienne de linguistique 62(2): 196–220. doi: 10.1017/cnj.2017.8
- Abstract: Ideophones are expressive marked linguistic units with a dramaturgic depictive function (Dingemanse 2012). They are described by a number of crosslinguistic structural as well as semantic-pragmatic characteristics (Ibarretxe-Antuñano 2017). Languages, regardless of the size of their ideophonic inventories, possess numerous ideophones to describe (caused) motion events. That is, how an entity moves (Aragonese china-chana ‘walk in small steps’), where the entity moves (English splish-splash), and even who/what moves (Basque kli-kli ‘fly (of insects)’). The main goal of this talk is to provide an overview of the role of ideophones in the lexicalization of (caused) motion events. After a brief introduction to the typological characteristics of ideophones, the talk focuses on the semantics and usage of motion ideophones.
- 2/3. No seminar
- 9/3. Diederick Niehorster & Marcus Nyström (Lund University Humanities Lab). Making sense of eye movements.
- We'll talk about how eye movements are used to study information extraction from visual displays, and how people use eye-movements as a communication channel. We'll present original research into 1. what information is used by students when solving math and physics problems, and 2 using eye movements to communicate in a social visual search task. We will also present a look into the future, focusing on how eye movements are relevant for the educational sciences.
- We'll talk about how eye movements are used to study information extraction from visual displays, and how people use eye-movements as a communication channel. We'll present original research into 1. what information is used by students when solving math and physics problems, and 2 using eye movements to communicate in a social visual search task. We will also present a look into the future, focusing on how eye movements are relevant for the educational sciences.
- 16/3. No seminar
- 23/3. No seminar.
- 30/3. Holiday
- 6/4. Peter Skoglund (Archeology, Kalmar), Anna Cabak Redei (Cognitive Semiotics, Lund), Michael Ranta (Cognitive Semiotics, Lund), & Tomas Persson (Cognitive Science, Lund): Do Rock Carvings Tell Stories?Aspects of Narrativity in Scandinavian Petroglyphs
- 13/4. José Manuel Ureña Gómez-Moreno (Departamento de Filología Moderna, Castilla-La Mancha) Tentative suggestions on the psycho-cognitive basis of the mimic octopus’ semiosis.
- 20/4. No seminar
- 27/4. Piotr Konderak (Cognitive science, Lublin). The amalgamated mind: Between function and experience.
- 4/5, 13-16; H140 (Please note changed place and time) Mini-symposium: "Mapping the body across cultures : shared patterns and variations of body representation".
- Shared patterns and variations of body representation in French, Indonesian, and Japanese (Simon Devylder, Misuzu Shimotori, Poppy Siahaan, Soichi Kozai & Christopher Bracks)
- Body parts metaphors in Indonesian, English, and German (Poppy Siahaan)
- The Embodied Motivations for Deep and High Emotion Metaphors in Japanese and Swedish (Misuzu Shimotori, Göteborg University)
- Abstracts
- 11/5, 13-17; H339 (Please note changed place and time)Mini-symposium:"Memory Research and Street Art"
- Reconstructing Bartlett: The serial reproduction of his idea (Brady Wagoner, Aalborg University)
- Cairo post 2011: Collective Memory, urban space, and street art. (Sarah H. Awed, Aalborg University)
- General discussion about Bartlett's work, its relevance to so-called experimental semiotics, and street art.
- 18/5, 10-17; L201 (Please note changed place and time)Mini-symposium: "Enaction, Embodiment and Language"
- Linguistic Bodies and Cognitive Linguistics (Elena Cuffari, Worchester State University, MA, USA)
- Participatory Sense-Making and How We Read Literary Fiction (Yanna B. Popova, Oxford)
- Temporality of Sense-Making in Narrative Interactions (Yanna B. Popova & Elena Cuffari)
- The Phenomenological Semiotic Hierarchy: From Operative to Linguistic Intentionality (Jordan Zlatev, Cognitive Semiotics, Lund)
- Gestures as image schemas and force gestalts (Irene Mittelberg, Aaachen)
- 25/5.Elena Faur (Cluj-Napoca, Roumania):Metaphor and Myth. Are “worldview metaphors” really metaphors?
- 1/6. No seminar.
- 8/6.
Autumn Term Seminars 2018
September 2018- 13/9.Jonathan Schlossberg (The University of Newcastle, Australia):Factors influencing diversity in spatial referencing practices: evidence from Marshallese.
- 20/9. Juan Carlos Mendoza Collazos (Doctorate student at Cognitive semiotics, Lund). Semiotics of design and the notion of agency: the pursuit of cognitive semiotics applications.
- Abstract: The semiotic analysis of artefacts has been a field of study of great interest not only in sociology, archaeology and anthropology, but also for design professions such as industrial design, graphic design and architecture. In this seminar, the notion of agency will be presented in order to introduce a new approach to semiotics of design. The capability of agency is often taken for granted as a property of artefacts. This consideration is phenomenologically misleading. From agentive semiotics (Niño, 2015) we develop the thesis that artefacts do not have agency, and therefore do not have the ability to act or interact with human beings. In addition, artefacts do not signify or communicate by themselves. Agentive semiotics is a new approach to signification strongly based on the notion of agency and it embedded into (and derived from) cognitive semiotics. Unlike traditional semiotic analysis of design, the agentive approach implies focus not on the artefacts themselves, but on acts of production and response between agents, i.e. between designers and users. The main goal of the present project is to close the conceptual-empirical loop of the agentive theory with applications of its theoretical corpus into design practice, showing how theoretical and “applied” cognitive semiotics can intermix.
- 27/9. No seminar
- 4/10. Reading seminar.Agency and agenda
- Following a good discussion last week of the relation between agency and artifacts, and a break this week, we continue with a reading seminar next Thursday, where we will discuss a possible definition of “artifacts”, and the first two chapters of a book that has been important for agentive semiotics: Agenda Relevance by Gabbay & Woods, 2003 (even though they may take a rather too cognitivist perspective).
- 11/10. PHD student day in (cognitive) semiotics
- The basic idea is that PhD students (and their supervisors) in the field of (cognitive) semiotics at Lund and Växjö get to know each other’s work better, as a basis for future collaboration. Each presentation should last about 15 minutes, and present a general outline of the projects, in a way that is comprehensible for a broader audience. A good idea is to include ideas and methods that would like feedback on. We will announce the program to our research seminar, but the last hour, and especially the post-seminar will be limited to the core group.
Welcome to Lund!
Preliminary program
13:00-13:20. Pedro Ata (Linnaeus Univ): Distributed surprise: art and literature as cognitive artifacts
13:20-13:40. Leticia Vitral (Linnaeus Univ): Can Artworks Behave as Models? Diagrammatic Reasoning and the Epistemic Potential of Art
13.40-14:00. Juan Carlos Mendoza Collazos (Lund Univ): The notion of agency, and rethinking the role of artefacts in design semiotics
Break
14:20-14:40 Anu Vastenius (Lund Univ): Cognitive-semiotic determinants for sign order in gestural and pictorial even representations (tentative)
14:40-15:00 Georgios Stampoulidis (Lund Univ): Metaphor and narrative in Greek street art (tentative)
15:00-16:00 General discussion
- The basic idea is that PhD students (and their supervisors) in the field of (cognitive) semiotics at Lund and Växjö get to know each other’s work better, as a basis for future collaboration. Each presentation should last about 15 minutes, and present a general outline of the projects, in a way that is comprehensible for a broader audience. A good idea is to include ideas and methods that would like feedback on. We will announce the program to our research seminar, but the last hour, and especially the post-seminar will be limited to the core group.
- 25/10. No seminar
- 1/11. Trends in metaphor (and other figures): Reports from a conference
- In the past week, three of us (Jordan Zlatev, Simon Devylder, and George Stampoulides) attended and presented talks at an exciting conference in Braga, Portugal, with 140 participants from 27 countries:
http://braga.ucp.pt/ftl4/
Since we were the only ones from Lund, and even Sweden, we decided that it would be a pity if we did not share our thoughts and experiences with colleagues.
So in this seminar we will hold (shortened versions) of our talks, and discuss issues such as: what is a metaphor, and how can we find it in discourse and street art?
- In the past week, three of us (Jordan Zlatev, Simon Devylder, and George Stampoulides) attended and presented talks at an exciting conference in Braga, Portugal, with 140 participants from 27 countries:
- 8/11 Yirong Hu (Guest researcher at the Division of cognitive semiotics): From “Perceptive Semiotics” to “Cognitive Semiotics”: A Discussion on Category of “the World of Meaning” Proposed in Philosophical Semiotics.
- Abstract: The new book Philosophical Semiotics: The Coming into Being of the World of Meaning, by Yiheng Zhao, mainly addresses the way in which “the world of meaning” has come forth and been formed, which unavoidably faces up to the delimitation of the boundary of the world of meaning. The present lecture will explore the concept of the boundary of “the world of meaning” from the following aspects: First, has “the world of things-in-themselves” been “unrecognized” or “unperceived”? Second, does the world of material and the world of meaning countervail each other? Third, how do the world of meaning and “the world of things-in-themselves” affect each other?
This article, in a new academic context, takes into account both “cognitive” and “perceptive” aspects of semiotics: First, a synergy between “cognition” and “perception” exists amid the reconstruction of the relation between “humanities” and “science”. Second, the world of meaning and the world of material supplement each other in the formulation process. Third, “information” as the presence of materiality must be considered as we understand the interface between the world of meaning (also the world of signs) and the world of the things-in-themselves.
- Abstract: The new book Philosophical Semiotics: The Coming into Being of the World of Meaning, by Yiheng Zhao, mainly addresses the way in which “the world of meaning” has come forth and been formed, which unavoidably faces up to the delimitation of the boundary of the world of meaning. The present lecture will explore the concept of the boundary of “the world of meaning” from the following aspects: First, has “the world of things-in-themselves” been “unrecognized” or “unperceived”? Second, does the world of material and the world of meaning countervail each other? Third, how do the world of meaning and “the world of things-in-themselves” affect each other?
- 15/11. Reading seminar:New reflections on the Problem(s) of Relevance(s) by Göran Sonesson
- Abstract: Relevance” is an ordinary language word, which has been put to sundry scholarly uses. Nowadays, the term most commonly evokes the work, along the lines of speech act theory, of Paul Grice and, more in particular, of Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson. Starting out from these theories, Jean-Louis Dessalles has suggested that relevance may account for the evolutionary origin of language. Among those following the phenomenological tradition, the same term rather calls to mind the work of Alfred Schütz, and perhaps, more rarely, some remarks made by Aron Gurwitsch. For linguists, who still remember something about linguistics before Chomsky, the term suggests the structuralist theories of the Prague school, as applied to phonology. In fact, while Schütz talks about relevance systems, the point of the whole endeavour initiated by Sperber & Wilson is to reduce meaning to contingent factors of the given situation. While Schütz as well as Sperber & Wilson treat relevance as something given in the situation, Dessalles presents it as new information. The linguistic definition is often nowadays taken to involve the features , while at least Schütz clearly thinks of relevance as a kind of thematic adumbration. The question then becomes: do all these different uses have anything in common, beyond the employment of the same common sense word? To investigate this, we have to go beyond ordinary language to our common lifeworld, asking which of the three conceptions, if any, accounts for the real phenomenon, if this is actually more or less the same thing in all traditions.
- 22/11: Reading seminar:More readings of recent papers on metaphor
- 29/11: Piotr Konderak (Cognitive science, Maria Curie-Sklodowska University, Lublin). Title to be specified
- 6/12. No seminar
- 13/12. Esa Itkonen (Linguistics, University of Turku). Concerning the role of imagination in linguistics, philosophy and logic.
- Abstract: I argue that imagination, if properly understood, constitutes the basis for philosophical and linguistic semantics as well as for logic, both formal and "natural". The all-important distinction between empirical and non-empirical sciences is determined by the absence vs. presence of normativity in the data (Itkonen 1978, 2008). But on another interpretation, it is determined by what can or cannot be consistently imagined.
- Abstract: I argue that imagination, if properly understood, constitutes the basis for philosophical and linguistic semantics as well as for logic, both formal and "natural". The all-important distinction between empirical and non-empirical sciences is determined by the absence vs. presence of normativity in the data (Itkonen 1978, 2008). But on another interpretation, it is determined by what can or cannot be consistently imagined.
20/12: No seminar