Non‐Arbitrariness in Mapping Word Form to Meaning: Cross‐Linguistic Formal Markers of Word Concreteness

Arbitrary symbolism is a linguistic doctrine that predicts an orthogonal relationship between word forms and their corresponding meanings. Recent corpora analyses have demonstrated violations of arbitrary symbolism with respect to concreteness, a variable characterizing the sensorimotor salience of a word. In addition to qualitative semantic differences, abstract and concrete words are also marked by distinct morphophonological structures such as length and morphological complexity. Native English speakers show sensitivity to these markers in tasks such as auditory word recognition and naming. One unanswered question is whether this violation of arbitrariness reflects an idiosyncratic property of the English lexicon or whether word concreteness is a marked phenomenon across other natural languages. We isolated concrete and abstract English nouns (N  = 400), and translated each into Russian, Arabic, Dutch, Mandarin, Hindi, Korean, Hebrew, and American Sign Language. We conducted offline acoustic analyses of abstract and concrete word length discrepancies across languages. In a separate experiment, native English speakers (N  = 56) with no prior knowledge of these foreign languages judged concreteness of these nouns (e.g., Can you see, hear, feel, or touch this? Yes/No). Each naïve participant heard pre‐recorded words presented in randomized blocks of three foreign languages following a brief listening exposure to a narrative sample from each respective language. Concrete and abstract words differed by length across five of eight languages, and prediction accuracy exceeded chance for four of eight languages. These results suggest that word concreteness is a marked phenomenon across several of the world's most widely spoken languages. We interpret these findings as supportive of an adaptive cognitive heuristic that allows listeners to exploit non‐arbitrary mappings of word form to word meaning.     

Signalling signalhood and the emergence of communication

A unique hallmark of human language is that it uses signals that are both learnt and symbolic. The emergence of such signals was therefore a defining event in human cognitive evolution, yet very little is known about how such a process occurs. Previous work provides some insights on how meaning can become attached to form, but a more foundational issue is presently unaddressed. How does a signal signal its own signalhood? That is, how do humans even know that communicative behaviour is indeed communicative in nature? We introduce an experimental game that has been designed to tackle this problem. We find that it is commonly resolved with a bootstrapping process, and that this process influences the final form of the communication system. Furthermore, sufficient common ground is observed to be integral to the recognition of signalhood, and the emergence of dialogue is observed to be the key step in the development of a system that can be employed to achieve shared goals.     

Martin Heidegger and Russian Symbolist Philosophy

In this paper Russian Symbolist philosophy is represented primarily by Viacheslav Ivanov (1866--1949), but its conclusions are intended to be valid for other philosophers we classify as Symbolist, including Nikolai Berdiaev and S. L. Frank. It is posited that, by comparing Ivanov's cosmology, aesthetics, and anthropology to those of Martin Heidegger, one can reconceive of Symbolist philosophy as an existential hermeneutic. This, it is claimed, can help to identify a common basis among the Symbolist philosophers, and also to place Russian thought in the context of modern European philosophy and vice versa.     

Who will Stir the Water for Us? A Pastoral Retrospective

This essay explores a parish-based pastoral counseling case with a terminally ill woman suffering from crippling memories of childhood trauma. The analysis of the case focuses on the mutual influence arising within relational field, the idealizing transference (Kohut) or archetypal projection (Jung) onto the pastoral caregiver, and the purposeful function of a symbol which arose spontaneously in the work. Recalling the ancient incubation rites of Aesculapius, the article concludes by suggesting parallels for illuminating modern approaches to psychological and religious healing.     

Hearing living symbols and nonliving icons: Category specificities in the cognitive processing of environmental sounds

The neurocognitive processing of environmental sounds and linguistic stimuli shares common semantic resources and can lead to the activation of motor programs for the generation of the passively heard sound or speech. We investigated the extent to which the cognition of environmental sounds, like that of language, relies on symbolic mental representations independent of the acoustic input. In a hierarchical sorting task, we found that evaluation of nonliving sounds is consistently biased toward a focus on acoustical information. However, the evaluation of living sounds focuses spontaneously on sound-independent semantic information, but can rely on acoustical information after exposure to a context consisting of nonliving sounds. We interpret these results as support for a robust iconic processing strategy for nonliving sounds and a flexible symbolic processing strategy for living sounds.     

Religious Symbolism at the Limits of Human Engagement

This article explores the triadic semiotics of C.S. Peirce as a resource for the interdisciplinary dialogue between science and theology. His pragmatic theory of interpretation was explicitly linked to a non-dualistic metaphysics and epistemology, and avoids the temptation to treat religious symbolism reductionistically. This philosophical model can facilitate dialogue across disciplines about questions of ultimate religious significance in a way that overcomes some of the pernicious dualisms that reinforced the popular imagery that science and theology are (at worst) enemies in warfare or (at best) indifferent and irrelevant to one another.