Recent research on science education has increasingly focused on the literacy challenges posed by multimodality. While students are required by government mandated syllabi to make a successful translation between different semiotic resources, there still remains a lack of research on the grammars and functionality of the specialized modalities to develop explicit instructions to improve literac...

As Lindley and Srinavasan note regarding film, “Particular cinematic devices can be used to create different connotations or subtextual meanings while dealing with similar diegetic material” [5]. In language, different ‘illocutionary forces’ create different meaning from the same ‘propositional content.’ However, linguistic philosopher J.R. Searle thinks this points not to infinite elasticity o...

Metaphor and simile research has traditionally focused on the projection of content from vehicle to topic, thereby revealing new meaning in the topic. We show that the meaning of vehicles also changes during figurative language understanding. Participants read a poem that likens the temporal self to a snake being divided by a machete, and were asked to draw the snake. Against prototypical snake...

As part of a cross-sectional, quantitative study on adjustment factors in long-term breast cancer survival, 52 women were asked to write in their own words how religious and spiritual factors played a part in their understanding of and coping with this illness. A subsample of 39 women responded to this question. The qualitative method of content analysis was used to define meaning units, descri...

Automatically detecting similar Chinese characters is useful in many areas, such as building intelligent authoring tools (e. g. automatic multiple choice question generation) in the area of computer assisted language learning. Previous work on the computation of Chinese character similarity focused on detecting character glyph similarity while ignored the importance of other character features,...

BACKGROUND Meaning and purpose in life are fundamental to human beings. In changing times, with an aging population and increased life expectancy, the need for health care services and long-term care is likely to grow. More deeply understanding how older long-term care residents perceive meaning and purpose in life is critical for improving the quality of care and the residents' quality of life...

Idioms are used in conventional language twice as frequently as metaphors, but most research, particularly recent work on embodiment has focused on the latter. However, idioms have the potential to significantly deepen our understanding of embodiment because their meanings cannot be derived from their component words. To determine whether sensorimotor states could activate idiomatic meaning, pa...

Coercion effects, including aspectual ones, appear to indicate a modular grammatical architecture, in which the process of composition may add meanings absent in the syntax in order to ensure that certain functors, e.g., the progressive operator, receive suitable arguments (Herweg 1991, Jackendoff 1997, De Swart 1998). In this paper, coercion effects are instead taken as evidence for the existe...