Scalar reasoning is endemic to macroeconomic thought and argumentation. The present article examines the uses of even among economists operating according to incommensurate models of capitalist economies. These economist generate mental spaces built on pragmatic scales (Fauconnier 1975) that, following Israel (2011), are sensitive to two semantic properties: quantity (q-value) and informativeness (i-value). Consistent with Kay (1990), the informative semantics associated with even can be mapped on to a valence axis of good-bad, while quantity semantics can be mapped onto either easy-hard or more-less axes. Rhetorically, the purpose of these scalar mental spaces tends to highlight recalcitrance of an economist opponent, conceding a premise as preparation for positing an argumentum ad absurdum, and in the case of blending to explain the force dynamic (Talmy 2000) properties driving inflation. This essay highlights the range of mental space configurations used in conceptualizing how the economy works.

Few other social technologies and institutions are more consequential to human societies than money. Yet money remains a deeply perplexing phenomenon. On the one hand, it is a pan-human system of valuation, but on the other, it is conventional and variable in its uses. While it is controversial if money instantiates a fully-fledged sign system, it is rife with semiotic capacities. To present an illuminating analysis of money is thus a test case for the Motivation & Sedimentation Model (MSM) of meaning making, with roots in the phenomenology of Husserl and Merleau-Ponty. Using MSM, we analyze two origin accounts of money: the commodity money account evidenced in archaic and classical Greek coinage, and the credit money account exemplified by early findings in Mesopotamia. Both accounts focus on the interactions between the three levels of MSM: the pre-signitive Embodied, the cultural Sedimented, and the interactional Situated levels of meaning and propose different series of "loops" to account for the genesis of money. Despite key differences in the two origins, both imply semiotic processes operating according to motivated, and hence non-arbitrary, conventions developing within institutional formations that ultimately influence present day concepts of money.

How do economists think and talk about contingency? They express shock, but not in the typical sense of being surprised. In fact, mainstream economists build models in which shocking events are expected variables. An investigation of nominal forms in the [x-shock] construction (e.g., "technology shock," "supply shock," or "monetary shock") among economists reveals a steep increase in the late twentieth century. We report on a large-scale empirical investigation of influential economic textbooks, top economic journals, and US Federal Reserve documents. Each corpus shows a steep rise in the frequency of nominal [x-shock] beginning in the 1980s. This quantitative analysis lays the groundwork for a qualitative analysis of the various uses of [x-shock] among economists from different schools. First, the rise of nominal shock typifies a process of de-subjectification in which shock moves from its more direct experiential uses toward a role of abstract causation. Second, the steep rise in usage coincides with the rise of general equilibrium models in some economic schools of thought. These models assume a particular type of force dynamic logic. In response, other schools invoke a contrasting force dynamic logic. These developments in the [x-shock] construction show not only semantic change but also the disciplinary logics consolidating that change. (c) 2024 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).

Echolalia, the echoing of prior speech, is a typical characteristic of autism. Long considered meaningless repetition to be avoided, echolalia may in fact be used functionally in autism. This paper explores the functions of echolalia by children with autism. Based on two prior studies, we designed an elicitation task involving images of 12 professions (teacher) and 12 objects (birthday cake) commonly associated with given conventionalized expressions in Mandarin (e.g., “ sheng ri kuai le! ” ‘Happy birthday!’). Eight Chinese children with autism (mean age: 55.50 ± 8.64) were asked to name and describe these images. All our participants produced a relatively high proportion of echolalia, mostly for naming, description, and topic development, a small percentage being used as conversation maintenance strategy or as cognitive strategy. This indicates that echolalia is often used communicatively in autism speech.

A nagging question for cognitive semiotics is, “What is the relationship between social structure and agency?” Answers to that question are as elusive as they are essential for explaining the social cognitive facets of meaningful interactions. Elusive in the sense that the social sciences have traditionally lacked ontological rigor in the investigation of social structures and their relationship to individuals. Indeed, the very idea of a social structure is a hotly contested ground. Critical in the sense that many participants within the cognitive semiotics programme aim to explain meaning-making as an emergent property of coordinated activities within normative institutions and organizations. This article aims to provide some measure of ontological rigor to social cognitive semiotics from a critical realist perspective as it applies to the semiotics of money and finance.

Abstract An axiom of Per Aage Brandt’s approach to conceptual blending, known colloquially as the “Aarhus model”, is that semiosis only makes sense when grounded in communicative interaction. Here we adopt that approach in relation to the reality of current, daily communication which is increasingly mediated by digital audio-visual technology platforms. We pursue this goal via a small set of case studies that explore how this technology changes and challenges social interaction and how participants exploit and adapt cognitive, embodied, technological, and semiotic resources in creating meaningful, collective, virtual spaces of joint social activity. In so doing, we expand the horizon of inquiry and contribute insights that have relevance for the new media ecology. This application of cognitive semiotic analyses of video meetings confronts the nature of “mediation” and its accomplishment, the status of “virtual spaces”, and “social presence.”

How are we to understand cognitively modern human beings as rhetorical beings? The position taken by the author is that rhetorical theory can and should contribute substantially to the primary research agenda of cognitive science, provided that both cognitive scientists and rhetoricians develop coherent frameworks for solutions to six basic research problems in human cognition. The author explores four issues from the perspectives of a distributed rhetorical theory. He begins with the unit of analysis problem, in which he debates over the boundaries of cognition and argues for an “enactive” and “extended” cognitive theory as most conducive for next generation rhetorical research. He then presents three areas of overlapping interest of cognitive scientists and rhetoricians: attention management, framing, and emotional disposition.

Metaphtonymy is identified as a special rhetoric figure that specifies the interaction between metaphor and metonymy and which is pervasive in literary works. How and why do trainee translators translate metaphtonymy? Using task analysis, semi-structured discourse-based interviews, and a questionnaire survey among 30 master of translation and interpreting (MTI) trainee translators, this study investigates their translation approaches adopted when translating the metaphtonymies in Chinese extracted prose and explores the effects of their choices. It is found that they mainly employed three approaches: omission, modification, and retainment, with omission being the most, and retainment the least frequent. The main factors attributing to each approach range from the prominence degrees and cross-cultural adaptation abilities of the metaphtonymies, rhetorical awareness of translators, and transference competence to their translation knowledge sub-competence. This study suggests that trainee translators should be instructed to systematically construct rhetoric knowledge, and the teaching design should emphasize the competence of trainees of identifying rhetorical devices and their competence of shifting rhetoric between languages.

Money is a human creation arising from organic, technological, and symbolic resources. The complexity of its operations makes it difficult to comprehend. The origins of money can be dated with some accuracy, but the social and symbolic processes that led to this world-changing invention are poorly understood. One of the most persistent misunderstandings that adversely affects modern economic thinking is that money emerged from barter. As will be discussed, the origins of money have more fundamental symbolic, social, and political foundations in statecraft, warfare, religion, and gift-giving. Moreover, money develops among beings capable of considerable flexibility in combining or “blending” ideas from diverse, sometimes incommensurate, domains of knowledge and experience, and specifically among a species for whom institutions—socially constructed habits of thought and action—are ontologically criterial. This chapter aims to provide a foundation for thinking about money as an institutional semiotic system. Topics covered include money and barter; sovereign money; money and gift-giving; money and violence; the money/language analogy; and international monetary exchanges.

Minds are rhetorical. From the moment we are born others are shaping our capacity for mental agency. As a meditation on the nature of human thought and action, this book starts with the proposition that human thinking is inherently and irreducibly social, and that the long rhetorical tradition in the West has been a neglected source for thinking about cognition. Each chapter reflects on a different dimension of human thought based on the fundamental proposition that our rhetoric thinks and acts with and through others.

What makes The Daily Show with Jon Stewart so successful as social and political satire? Rhetorical theorists and critics have identified several mechanisms for satisfying the show's satiric and parodic aim, which include parodic polyglossia, contextual clash, and satirical specificity (Waisanen, 2009). We present a unified account of meaning construction that encompasses these three mechanisms within the framework of blended fictive interaction (Pascual, 2002, 2008ab). Satire results from emergent effects of different conceptual configurations that have to be in place to integrate a pastiche of speech whose provenance originates in different and diverse contexts and genres. The integration of contradictory, conceptually disjointed pieces of discourse under the governing structure of the conversation frame accounts for the show's most conspicuous satirical moments. These imagined interactions highlight facets of the real world for critical commentary. The thick description of an influential Daily Show segment deepens our understanding of contemporary political satire.

Abstract What makes The Daily Show with Jon Stewart so successful as social and political satire? Rhetorical theorists and critics have identified several mechanisms for satisfying the show’s satiric and parodic aim, which include parodic polyglossia, contextual clash, and satirical specificity (Waisanen, 2009). We present a unified account of meaning construction that encompasses these three mechanisms within the framework of blended fictive interaction (Pascual, 2002, 2008a b). Satire results from emergent effects of different conceptual configurations that have to be in place to integrate a pastiche of speech whose provenance originates in different and diverse contexts and genres. The integration of contradictory, conceptually disjointed pieces of discourse under the governing structure of the conversation frame accounts for the show’s most conspicuous satirical moments. These imagined interactions highlight facets of the real world for critical commentary. The thick description of an influential Daily Show segment deepens our understanding of contemporary political satire.

Alfred Hitchcock claimed that suspense arises when viewers have - or believe that they have - privileged information about a forthcoming undesirable event and are powerless to intervene. In Hitchcock’s canonical formulation, then, suspense is a function of information management and audience anticipation. Cognitive approaches follow this line of reasoning, and thus the cognitive literature on suspense has thus been especially concerned what is sometimes called the “paradox of suspense” or the “anomalous experience of suspense”: if suspense involves uncertainty, why should people feel suspense when they know what’s about to happen? In the present study, we think the explanation lies in another aspect of suspense that Hitchcock alludes to but never develops in his own account: namely, the extent to which its suspense seems to be the product specifically of social cognition. That is, it is not merely a matter of tracking information about a sequence of events, but of processing and applying social information, managing multiple perspectives, and ascribing mental states to real and imagined participants in the narrative scene. To explain how suspense emerges from the interaction of narrative conventions and our natural cognitive responses, we will need to look at the contributions of two important cognitive systems that underlie the construction of meaning: (1) joint attention, in which two or more people are both focused on an external object and mutually aware of this shared focus; and (2) conceptual integration, in which elements and vital relations are selectively projected from multiple inputs, and processes of composition, completion, and elaboration give rise to new emergent structure in the blend. Each without the other fails to provide an adequate cognitive model of the phenomenon of suspense as it plays out in real time. Suspense is a product of manipulations of blended joint attentional scenarios. Filmic conventions generate suspense by constructing triangles of joint attention in which the intentions of the filmmaker, or the camera-eye, overtly overpower the agency of the viewer. They engage our natural systems for social cognition while frustrating our desire to complete the joint attentional triangle. We use this model for the analysis of two classic Hollywood films, Hitchcock's Notorious (1946) and Wells's Touch of Evil (1958), and one experimental film, Michael Snow's Wavelength (1967).

I thank Per Aage Brandt (2017) for his commentary, which elaborates on the gift origins of money that was only elliptically alluded to in my own piece. I agree with Brandt’s genealogical argument that giving underlies the social categories of debtor and creditor. This indeed was the point of Graeber’s analysis of credit money, from which my own analysis draws heavily. Brandt’s discussion of the role of priests and the priestly class in the establishment of wealth and credit is well established. In fact, my own claims of the money-as-credit origins of what becomes sovereign (state) money systems is fairly well attested among historians of money, whether conscious of Mauss’s important discussion of gifts or not. Brandt is also correct in emphasizing the role of metallic adornments in the history of money. I caution, however, that it is easy to slip seamlessly from acknowledging the material necessity of monetary “inscriptions” to mistaking the expressive sign of money for its content — a mistake made repeatedly throughout history, with disastrous consequences (such as John Locke’s arguments in the late seventeenth century that send England into a financial tailspin) that persist to this day. This is in part due to the fact that money as a store-of-value has to have some form of materialization, but it is and has always been the case, even as far back as Mesopotamia, that the store-of-value resides in whatever records of debts and credits are being maintained and, importantly, WHO has the authority to create and edit the record. As Brandt points out, the priestly classes historically have been “chartered” with the rights to create and edit the ledger, using precious metals as the preferred medium (for physical and religious reasons). It is not a coincidence, then, that precious metals are a perduring material of the pecuniary interest, but it is also important to emphasize that the evidence for “banking” in the form of cuneiform ledgers appears long before evidence of its metallic avatars (see Werner 2005). I mention this in part to emphasize that a fiat-basis for money is not a consequence of metallic adornments, but rather metallic adornments as coined money are consequences of the fiat-based “banking” operations. Brandt’s account and his response, however, focuses on banking as a “mediational” activity, which dilutes his initial point of priest being the first bankers — banks, both historically and especially now, are institutions that either arrogate or are granted the power to create credit-money — their roles as “mediators” are socially salient constructions, which do not, in fact, capture their real operations. Banking as a function of goldsmithery in medieval England and the high prevalence of bankers from European Jewry (a profession for which they were legally consigned to in some instances) adds to the legend of the mediators as outsiders. But goldsmiths did not lend from their deposits in gold, rather they created “fictional deposits” in the form of promissory notes, a practice that became fully sanctioned in England by the Remedies Act of 1704, at least 400 years after the practices of bank-credit creation appeared on the Thames. The above throat clearing is simply to emphasize that Brandt and I largely agree on the general origins of money. Brandt emphasizes the store-of-value dimension over the unit-of-account dimension; I emphasize the unit-of-account dimension as equally elemental and antecedent to coined money. There are a few points that I wish to register substantive disagreement. I do not doubt that commercial acts and acts of giving can be easily represented by distinct networks, but the commercial network sketched by Brandt does not speak to the issue of money-as-store-of-value (aka, credit) and remains irrelevant to the problem of sovereign money. It merely deepens Fauconnier & Turner’s own account. I, therefore, demur to the claim that “Oakley mistakenly explains how to make more money instead of discussing what money is in the first place” (Brandt 2017: 207). If I wasn’t clear in the article, let me reiterate: money is a storeof-valueand a unit-of-account. My explication of the store-of-value dimension has obvious and general overlaps with Brandt’s view of money as “protection.” Bearers of money have credit and hold a desire to “hoard” that credit (i.e. save). It is the unit-of-account dimension that I seek to focus on with respect to sovereign or state money and the institutional properties that develop therefrom, some of which go back to the beginnings of money-systems in Mesopotamia, others of which developed over the last 500 years with the formalized institution of double-entry bookkeeping, and still some others that have just arrived on the scene. Brandt’s account offers nothing by way of this critical dimension, but it seems that the unit-of-account dimension is precisely what Brandt regards as the basis for “the madness of money” for which he seeks deliverance. If something is inherently “mad,” then

Language is intimately related to interaction. The question arises: Is the structure of interaction somehow mirrored in language structure and use? This book suggests a positive answer to this question by examining the ubiquitous phenomenon of fictive interaction, in which non-genuine conversational turns appear in discourse, even within clauses, phrases, and lexical items (e.g. “Not happy? Money back! guarantee”). The book is based on a collection of hundreds of examples of fictive interaction at all grammatical levels from a wide variety of spoken, written, and signed languages, and from many different discourse genres. Special attention is devoted to the strategic use of fictive interaction in legal argumentation, with a focus on high-profile criminal trials. Both trial lawyers and lay jurors often present material evidence or murder victims as speaking, and express emotions and intentions in conversational terms. The book thus establishes the role of the conversational turn—rather than the sentence—as the basic unit of language, and the role of conversation as a frame that structures cognition, discourse, and grammar.

The ideal of an "authoritative text" is no longer a taken-for-granted assumption among editorial and critical theorists of the literary text. Rather, texts are, and should be thought of as, composites of distributed activities of multiple social agents. This view has many virtues, but it quickly runs up against the deeply entrenched gestaltism of the "underlying work" stance, a perspective that invades some of the most commonplace ways of talking about Anglo-American literary texts. We explain the fundamental tensions that arise from this stance and offer a general ontology of literary artifacts that can account for the ways we habitually conceptualize texts and their effects. We provide a basic cognitive framework for understanding the ontology of the document, in its most generalized form, which can embrace a wide range of practices, literary and otherwise, that have significant implications for understanding editorial, authorial, and readerly behavior.

Abstract Much social cognition and action is dialogical in nature and profitably understood from a second-person perspective. The elemental social roles of “debtor” and “creditor” are of great importance in explaining the structure and history of a wide range of social facts and institutions. Yet these person-level experiences of indebtedness and the mental spaces they engender are not sufficient to account for complex social facts. Sovereign money systems are a leading example where our person-level experiences of exchange lead us astray by actively hindering our ability to grasp money’s macroeconomic functions. This article provides a comprehensive account of money as a distributed cognitive phenomenon. It summarizes and critiques a prior analysis of money as a conceptual blend enabling exchange and subsequently advances an alternative “institutional” blending analysis of money as primarily a store-of-value and unit-of-account. This alternative analysis tracks findings of anthropologists and legal historians of money and banking as well as heterodox economists who make money the centerpiece of their macroeconomic models. The account of money also emphasizes that the underlying logic of sovereign money systems is stubbornly difficult for users of the currency to grasp or accept, as evidenced in a brief televised debate. If money is an instance of institutional blending wherein social structures and their material manifestations have cognitive status, then it recommends a broader argument that human minds themselves are an amalgam of neural assemblies, bodily structures and functions, and environmental structures and arrangements.