Language And Body In Place And Space

Drawing on the author's experience as a sociolinguist and a mountain climber, this book shows how the expertise and affect-laden experience of Japanese rock climbers can be illuminated through linguistic methods and theories. Through a detailed investigation of multimodal interaction among climbers, the book explores a number of significant sociolinguistic and linguistic anthropological themes, including spatial frames of reference, intersubjectivity, chronotopic configurations, and poetic formations of talk. In doing so, it presents climbing as a condensed locus of human interactions in which the integrated analysis of semiotic processes brings to light a new set of relationships between humans and their surroundings. Grounded in an extended and focused participation in rock climbing activities and interviews with other climbers, Kuniyoshi Kataoka examines the assemblage of semiotic resources including the language, the body, and the space mediated by their climbing equipment and the surrounding environment. The result is a showcase of interdisciplinary multimodal approaches to climbing discourse analysis in and around the gravity-sensitive zone, ranging from expert climbers' instruction to novices, gossip and narratives on near-death experiences, to a multi-participant discussion of a critical accident. As well as demonstrating how language reflects extraordinary experiences on the vertical plane, the findings also offer a chance to learn more about climbing, which is attracting a growing number of participants and competitors worldwide.

This book examines the emerging problems and opportunities that are posed by media innovations, spatial typologies, and cultural trends in (re)shaping identities within the fast-changing milieus of the early 21st Century. Addressing a range of social and spatial scales and using a phenomenological frame of reference, the book draws on the works of Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty and Don Hide to bridge the seemingly disparate, yet related theoretical perspectives across a number of disciplines. Various perspectives are put forward from media, human geography, cultural studies, technologies, urban design and architecture etc. and looked at thematically from networked culture and digital interface (and other) perspectives. The book probes the ways in which new digital media trends affect how and what we communicate, and how they drive and reshape our everyday practices. This mediatization of space, with fast evolving communication platforms and applications of digital representations, offers challenges to our notions of space, identity and culture and the book explores the diverse yet connected levels of technology and people interaction.

A collaboration between dancer/somatic practitioner Ira Ferris and artist/scenographer Elia Bosshard, SPACE BODY HABIT is a transcription of conversations and experiences that unfolded during a two-week research residency at Frontyard, a multipurpose creative space in Marrickville, Sydney. Set to explore the many ways we perceive, or fail to perceive spaces, the book comprises a series of spatio-somatic and phenomenologically-driven exercises, followed by in-depth discussions on themes as varied as: first impressions and knowing space by heart, body as a space and supremacy of vision, care for spaces and observing spaces from the more-than-human perspective, posture and perception, repetition and choices, comfort and entrapment, sharing spaces with others and dissolving boundaries between spaces, creativity and mental space, language and the agency of spaces, memory and habitual pathways, structures and flexibility, physical and psychological spaces, voids and empty spaces, belonging to a place and knowing others through their spaces, designated spaces and liminal spaces, contracts and trust, boredom and perseverance... With the starting premise that interaction with space is often habitual and perception of space often unconscious, the book explores ways to deepen and enhance our awareness of space and its impact on our day-to-day life. What else might we open ourselves to if we challenge the ingrained relationship to space and inhabit familiar spaces in new ways? The ​​exercises and conversations were inspired and informed by reading texts on space/place and the body, including: Rhythm Analysis by Henri Lefebvre, The Spell of the Sensuous by David Abram, The Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard, The Memory of Place by Dylan Trigg, Bodies of Water by Astrida Neimanis, Escapism by Yi-Fu Tuan, and Bertolt Brecht by Meg Mumford. The authors wish to acknowledge that this research residency and the writing of the book took place on the unceded land of the Gadigal and Wangal people of the Eora nation. Their care of the land, their respect for the lineage, their reciprocity with the place, are to be our inspiration as we find ever better ways to be in spaces and pass them on to others.

Building on the success of the first volume in this series of research on collective and collaborative drawing, this book’s key themes are linked through the concepts of body, space, and place. The location of the body in art has always been central, but the exploration of it here, in relation to place and space, uncovers a wide range of exciting and different contexts, relationships and materials. Space is examined through the practice and theorisation of drawing, through the ongoing artistic practices of the authors, and the writings of Berger and Derrida in relation to making, viewing and understanding the drawing process. Place is examined through unique approaches to considering drawing, through multiple consecutive and site-specific places, through place as a changing and temporal site, and through the idea of the ‘non-place’. The contributors in this volume include academics, artists, dancers, researchers, designers, and architects from across the globe.

This handbook provides a comprehensive overview of spatial configurations of language use and of language use in space. It consists of four parts. The first part covers the various practices of describing space through language, including spatial references in spoken interaction or in written texts, the description of motion events as well as the creation of imaginative spaces in storytelling. The second part surveys aspects of the spatial organization of face-to-face communication including not only spatial arrangements of small groups in interaction but also the spatial dimension of sign language and gestures. The third part is devoted to the communicative resources of constructed spaces and the ways in which these facilitate and shape communication. Part four, finally, is devoted to pragmatics across space and cultures, i.e. the ways in which language use differs across language varieties, languages and cultures.

People constantly talk to each other about experience or knowledge resulting from spatial perception; they describe the size, shape, orientation and position of objects using a wide range of spatial expressions. The semantic treatment of such expressions presents particular challenges for natural language processing. The meaning representation used must be capable of distinguishing between fine-grained sense differences and ambiguities grounded in our experience and perceptual structure. While there have been many different approaches to the representation and processing of spatial expressions, most computational characterisations have been restricted to particularly narrow problem domains. The chapters in the present volume reflect a commitment to the development of cognitively informed computational treatments of spatial language and spatial representation. Therefore the chapters present computational work, empirical work, or a combination of both. The book will appeal to all those interested in spatial language and spatial representation, whether they work in artificial intelligence, cognitive science, cognitive psychology or linguistics.

This new dynamic is used to explain such diverse phenomena as the Iron Gates Mesolithic, mass sherd deposition in pits, the use of anthropomorphic figurines, and the wealth of artefacts found in the Varna cemetery."--BOOK JACKET.