Connotation

Abstract: In this paper we highlight a fundamental aspect of human communication: Most interpersonal communication includes unstated requests for the receiver to respond in a certain way. In addition, this role induction request is most commonly made nonverbally, and speakers are often unaware that they are actually making the request. Furthermore, receivers are often unaware that they are being induced to respond in a certain manner. We will clarify the defi nition of metacommunication (comments about communication) and introduce the new term paracommunication: the summation of nonverbal signs intended to create a response in the receiver. The nonverbal signs may be compared with instruments in an orchestra, whose purpose is to play a song that enraptures the audience. We emphasize the effect on the audience more than the means by which the multiple instruments create their effect. When wading into the muddy waters of linguistic analysis, words can come back to haunt us. For example, we will be drawing lines with words to create categories that may not be sharply delineated. Where does “verbal” end and “nonverbal” begin? Where does “denotation” (the explicit meaning of a communication) end and “connotation” (the implicit meaning of the communication) begin? Clinicians can ill afford journeys into such nuances unless they provide practical cognitive tools that help patients to change. We ask your indulgence as we explore this uncharted terrain because there will be many intellectual loose ends. Our aim is pragmatics—the practical. We are very interested in your comments on the concepts presented in this paper. Please contact us

Abstract: Mountain Urban Landscape Studies is a discipline to research on the formation, evolution and characteristics of the urban landscape in mountainous areas. The author has made systematic research on the basic issues of the subject, including the definition of mountain urban landscape studies, its connotation and denotation, the research scope, research background and significance, research methodology, its relationship with landscape architecture, architecture, city planning and other disciplines.

Abstract: We investigate the problem of understanding the message (gist) conveyed by images and their captions as found, for instance, on websites or news articles. To this end, we propose a methodology to capture the meaning of image-caption pairs on the basis of large amounts of machine-readable knowledge that has previously been shown to be highly effective for text understanding. Our method identifies the connotation of objects beyond their denotation: where most approaches to image understanding focus on the denotation of objects, i.e., their literal meaning, our work addresses the identification of connotations, i.e., iconic meanings of objects, to understand the message of images. We view image understanding as the task of representing an image-caption pair on the basis of a wide-coverage vocabulary of concepts such as the one provided by Wikipedia, and cast gist detection as a concept-ranking problem with image-caption pairs as queries. To enable a thorough investigation of the problem of gist understanding, we produce a gold standard of over 300 image-caption pairs and over 8,000 gist annotations covering a wide variety of topics at different levels of abstraction. We use this dataset to experimentally benchmark the contribution of signals from heterogeneous sources, namely image and text. The best result with a Mean Average Precision (MAP) of 0.69 indicate that by combining both dimensions we are able to better understand the meaning of our image-caption pairs than when using language or vision information alone. We test the robustness of our gist detection approach when receiving automatically generated input, i.e., using automatically generated image tags or generated captions, and prove the feasibility of an end-to-end automated process.

Abstract: The concept ‘social entrepreneurship' is virtually proliferating like a virus, elating and inspiring people in such diverse spheres as politics, the media, the non-profit sector as well as academia. Despite the rather young pedigree of the term, social entrepreneurship today is predominantly construed as a positive sign, a genuine ‘hurray word', so to speak. In an effort to gain a deeper sense of its positive, not to say enthusiastic, connotation as well as its historical evolvement, this book endeavors to investigate the social construction of social entrepreneurship in three distinct contexts: business school teaching, management research and development aid. While shedding light on three areas of knowledge production which have been and still are evidently influential in denoting and circulating the meaning of social entrepreneurship, the objective of this book is not only to reveal that social entrepreneurship may be conceived as a power-based reality construction, but to investigate critically the limitations and totalitarian threats related to prevailing enunciations and to ask whether and how the sign ‘social entrepreneurship' could be extended beyond its current confines. The book is divided into three parts. The first part sheds light on the commodification of social entrepreneurship through management (MBA) education and its determination (and thus delimitation) in the context of management research. The second part is a discursive investigation of development aid practitioners, endeavoring to investigate if and to what extent the lexis of entrepreneurship, and managerialism at large, has come to penetrate the non-governmental sector. The third part suggests novel lines of flight (i.e. meanings) that take into account and counteract the fact that social entrepreneurship is as yet mainly orchestrated by economic rationalities and, by implication, limited in its potentially infinite semantic. Whereas the book trades heavily on philosophy, the three parts also take into account works from other academic traditions, such as, for instance, (social) psychology, (business) ethics and sociology, in order to illuminate and reflect upon social entrepreneurship from various angles and, most importantly, to probe understandings of social entrepreneurship which are new to its hotbed: organization and management science.