Phraseology “without meaning”: Politics of emptiness

The Meaning of Emptiness and Its Role in Islamic Architecture (Case Study: Historical Houses of Yazd)

In this study emptiness is considered as a transcendental and effective concept that appears in the form and content of things. What is seen as internally present in an entity is existent in the first instance because of the external presence of its opposite. The entity and its opposite are intertwined through the principle of inverse correspondence, a higher level of accord that emerges from t...

Politics Without Pleasure

Terminology, Phraseology, and Lexicography

This paper explores two aspects of word use and word meaning in terms of Sinclair's (1991, 1998) distinction between the open-choice principle (or terminological tendency) and the idiom principle (or phraseological tendency). Technical terms such as strobilation are rare, highly domain-specific, and of little phraseological interest, although the texts in which such word occur do tend to contai...

Recognizing Humor Without Recognizing Meaning

We present a machine learning approach for classifying sentences as one-liner jokes or normal sentences. We use no deep analysis of the meaning to try to see if it is humorous, instead we rely on a combination of simple features to see if these are enough to detect humor. Features such as word overlap with other jokes, presence of words common in jokes, ambiguity and word overlap with common id...

Video, Politics, and Applied Semiotics: Constructing Meaning from Broadcast News

This paper examines the relationship between verbal and visual semiotic cues by analyzing how semiotic cues position speakers interactionally and communicate implicit evaluative messages in one television news story. The paper summarizes an analysis of this news story that my collaborator and I have done based solely on verbal cues (Wortham & Locher, 1996). Then the paper analyzes the visual cu...