The symbolism of liminality

The Liminality of Contemporary Culture

After these lines of Neo, a character in the semi virtual movie The Matrix, I went to my desk to write this paper. The reason is not far to seek. My mind was seeking the possibilities of such worlda world without rules and controls, without borders or boundaries, a world ...where anything is possible. I saw the modern cultural world as the world of immense possibilitieswith conflicts, assimilat...

The Symbolism of Chess

IT is known that the game of chess originated in India. It was passed on to the medieval West through the intermediary of the Persians and the Arabs, a fact to which we owe, for example, the expression "check-mate", (German: Schachmatt) which is derived from the Persian shah: "king" and the Arabic mat: "he is dead". At the time of the Renaissance some of the rules of the game were changed: the ...

Rethinking Symbolism

[The pages numbers are the same as in the original edition]

Sound Symbolism

Sound symbolism is the term for a hypothesized systematic relationship between sound and meaning (Hinton, Nichols, & Ohala 1994). The idea that there might be a non-arbitrary relationship between the physical aspect of a speech signal and its meaning is quite an old idea, dating back at least to the time of Plato who, in his work Cratylus, had Socrates debating with two pupils the issue of whet...

Weaving the symbolism of light