Semiotics is one of the theories of reading literary texts.  This theory systematically studies the causes and factors involved in the process of production and interpretation of the signs. One of the main topics in semiotics deals with implicit meaning wherein the scholars examine the implied significance of the signs in addition to their explicit significance. Sadegh Chubak’s Tangsir is one o...

This paper explores the relationship between cultural knowledge and the specific meaning of a pronominal adverb in legal English where Chinese translators need to get the correct translation in their venture into translating the language of law. On the one hand, relying on the relevant legal cultural knowledge functioning as domain-general reference within a community or jurisdiction, tra...

Abstract What Does »Cosmopolitanism« Mean in Japanese? Convergences of Western Conceptions Global Citizenship and Japanese Conviviality from the Perspective Educational Anthropology Based on anthropological assumption that languages express worldviews, paper approaches meaning cosmopolitanism two directions. First, traditions are examined. Anthropological is elaborated as a way thinking emphasi...

Negated statements often carry positive implicit meaning. Regardless of the semantic representation one adopts, pinpointing the positive concepts within a negated statement is needed in order to encode the statement’s meaning. In this paper, novel ideas to reveal positive implicit meaning using focus of negation are presented. The concept of granularity of focus is introduced and justified. New...

OBJECTIVE Our research utilized two popular theoretical conceptualizations of implicit self-esteem: 1) implicit self-esteem as a global automatic reaction to the self; and 2) implicit self-esteem as a context/domain specific construct. Under this framework, we present an extensive search for implicit self-esteem measure validity among different cultural groups (Study 1) and under several experi...

Individualism and collectivism, or self-construal style, refer to cultural values that influence how people think about themselves and their relation to the social and physical environment. Recent neuroimaging evidence suggests that cultural values of individualism and collectivism dynamically modulate neural response within cortical midline structures, such as the medial prefrontal cortex (MPF...

The concept of change simply entails the totality of ways in which a particular entity has grown better and grown worse. Five studies suggest that this is not how people actually understand it for themselves. Rather, when asked to assess how they have "changed" over time, people bring to mind only how they have improved and neglect other trajectories (e.g., decline) that they have also experien...