Joost Zwarts, Utrecht University, Intermediate level course, 2024 Winter LOT School, Tilburg
Graphics (diagrams, ‘maps’, networks, pictures, visualizations) play an important role in linguistic semantics, maybe more so than in other fields. They range from the classical square of opposition and Porphyrian trees, through the pictorial diagrams of cognitive linguistics, to modern computer-generated visualizations of large linguistic data sets. This course tries to gives a comprehensive and systematic overview of graphics produced in cognitive, computational, and formal work on meaning. It does so by approaching them as expressions of various visual (meta)languages, with their own grammars, using the insights of current work on the graphical modality in general. Participants will not only gain insight in the structure and use of (semantic) graphics, but also in how those graphics reflect assumptions about the nature of meaning and the way to do semantics. A corpus of over a thousand semantic graphics will be shared with the participants to interact with during the course.
Reading: Tversky, B. (2011). Visualizing Thought. Topics in Cognitive Science, 3(3), 499–535. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1756-8765.2010.01113.x
Topic: General introduction.
Reading: Richards, C., & Engelhardt, Y. (2020). The DNA of information design for charts and diagrams. Information Design Journal, 25(3), 277–292. https://doi.org/10.1075/idj.25.3.05ric
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Topic: The variety of graphics used in semantics and how to classify them.
Reading: Smessaert, H., & Demey, L. (2018). Towards a Typology of Diagrams in Linguistics. In P. Chapman, G. Stapleton, A. Moktefi, S. Perez-Kriz, & F. Bellucci (Eds.), Diagrammatic Representation and Inference (pp. 236–244). Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91376-6_24
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Topic: The role of two very basic building blocks in semantic graphics, in trees, networks, and many other types of graphics.
Reading: Alikhani, M., & Stone, M. (2018). Arrows are the Verbs of Diagrams. Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, 3552–3563. https://aclanthology.org/C18-1301
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