Soquem (Canada)

Abstract This article offers our reply to Wolfgang Teubert. 2021. Embodiment is not the answer to meaning: A discussion of the theory underlying the article by Carina Rasse and Raymond W. Gibbs, Jr. in JLS 50(1). Journey of Literary Semantics 50. 89–106. Teurbert’s article examined discussion of our earlier publication in this journal on metaphorical thinking in people’s literary experiences of J.D. Salinger’s novel “The Catcher in the Rye.” Teubert makes several points about our advocacy of an embodied perspective on literary meaning and interpretation. He argues that literary experience is best characterized in terms of people’s verbalized, reflective statements about the meanings of literary texts. Data from cognitive linguistic analyses and behavioral experiments are less compelling, in his view, because these studies examine embodied metaphors from a discourse-external perspective and mostly focus on people’s fast, mostly unconscious processing of verbal metaphors. Our reply highlights the importance of studying linguistic understanding, and literary experience, along varying time-dimensions, the fact that many linguistic and behavioral studies examine embodied metaphorical thinking in more reflective, social circumstances, exactly as Teubert recommends. Finally, we suggest that looking at literary experience from an embodied perspective is tightly associated with a discourse-analytic point of view. Scholars can never dismiss the reality of embodiment in literary experience because it provides a critical, but not exclusive, constraint on how we express ourselves and enable others to create specific patterns of meaning in the words they read.

A detailed investigation of the dielectric properties of powdered and solid dry rocks in the frequency range of 50 hz to 2 mhz has revealed the following general characteristics: 1) All dry rocks, powdered and solid, show an increase in both the dielectric constant and the loss tangent as frequency decreases and as temperature increases. This dispersion is believed to be due to polarization associated with charge buildup at grain boundaries or at grain imperfections. 2) Dry powdered rocks often show a thermally‐activated relaxation peak with a typical Debye‐relaxation character. This is due to the presence of pyroxene and biotite and may be associated with other minerals. The relaxation peak is not seen in solid rocks, where it is hidden by the low‐frequency dispersion. 3) At high frequencies, the loss tangent approaches a constant value which is frequency independent. This behavior is observed in many dielectrics and may be the result of a distribution of relaxation times.