The Deuteronomic roots of postexilic prophetic eschatology in Malachi

In this article, the promises of judgement and restoration in Deuteronomy 4:25–31; 28:15–68; 30:1–10 are compared with the eschatological prophecies in Malachi 2:17–3:24 about the Day of the Lord. The conclusion is that Malachi’s eschatology can be understood against the background of the history of fulfilment of these promises as envisioned in the Torath Mosheh in Deuteronomy. The rhetorical nature of Moses’ speeches is taken into consideration, indicating their communicative intent to persuade the people to take the promise of judgement seriously and to return to God in compliance with Mosaic teachings in order to avert it. But even beyond judgement, restoration is promised as well, indicating the positive intent of judgement preaching. The purpose of the announcement of judgement is to delay its fulfilment; its irrevocability only shows when the response to the teachings of Moses is persistently negative. The promises of judgement are not meant to be understood as prognostications to be fulfilled within a predetermined time frame. They are delay-intended, and hence avertible. These features of Mosaic teaching in Deuteronomy can be identified in Malachi’s eschatology which is shaped by divine judgement but is delay-intended and in compliance with the Mosaic teachings in Deuteronomy, theocentric and temple-based.Contribution: The purpose of this article is to contribute towards a theological reading of Malachi in the context of the metanarrative of the Old Testament (OT) Scriptures.

Defining turn taking in intervention for young children with autism: A review of the literature

Turn taking is a form of preverbal, dyadic, reciprocal communication that may support key areas of development, such as language and joint attention, and may serve different functions depending on each communicative partner’s intent. As such, it has been incorporated in interventions targeting various outcomes in young children with autism. However, there is inconsistency in how researchers define turn taking and explorations on how turn taking is defined across these interventions have not yet been reported in the current literature. Therefore, the purpose of this review was to investigate how turn taking is operationally defined based on communicative intent in the current literature on interventions for young children with autism and to explore additional intervention content to provide fuller context to how turn taking has been promoted. A search was conducted across databases to identify intervention studies for young children with autism that incorporated an embedded turn-taking component. Peer-reviewed articles were then coded based on turn-taking communicative intent, and additional intervention content was categorized. Findings across 14 studies indicate variability among turn-taking definitions both in communicative function and form. The results also reveal that turn taking has been promoted through different intervention approaches that incorporate diverse agents, settings, and methodology. Researchers and practitioners should consider specificity and clarity when defining turn taking to most optimally meet the developmental needs of young children with autism in future interventions.

Frontoparietal, Cerebellum Network Codes for Accurate Intention Prediction in Altered Perceptual Conditions

Integrating and predicting the intentions and actions of others are critical components of social interactions, but the behavioral and neural bases of such mechanisms under altered perceptual conditions are poorly understood. In the present study, we recruited expert violinists and age-matched controls with no musical training and asked them to evaluate simplified dynamic stimuli of violinists playing in a piano or forte communicative intent while undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging. We show that expertise is needed to successfully understand and evaluate communicative intentions in spatially and temporally altered visual representations of musical performance. Frontoparietal regions—such as the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and the inferior parietal lobule and sulcus—and various subregions of the cerebellum—such as cerebellar lobules I-IV, V, VI, VIIb, VIIIa, X—are recruited in the process. Functional connectivity between these brain areas reveals widespread organization, particularly in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, inferior frontal gyrus, inferior parietal sulcus and in the cerebellum. This network may be essential to successfully assess communicative intent in ambiguous or complex visual scenes.

Biological and Acoustic Sex Differences in Rat Ultrasonic Vocalization

The rat model is a useful tool for understanding peripheral and central mechanisms of laryngeal biology. Rats produce ultrasonic vocalizations (USVs) that have communicative intent and are altered by experimental conditions such as social environment, stress, diet, drugs, age, and neurological diseases, validating the rat model’s utility for studying communication and related deficits. Sex differences are apparent in both the rat larynx and USV acoustics and are differentially affected by experimental conditions. Therefore, the purpose of this review paper is to highlight the known sex differences in rat USV production, acoustics, and laryngeal biology detailed in the literature across the lifespan.

Can Turn-Taking Highlight the Nature of Non-Verbal Behavior: A Case Study

The present research explores non-verbal behavior that accompanies the management of turns in naturally occurring conversations. To analyze turn management, we implemented the ISO 24617-2 multidimensional dialog act annotation scheme. The classification of the communicative intent of non-verbal behavior was performed with the annotation scheme for spontaneous authentic communication called the EVA annotation scheme. Both dialog acts and non-verbal communicative intent were observed according to their underlying nature and information exchange channel. Both concepts were divided into foreground and background expressions. We hypothesize that turn management dialog acts, being a background expression, co-occur with communication regulators, a class of non-verbal communicative intent, which are also of background nature. Our case analysis confirms this hypothesis. Furthermore, it reveals that another group of non-verbal communicative intent, the deictics, also often accompany turn management dialog acts. As deictics can be both foreground and background expressions, the premise that background non-verbal communicative intent is interlinked with background dialog acts is upheld. And when deictics were perceived as part of the foreground they co-occurred with foreground dialog acts. Therefore, dialog acts and non-verbal communicative intent share the same underlying nature, which implies a duality of the two concepts.

Miracula s. Willehadi: Prospects for Studying “Unreliable” Sources

The article deals with the heuristic potential of early medieval collections of saints' miracles (libri miraculorum, miracula) which are rarely studied in anthropologically oriented historiography, because they are literary fiction and, unlike the 12—17th century miracula, cannot serve as sources for studying folk piety or everyday life. Using the example of St. Willehadi's miracles (Miracula s. Willehadi, 860—865) by Bishop Ansgar of Bremen, the article analyzes the possibility of involving texts considered “unreliable” in terms of the facts described in them, within the framework of the cognitive theory of communication. The approach to the miraculous text as a message containing meaning-generating representations, which have a distinctly expressed communicative intent, allows to reassess its content, which in traditional studies is usually devalued as “hagiographic topics”, and to establish the pragmatic function of the text (causa scribendi), which is not always limited to the proof of the sanctity of the hero.

Communicative particles as means of representing actual information in literary discourse in English, Spanish and Russian

This article examines one of the issues of fiction discourse and communicative syntax that has not yet been sufficiently studied, i.e. the role of limiting particles in the communicative and syntactic organization of a sentence in the English, Spanish and Russian literary discourse. These particles are considered with rhetorical means which are of particular importance in literary discourse. Various lexical and syntactic constructions can be used as rhetorical means (for example, word order, lexical repetitions, inversion, etc.), as well as literary figurative forms. It is worth noting that one of the relatively understudied issues of actual syntax remains the question of communicative pragmatic functions of limiting particles, which occupy a special place in the system of linguistic means of expressing the actual division in literary discourse, and their role in the communicative and syntactic organization of a sentence in the English, Spanish and Russian languages. Communicative (actual) division is one the most important aspects of the utterance which marks, according to the particular speech situation and communicative and pragmatic intentions, logical parts of the utterance – theme and rheme, determining the meaning of the utterance as a speech unit.Actual division is seen as an individual speech act, relating to a particular situation and defined by the communicative intent of the speaker, as a phenomenon that is not subject to standardization and generalization. Several methods of actualization are simultaneously involved in forming the communicative (actual) division of a sentence, some of them being the main and others being auxiliary means which can replace, supplement or reinforce each other. Thus, each language has a fairly rich system of communication-oriented means that have received a stable and standardized character, designed specifically for expressing the communicative division of a sentence and providing the speaker (writer) an opportunity to choose the necessary ways of its implementation in accordance with a specific speech situation and the purpose of the utterance.

Frontoparietal, cerebellum network codes for accurate intention prediction in altered perceptual conditions

Integrating and predicting intentions and actions of others are crucial components of social interactions, but the behavioral and neural underpinnings of such mechanisms in altered perceptual conditions remain poorly understood. We demonstrated that expertise was necessary to successfully understand and evaluate communicative intent in spatially and temporally altered visual representations of music plays, recruiting frontoparietal regions and several sub-areas of the cerebellum. Functional connectivity between these brain areas revealed widespread organization, especially in the cerebellum. This network may be essential to assess communicative intent in ambiguous or complex visual scenes.