The purpose of this research design is to explore the meaning of death for the female adolescent. A qualitative design was used as the method of research. Twelve participants were selected from a snowball sample ten females and two males. Four participants reported witnessing the death of an individual, five reported a moderated death experience in which they were not present but were told after the fact and three reported no significant experience with death. The study indicated relationships and cause of death as among the pre-conditions towards meaning development for the adolescent female. The two main themes derived from the pre-conditions are an understanding of the inevitability of death for themselves and the experience of death as qualia. Consequences to the experience of death include increased emotional tolerance under stress and a perceived increased maturity suggesting resilience in the adolescent female following a loss. Future areas of research are also addressed.

The human motivation for meaning has been a longstanding topic of inquiry, and recent research has begun to investigate how individuals maintain a sense of meaning in life. Given the importance of social connectedness in human life, as well as the role of relationships in providing a sense of meaningfulness, the present investigation explored meaning maintenance within the domain of close relationships. Specifically, a theoretical model for interpersonal meaning maintenance is presented, which proposes that moral actions—particularly forgiveness—are oriented toward restoring relationship quality, and, in turn, meaning in life, in the wake of interpersonal transgressions. The tenets of this model were tested in two studies. Study 1 provided initial evidence for this model by examining dispositional characteristics that are important for one’s relationship (e.g., trait empathy, self-esteem) and provided promising results that support a more specific investigation within the domain of close relationships. Implementing a longitudinal study design, Study 2 examined interpersonal offenses committed by romantic partners over six months, as well as the degree of forgiveness offered by the hurt partner, and the subsequent effects on relationship quality and meaning in life. The results revealed that, as hypothesized, initial levels of meaning in life predicted committing fewer moral offenses against one’s partner and offering more forgiveness when suffering a transgression by one’s partner. Although transgressing against one’s partner did not reduce meaning in life, offering forgiveness increased meaning in life and life satisfaction over time. In addition, relationship satisfaction partially mediated the effects of forgiveness on meaning in life, and self-esteem was found to moderate this mediating relationship. Support for the model of interpersonal meaning maintenance was garnered in two studies. The present investigation was the first to explore how individuals maintain meaning within the domain of close relationships. Implications for the scientific study of meaning, as well as for applications in relationships, are discussed.

Decisive moments and their fleeting experiences are born from an individual’s interaction within a defined physical space. It is here at the intersection of environment and context that my work in site-specific art begins. I endeavor to create an examination of socio-political and environmental issues through a manipulation of materials, thereby altering one’s private, communal, and cultural response to them. My installations are comprised of slip casted multiples which reference the human form. I place these forms in galleries and specific exterior locations, and incorporate materials that are charged with societal discord, such as used motor oil and post-consumer detritus, in order to still the blur of contemporary life. This allows for a contemplative pause that pulls into focus the effect of pursuing our individual wants and desires against the consequences of these pursuits on the larger society and environment.

In this essay, I intend to analyze and respond to criticism directed towards the subjective component of Susan Wolf’s Bi-partite “Fitting Fulfillment View”, criticism directed from Thaddeus Metz, Ben Bramble, and Aaron Smuts. Wolf offers a theory about meaning in life which considers both that the subject should find it meaningful and that the source of this meaningfulness should be objectively valuable. However, critics have argued that a subject’s attitude towards meaningfulness should not affect whether one’s life is meaningful or not. Out of the critics I found promising and responded to I did not find any that seriously threatened Wolf’s theory and, in some cases they even seem to misunderstand Wolf’s claim. In the final section, I raise a question for Wolf’s account that I believe would be interesting to pursue in a further study.

Viktor Frankl published Man’s Search for Meaning in 1946, documenting the horrors of the concentration camps. Based on his prison experience in the camps, Frankl (1984) believed that meaning in life could be found in suffering. The theoretical framework for this research study was based on Frankl’s theory of logotherapy, an extension of existentialism. In today’s society, we can find many parallels to Frankl’s descriptions of suffering in the natural and human-made disasters that have occurred such as the 1999 shooting at Columbine, the levee failure in 2005 following Hurricane Katrina, the floods in the spring of 2011 in the South, and in 2011 the earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear power failure in Japan. The purpose of the present study was to explore if graduate counseling students’ (GCS) meaning in life is related to their crisis experiences.Data collection was completed electronically. Qualtrics™, a web-based service, was used to distribute the researcher-designed survey, Graduate Counseling Student Crisis Experience Questionnaire (GCSCEQ) and the Purpose in Life (PIL) test. Results of this study indicated that there was no relationship between meaning in life and overall experiences, number of experiences, or intensity of GCS’ crisis experiences. Additionally, results indicated that GCS’ crisis experiences and meaning in life are impacted by the category of their disaster experiences, the intensity of their experiences and their age.

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The activity of translating something into a monetary amount – the price - is central to markets. Yet we know remarkably little about the practice of pricing beyond theories of economic rationale or market positioning and, as a construct, price has remained largely within the economists’ domain. This research pushes for and contributes towards the need for more substantive studies of pricing. With particular emphasis on money-meanings, this research applies prior socio-economic research in an examination of discourses of the pricing process in order to better understand pricing as a social and meaning-full activity. In its focus on pricers this research contributes to the call for more studies of supply-side meaning-making within markets, and addresses the consumer-focussed imbalance in previously published price research

Este trabalho tem como objetivo analisar, sob a ótica da Análise de Discurso francesa fundada pelo filósofo Michel Pêcheux, depoimentos produzidos em formação pedagógica de profissionais da educação de uma escola da rede pública estadual localizada na zona sul da cidade de Porto Alegre - RS, ocorrida no segundo semestre de 2015, que contou com 60 (sessenta) participantes entre equipe diretiva, professores e funcionários da instituição. A análise, sendo um estudo de caso de caráter qualitativo, surge a partir do dilema entre “ser ou não ser professor” desde a consideração das formas de sentir, compreender, entender, identificar, enfim, ser-permanecer educador/educadora na instituição escolar, buscando melhor entender os efeitos de sentido da permanência docente na escola, o modo de produção da profissão docente, hoje, e o tipo de pertencimento experimentado pelos educadores. Sob o prisma de estudar a língua como elemento inerente ao sujeito, atravessada pela história, para que se apreenda seu funcionamento enquanto processo significativo, e relacionado à linha de pesquisa Arte, Linguagem, Currículo, área temática Discurso e Docência, que traz como proposta o estabelecimento de interfaces entre educação e linguagem sob uma perspectiva discursiva, juntamo-nos ao projeto Formação de professores, tecnologias de informação e comunicação e autoria, coordenado pela Profª Drª Dóris Maria Luzzardi Fiss – UFRGS, com o intuito de responder algumas questões que nos instigam: Por que os docentes continuam exercendo a “profissão professor”? Que sentidos de (não)permanência são percebidos nos enunciados dos educadores? O que leva os docentes a quererem permanecer nas instituições de ensino, especificamente, dentro da sala de aula? De que modo os docentes permanecem na escola? Que estratégias os professores/as professoras utilizam para permanecer na educação? Percebemos, a partir de gestos de interpretação dos enunciados dos(as) professores(as), o compromisso dos mesmos com determinada memória que associa educação à transformação, à esperança, à docência vivida com objetivos concretos que justificam permanecer no exercício da profissão. A permanência do/da docente pode ser compreendida a partir dos laços que ele/ela cria com seus colegas e seus alunos/suas alunas, laços que estão atravessados por afeto e compromisso epistemológico e social. Talvez se possa especular que a humana docência, assim como é compreendida por Miguel Arroyo e Paulo Freire, possa ser o elemento que está fortalecendo o professor/a professora e garantindo sua aposta na educação. / The objective of this work is to analyze, from the point of view of the French Discourse Anal-ysis founded by the philosopher Michel Pêcheux, testimonies produced in pedagogical for-mation of education professions of a public public school located in the area of the city of Porto Alegre - RS, Occurred in Second half of 2015, which included 60 (sixty) participants among the management team, professors and employees of the institution. An analysis, being a quali-tative case study, arises from the dilemma between "being or not being a teacher" from an Opinion of the ways of feeling, understanding, understanding, identifying, finally, being-to re-main educator / educator in the The school creation, seeking a better understanding of the ef-fects of teacher stay in school, the way of production of the teaching profession, today, the type of belonging experienced by educators. From the perspective of studying language as an inher-ent element of the subject, traversed by history, in order to understand its functioning during the process, and related to the research line Art, Lin-guage, Curriculum, Thematic area Dis-course and Teaching, That Bringing as a proposal the establishment of interfaces between edu-cation and language from a discursive perspective, we join the project Teacher training, infor-mation and communication technologies and authorship, co-ordinated by Prof. Dr. Dóris Maria Luzzardi Fiss - UFRGS, with O To respond to someone who is not an instigator: Why do teach-ers continue to exercise a "professing profession"? What meanings of (non) permanence are perceived in educators' statements? What leads teachers to want to stay in educational institu-tions, specifically within the classroom? How do teachers stay in school? What school of teach-ers do teachers use to remain in education? We perceive, from the interpretations of the state-ments of (as) teachers, their commitment to the memory that associates education at a distance, information, documentation lived with concrete objectives that justify remaining in the exercise of the profession . The permanence of the teacher can be understood from the bonds he / she creates with his / her classmates and their students, ties that are publicly committed, and epis-temological and social commitment. Maybe it's a company that knows the teacher and a teacher and guarantees its commitment to education, by Miguel Arroyo and Paulo Freire, can be the element that is strengthening the teacher and ensuring his commitment to education.

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Doctor of Philosophy(PhD) / There is increasing awareness among linguists that discourse analysis inevitably involves analyses of meanings arising from the combination of multiple modes of communication. The evolving multimodal pedagogic environment for teaching English as a foreign language (henceforth EFL), among other communicative contexts, calls for a social, semiotic, and linguistic explanation. Situated within the theoretical landscape of social semiotics and in the pedagogic context of EFL education, the present study aims to elucidate how linguistic and visual semiotic resources are co-deployed to construe interpersonal meaning in multimodal textbooks. The data drawn upon are eighteen EFL textbooks for primary and secondary schooling, published by People’s Education Press between 2002 and 2006. The research design consists of three complementary sub-studies. First, it investigates the ways in which the semantic regions of ENGAGEMENT and GRADUATION can be modelled in multimodal texts, with special reference to the interplay of voices in textbook discourse. The second sub-study analyzes how verbal and visual semiotic resources are co-deployed to construe the ‘emotion and attitude’ goal highlighted in curriculum standards, with a particular focus on verbiage-image relations. Third, it extends the linguistic concept ‘modality’ to multimodal discourse, exploring coding orientation in texts for different educational contexts and between different constituent genres. The main findings of this thesis are as follows: (1) A range of multimodal resources (i.e. labelling, dialogue balloon, jointly-constructed text, illustration and highlighting) are identified as enabling editor voice to negotiate meanings with reader voice and character voice. It is found that the way in which an ENGAGEMENT value can be scaled is strongly associated with the intrinsic property of the given multimodal resource. The interaction between multiple voices is closely related to contact, social distance, and point of view. (2) It is shown that images play an essential role in realizing attitudinal meanings. Together with verbal APPRAISAL resources, visual semiotic features work to position the readers in ways that align them to set pedagogic goals, guiding them in completing jointly-constructed texts. Moreover, an attitudinal shift from an emotional release to a more institutionalized type of evaluation can be identified as students advance through the school years. (3) It is argued that what counts as real in multimodal texts is socially defined and specific to a given communicative context. The nature of pedagogic discourse should be taken into account when visual displays are produced for pedagogic materials. The implications of this study include both theoretical and pedagogic aspects。Theoretically it adapts and extends APPRAISAL analysis to multimodal discourse, exploring the intersemiotic complementarity and co-instantiation in construing global evaluative stance. This semiotic exploration, in return, suggests ways in which discourse analysis may help textbook users better understand and interpret the multimodal features. With the affordances as well as limitations of semiotic resources made explicit, we may have one step further towards a comprehensive and critical understanding of multimodal construal of interpersonal meaning in pedagogic materials.