This research aims to describe how practicing lawyers perceive ‘plain writing’ in the legal field and to conceptualize this notion through the discourse analysis of these specialists. To do so, a qualitative research framed in the interpretive paradigm has been developed. Specifically, 18 practicing lawyers, from different countries and with different specializations in the practicing of Law, were surveyed. After analyzing the discourse of the interviewed lawyers, eight macro categories accounting for plain language both generally and particularly were identified. (...) The audience was identified as a key element in the production of legal texts which facilitate justice to citizens. Based on our analysis, we conclude with a definition of plain writing. (shrink)

This article intends to contribute to the science–religion historiography with two topics—philology and the construction of national identities—that can help provide a more complex picture of the relations between science and religion. We use the life and work of the Mallorcan Catholic priest Antoni Maria Alcover (1862–1932) as a case study that puts language, linguistics, and nationalism on the board of science and religion studies. Alcover was the main driving force of the Catalan Dictionary, a collective enterprise that (...) set out to inventory the complete oral and literary lexicon of this language, and which mobilized thousands of people, many of which were clergymen, from all over the Catalan‐speaking territories. In the article, we will explore Alcover's education; the way he established a link between language, religion, and fatherland; the shaping of his identity as a philologist in the image mainly of new German notions and practices; as well as his role in the institutionalization process of the Catalan language as a scientific language, as a language for science and for religion. (shrink)

La traduction est inséparable de l’histoire d’un peuple, de sa culture passée et présente, de la dimension politique qui, en définitive, délimite les cadres juridiques et sociaux où se déploie l’activité des personnes, mais aussi marque l’opinion et le débat idéologique dans une démocratie. Alors que la planète s’achemine vers le plurilinguisme d’une mondialisation économique et culturelle, en Catalogne, la politique se trouve en partie prise dans un combat visant à faire du catalan une langue majoritaire, voire, pour les (...) nationalistes radicaux et indépendantistes, la seule langue officielle. Dans un tel contexte, la traduction depuis et vers le catalan constitue le moyen culturel stratégique d’une revendication identitaire face à la langue de Cervantès. La question de la traduction et, plus précisément, celle de la langue catalane est inévitablement perçue comme politique, ce qui, d’une certaine manière, tend à laisser la réalité linguistique occultée derrière le contexte historique que la Catalogne a connu.Translation is inseparable from the history of a people, its culture past and present, and its political dimension which, ultimately, frames the legal and social context in which individuals act, but also sets its stamp on public opinion and ideological debate in a democracy. As multilingualism marches onward in an economically and culturally globalised world, politics in Catalonia have been caught up in a struggle to make Catalan the majority language – or, for radical nationalists and independence activists, even the only official language. In this context, translation from and into Catalan has become a strategic cultural vehicle for claims opposing Catalan identity to the language of Cervantes. The question of translation and, more specifically, translation of the Catalan language is inevitably perceived as political, so that the linguistic realities tend to be overshadowed by the historical context as experienced in Catalonia. (shrink)

This volume helps us to understand that the current political disorders in Catalonia have deep cultural roots. It focuses on the rise of Catalan cultural, national and linguistic identity in the 20th century. What is happening in Catalonia? What lies behind its political conflicts? Catalan identity has been evolving for centuries, starting in early medieval ages. It is not a modern phenomenon. The emergence of imperial Spain in the 16 c. and the French Ancien Régime in the 17 (...) c. correlates with a decline of Catalan culture, which was politically absorbed by the Spanish state after the conquest of Barcelona in 1714. However, Catalan language and culture flourished again under the stimulus of the European Romantic Nationalism movement. During the first Dictatorship, the Spanish Civil War, and the long Francoist era, Catalan language and culture were repressed, yet refurbished and reconstructed at the same time. This rise of a plural, complex, and non-homogeneous Catalan identity constitutes the subject matter of this volume. National conflicts that emerged later in the Spanish democratic state leant heavily on the life engagement and vital commitment experienced by the entrenched intellectual movements of the twentieth century in Catalonia, Valencian Country and the Balearic Islands. This book reveals the cultural and literary grassroots of these conflicts. (shrink)

Human linguistic phenomenon is at one and the same time an individual, social, and political fact. As such, its study should bear in mind these complex interrelations, which are produced inside the framework of the sociocultural and historical ecosystem of each human community. Understanding this phenomenon is often no easy task, due to the range of elements involved and their interrelations. The absence of valid, clearly developed paradigms adds to the problem and means that the theoretical conclusions that emerge may (...) be unclear on certain points. It is true that in the last fifty years sociolinguistic studies have advanced considerably, and today we have access to an impressive set of data and a wide variety of theoretical reflections. But as a discipline sociolinguistics does not yet have unified, powerful theoretical models able to account rigorously and clearly for the phenomena it studies. Sociolinguistic studies are today a diverse set of contributions in which certain and theoretical schools and lines of research emerged; but as is to be expected in a relatively new field, there is not enough communication between the various schools and they cannot yet be said to be integrated in terms of their conceptual and theoretical postulates. Against this background, our work aims to contribute to the overall, integrated understanding of the processes of language contact. Via an interdisciplinary, eclectic approach, it also aims to aid the theoretical grounding and integration of a unified, common sociolinguistic paradigm. Our strategy will not be merely to combine the contributions from ongoing research lines, but to address the question from a more global viewpoint which, together with the more innovative contemporary scientific disciplines, permits a harmonious integration of the various sociolinguistic perspectives in a broad, deep and unitary approach to the reality. The materials used to construct this unified approach are taken from many sources: Theoretical physics, ecology, the philosophy of science and mind, anthropology, phenomenological and process sociology, cognitive sciences, political science, pragmatics, history, systems theory, approaches to complexity and obviously sociolinguistics, are all involved in a dialogue in this desire for integration. (shrink)

Providing book reviews of some of the leading monographic studies in the Kierkegaard secondary literature, this volume aims to assist the community of scholars in becoming familiar with the works that they have not read for themselves, thus offering them a comprehensive survey of works that have played a more or less significant role in the research. In addition it tries to make accessible many works in the Kierkegaard secondary literature that are written in different languages.The six tomes of the (...) present volume present reviews of works written in Catalan, Chinese, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, Galician, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Slovak, Spanish, and Swedish. (shrink)

El objetivo de este trabajo consiste en explicar el concepto de «poder de lo real» en la filosofía de Xavier Zubiri. Siendo este el núcleo, hemos querido confrontar su reflexión con otros autores relacionados con un ámbito, digamos, artístico-filosófico. Autores en los que, como ocurre con el filósofo vasco, el poder de lo real, de las cosas reales concretas, es lo que proporciona el eje de sus obras. Es decir, el hombre abona, mediante ese poder, su funcionalidad con respecto a (...) las demás cosas reales, incluido el propio ser humano. Primeramente, nos introduciremos en la amplia reflexión que realiza Zubiri en relación a dos conceptos complejos, el de poder y el de lo real. Seguidamente nos adentraremos en la mirada trágica, con especial consideración a Edipo rey, de Sófocles, una obra que permite ver cómo ese poder se produce desde la vivencia trágica, lo que nos ayuda a comprender la perspectiva de Zubiri que también hace hincapié en el significado de la realidad trágica. El añadido del escritor Samuel Beckett se realiza porque su obra, en especial Esperando a Godot, puede servir de contraste, y al mismo tiempo de reto, a la visión zubiriana desde una perspectiva de la filosofía del absurdo. (shrink)

We study Fermat's last theorem and Catalan's conjecture in the context of weak arithmetics with exponentiation. We deal with expansions of models of arithmetical theories (in the language ) by a binary (partial or total) function e intended as an exponential. We provide a general construction of such expansions and prove that it is universal for the class of all exponentials e which satisfy a certain natural set of axioms. We construct a model and a substructure with e (...) total and (Presburger arithmetic) such that in both and Fermat's last theorem for e is violated by cofinally many exponents n and (in all coordinates) cofinally many pairwise linearly independent triples. On the other hand, under the assumption of ABC conjecture (in the standard model), we show that Catalan's conjecture for e is provable in (even in a weaker theory) and thus holds in and. Finally, we also show that Fermat's last theorem for e is provable (again, under the assumption of ABC in ) in “coprimality for e”. (shrink)

Medium-sized language communities face competition between local and global languages such as Spanish, Russian, French and, above all, English. The various regions of Spain where Catalan is spoken, Denmark, the Czech Republic, and Lithuania show how their medium-sized languages (a term used to distinguish them as much from minority codes as from more widely-spoken codes) coexist alongside or struggle with their big brothers in multilingual families. This comparative analysis offers unique insight into language contact in present-day Europe.

Historical processes exert an influence on the current state and evolution of situations of language contact, brought to bear from different domains, the economic and the political, the ideological and group identities, geo-demographics, and the habits of inter-group use. Clearly, this kind of phenomenon requires study from a complexical and holistic perspective in order to accommodate the variety of factors that belong to different levels and that interrelate with one another in the evolving dynamic of human languaging. Therefore, there (...) is a need for the restricted and general complexity approaches to come to a meeting of the minds, and take steps toward a mutual integration based on the acceptance of the shortcomings of each approach, achieving progress through a non-contradictory complementarity of perspectives. It must be conceded that the practical and methodological applications of basic complexical ideas need to be developed much farther in order to apply them to specific research. At the same time, the limits of complex adaptive systems as computational strategies must be accepted in the pursuit of a better understanding of the dynamic and evolutionary processes typical of human beings. New tools for the conception, apprehension and treatment of the data will need to be devised to complement existing ones and to enable us to make headway toward practices that better fit complexical perspectives. It seems obvious that human complexics must be seen as multi-methodological, insofar as necessary combining quantitative-computation methodologies and more qualitative methodologies aimed at understanding the historical mental and emotional world of people. (shrink)

Argumentation and fiction are quite different types of communicative phenomena. However, overlaps between them happen to be very frequent. We can both fictionalize by means of argumentation and argue by means of fiction. The main goal of this paper is to analyse the different types of overlap that may arise between argumentation and fiction. In this paper, the defended hypothesis is that by considering who the “character” that is arguing is, we can get an exhaustive account of any possible overlap, (...) as well as an explanation of the different functions that such overlaps can play. (shrink)

Argumentation and fiction are quite different types of communicative phenomena. However, overlaps between them happen to be very frequent. We can both fictionalize by means of argumentation and argue by means of fiction. The main goal of this paper is to analyse the different types of overlap that may arise between argumentation and fiction. In this paper, the defended hypothesis is that by considering who the “character” that is arguing is, we can get an exhaustive account of any possible overlap, (...) as well as an explanation of the different functions that such overlaps can play. (shrink)

Las migraciones transnacionales, la integración del pluralismo cultural en los Es-tados de acogida de inmigrantes, el reconocimiento de sus derechos civiles, económicos y políticos y las condiciones de acceso a la ciudadanía son fenómenos de interés público que nos obligan a repensar las fronteras de la democracia y la someten a una renovación continua. La presencia del extranjero irregular y la llegada masiva de refugiados a las puertas de Europa han tambaleado las bases de nuestra ciudadanía, poniendo en tela de (...) juicio los valores comu-nitarios y desafiando la tradición cosmopolita desde el afuera de la Administración de la UE. Estas contradicciones prácticas llevan a los teóricos de la justicia y la filosofía política, como S. Benhabib, a explorar los límites de la pertenencia, la responsabilidad y la ética en las de-mocracias contemporáneas. El objetivo de conciliar los derechos de autogobierno y libre auto-determinación territorial con la afirmación de los derechos humanos universales pasa, nece-sariamente, por argumentar la vigencia del Estado-nación moderno y problematizar las lógicas divisorias de la soberanía territorial, tan reforzada hoy en día. (shrink)

El artículo estudia el argumento mítico y religioso del paternalismo político en virtud del cual la sociedad es hija del gobernante, en especial del monarca. Del mismo modo que el rey en tanto Dios crea a la humanidad desde la nada, también el rey en tanto padre se presenta como su engendrador o fundador. El presente análisis tiene una estructura diacrónica que comienza en el estadio mítico-religioso de los pueblos africanos y de la China clásica, atraviesa la Antigüedad grecorromana y (...) el modelo medieval de la familia como modelo de la sociedad, y termina con la teoría política de John Filmer sobre el origen bíblico de la monarquía. (shrink)

Alfred Schmidt se coloca fuera del dogma del “marxismo soviético”. Considera textos inéditos en la vida de Marx, que permiten comprender los resultados en las obras centrales. Desde el concepto de naturaleza, discute la relación sujeto-objeto y necesidad- libertad. La naturaleza está mediada socio- ..

La autora explica el consumo adolescente por su sentido reafirmador en esa etapa, analiza el impacto de ellas en el sistema nervioso, postula que a población tiende a autorregular su consumo, distingue el abuso de la dependencia a las drogas y lo vincula al contexto de la vida adolescente, en particular en los sectores pobres. Finalmente aborda el tema de la rehabilitación y debate el contexto social en sus estrategias ante los jóvenes consumidores.

This volume addresses the intriguing issue of indirect reports from an interdisciplinary perspective. The contributors include philosophers, theoretical linguists, socio-pragmaticians, and cognitive scientists. The book is divided into four sections following the provenance of the authors. Combining the voices from leading and emerging authors in the field, it offers a detailed picture of indirect reports in the world’s languages and their significance for theoretical linguistics. Building on the previous book on indirect reports in this series, this volume adds an empirical (...) and cross-linguistic approach that covers an impressive range of languages, such as Cantonese, Japanese, Hebrew, Persian, Dutch, Spanish, Catalan, Armenian, Italian, English, Hungarian, German, Rumanian, and Basque. (shrink)

Grammatical markers are not uniformly impaired across speakers of different languages, even when speakers share a diagnosis and the marker in question is grammaticalized in a similar way in these languages. The aim of this work is to demarcate, from a cross-linguistic perspective, the linguistic phenotype of three genetically heterogeneous developmental disorders: specific language impairment, Down syndrome, and autism spectrum disorder. After a systematic review of linguistic profiles targeting mainly English-, Greek-, Catalan-, and Spanish-speaking populations with developmental disorders (...) (n = 880), shared loci of impairment are identified and certain domains of grammar are shown to be more vulnerable than others. The distribution of impaired loci is captured by the Locus Preservation Hypothesis which suggests that specific parts of the language faculty are immune to impairment across developmental disorders. Through the Locus Preservation Hypothesis, a classical chicken and egg question can be addressed: Do poor conceptual resources and memory limitations result in an atypical grammar or does a grammatical breakdown lead to conceptual and memory limitations? Overall, certain morphological markers reveal themselves as highly susceptible to impairment, while syntactic operations are preserved, granting support to the first scenario. The origin of resilient syntax is explained from a phylogenetic perspective in connection to the “syntax-before-phonology” hypothesis. (shrink)

La enseñanza y evaluación de la escritura son actividades esenciales en cualquier área, máxime en Medicina, que es una disciplina altamente especializada. Sin embargo, los docentes, con formación médica, pero no en didáctica ni evaluación de la escritura, muchas veces carecen de herramientas adecuadas para evaluar los aspectos lingüístico-discursivos de los textos que producen sus estudiantes. El objetivo es proponer un instrumento de evaluación contextualizado que permita valorar la calidad lingüístico-discursiva de textos disciplinares producidos por estudiantes de Medicina. Para ello, (...) se desarrolla un estudio cualitativo mediante un estudio de caso, a fin de generar una rúbrica analítica que permita orientar la enseñanza y evaluación de la escritura en la formación en Medicina. El proceso de creación del instrumento incluyó la revisión de distintos insumos de la carrera mencionada, lo que permitió realizar un levantamiento de las propiedades lingüístico-discursivas que debiesen poseer los textos especializados en cuestión y los aspectos que tendrían que ser evaluados por los docentes disciplinares en dichos textos. El instrumento quedó constituido por 17 dimensiones, agrupadas en cuatro macrodimensiones: situación comunicativa, comunicación del conocimiento especializado en Medicina, estructura global y oracional, normativa. Tras diversos procedimientos de validación, la versión final del instrumento obtuvo un acuerdo considerable para la validez de contenido y uno casi perfecto para la confiabilidad intercodificador. En conclusión, este instrumento permitirá obtener información más precisa respecto del nivel de adquisición de la competencia escritural en la formación de médicos; y, además, definir estrategias de intervención adecuadas a las necesidades de la comunidad disciplinar. (shrink)

El objetivo del estudio es analizar las prácticas de lectura inclusivas en niñas, niños y adolescentes mapuches con el fin de recrear la novela cervantina, desde la cosmovisión de este pueblo. La investigación se efectuó en dos escuelas interculturales con estudiantes de Educación Básica. En su ejecución se implementó un cuadernillo de trabajo con fragmentos del Quijote editado por Santos Tornero y fichas sobre la cultura mapuche que fueron desarrolladas por los participantes. Los resultados muestran la recreación de la obra (...) desde una perspectiva sincrética, donde el componente intercultural cobra relevancia y se relevan valores universales que trascienden épocas y culturas. (shrink)

This volume addresses the intriguing issue of indirect reports from an interdisciplinary perspective. The contributors include philosophers, theoretical linguists, socio-pragmaticians, and cognitive scientists. The book is divided into four sections following the provenance of the authors. Combining the voices from leading and emerging authors in the field, it offers a detailed picture of indirect reports in the world’s languages and their significance for theoretical linguistics. Building on the previous book on indirect reports in this series, this volume adds an empirical (...) and cross-linguistic approach that covers an impressive range of languages, such as Cantonese, Japanese, Hebrew, Persian, Dutch, Spanish, Catalan, Armenian, Italian, English, Hungarian, German, Rumanian, and Basque. (shrink)

Tourism, as an industry, has become one of the most dynamic sectors of the world economy these days and has specific features that are different from other industries. In the tourism industry, production and consumption points occur spatially at the same time. In addition, the tourism industry contributes to the economic growth of developed regions and can simultaneously distribute the wealth created geographically. It is notable that the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has caused many challenges in the tourism industry (...) regarding the presence of tourists in tourism centres and the closing of all tourism service chains, including food, entertainment, transportation and travel services worldwide. Tourism-related businesses, which are considered as invisible export and one of the engines of development and occupation, have been rendered obsolete. In other words, the businesses, as well as multiple units and activities in the related chain, have been damaged and employees of this industry have lost their jobs. This has led to the recession and regressive course of the developing and large industry of tourism in the world. It is worth noting that the tourism industry includes various sections, the most important of which is religious tourism. All religions in the world have different religious places, works, traditions and customs, which have become amongst the most important tourist attractions. Meanwhile, Muslims and the religion of Islam play a significant role in this branch of tourism. The Hajj, pilgrimage to holy places and the existence of mourning ceremonies or religious celebrations of Muslims are amongst the largest religious tourism events in the world. Given the importance of this issue, the present study aimed to evaluate the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on religious tourism in Iraq in 2021. This field study was conducted on 4500 Muslim managers and staff of restaurants, hotels, grocery stores, clothing stores and souvenir shops around the holy shrines of imams and religious places in Karbala, Najaf, Kufa, Samarra and Kazemi. According to the results, the tourism of Iraq, which is mainly limited to Muslim religious sites in several major Iraqi cities, has also seen a decline in the number of religious tourists. The negative effects of COVID-19 on religious tourism have also been proved statistically by the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS), as µ ≥ 3 has been counted in all indices.Contribution: Our findings offered new insights into the impact of COVID-19 on tourism, based on statistical analysis. In this study, the authors showed how COVID-19 affects various aspects of religious tourism, which has not been addressed in previous researches. (shrink)

As the demand for prosthetic limbs with reliable and multi-functional control increases, recent advances in myoelectric pattern recognition and implanted sensors have proven considerably advantageous. Additionally, sensory feedback from the prosthesis can be achieved via stimulation of the residual nerves, enabling closed-loop control over the prosthesis. However, this stimulation can cause interfering artifacts in the electromyographic (EMG) signals which deteriorate the reliability and function of the prosthesis. Here, we implement two real-time stimulation artifact removal algorithms, Template Subtraction (TS) and ε-Normalized (...) Least Mean Squares (ε-NLMS), and investigate their performance in offline and real-time myoelectric pattern recognition in two transhumeral amputees implanted with nerve cuff and EMG electrodes. We show that both algorithms are capable of significantly improving signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and offline pattern recognition accuracy of artifact-corrupted EMG signals. Furthermore, both algorithms improved real-time decoding of motor intention during active neurostimulation. Although these outcomes are dependent on the user-specific sensor locations and neurostimulation settings, they nonetheless represent progress toward bi-directional neuromusculoskeletal prostheses capable of multifunction control and simultaneous sensory feedback. (shrink)