Le corpus de littéracie avancée réunit des écrits universitaires et professionnels produits par des étudiants du niveau Licence 1 au Master 2. Il contient actuellement 338 textes (+ d’1 million de mots) et est mis à disposition au format xml, assorti de métadonnées (niveau, discipline, genre, consigne d’écriture etc.). Il est à la fois un aboutissement et un point de départ dans le champ de la littéracie avancée : parce que l’enjeu n’est pas tant de constituer des corpus que de (...) les savoir utilisés et de nourrir les recherches actuelles et futures, il est pensé comme un construit évolutif. L’article expose d’abord les objectifs du corpus : le premier, d’ordre descriptif est de cerner les compétences rédactionnelles et les besoins de formation à un niveau avancé ; le second, d’ordre didactique, est qu’il sert de ressource pour la formation, notamment pour des activités d’observation et de manipulation par les apprenants. Sont ensuite présentées les métadonnées, conçues en phase avec les recommandations de la TEI et dans la perspective d’un outillage des linguistes et des didacticiens dans le champ de la littéracie avancée. Enfin, l’article met en évidence les potentialités du corpus : intégrer des données sur les processus d’écriture et des textes annotés par des relecteurs-correcteurs, élaborer des dispositifs didactiques à l’échelle textuelle. à terme, le corpus gagnera à être associé à des outils de requête et à s’enrichir d’annotations diverses, selon les besoins des chercheurs et des formateurs. (shrink)

Constitution d’un grand corpus d’écrits émergents et novices : principes et méthodes Cette contribution propose une réflexion sur la construction d’un vaste corpus d’écrits qui permet d’approfondir notre compréhension des processus en jeu dans l’accès à la littératie dans sa diversité, au travers de la pluralité des genres et des types discursifs qui la constituent et chez des apprenants de profils divers : enfants/adultes, langue 1 / langue 2, entendants/sourds. La réflexion sur la mise en place de ce corpus s’inscrit (...) dans une perspective fonctionnaliste et énonciative et fait fond sur deux ensembles théoriques complémentaires. Du point de vue de l’acquisition des langues, nous souscrivons à la conception selon laquelle les productions d’apprenants ne constituent pas une déviance par rapport à la norme mais sont des manifestations (idiolectales) de systèmes linguistiques per se dont il s’agit de dégager les normes propres. Du point de vue de la littératie, nous nous inscrivons dans la tradition des travaux, d’inspiration bakhtinienne, qui considèrent l’hétérogénéité comme constitutive de toute production verbale. Ainsi, nous expliquons et justifions nos choix en matière de profils d’apprenants et de tâches rédactionnelles, en relation avec la perspective théorique adoptée, ainsi que les options retenues en matière d’outillage du corpus. (shrink)

Because they involve individual-level cognitive processes, psychological explanations of linguistic phenomena are in principle testable against individual behaviour. The present study draws on patterns of individual variation in corpus data to test explanations of productivity. Linguistic patterns are predicted to become more productive with higher type frequencies and lower token frequencies. This is because the formation of abstract mental representations is encouraged by varied types but counteracted by automation of high-frequency types. The predictions are tested for English -ly (...) and -ness-derivation, as used by 698 individual journalists in the New York Times Annotated Corpus and 171 members of Parliament in the Hansard Corpus. Linear regression is used to model individual variation in productivity, in relation to type and token frequency, as well as several other predictor variables. While the expected effects are observed, there is also robust evidence of an interaction effect between type and token frequency, indicating that productivity is highest for patterns with many types and not-too-infrequent tokens. This fits best with a view of entrenchment as both a conservative and creative force in language. Further, some variation remains irreducibly individual and is not explained by currently known predictors of productivity. (shrink)

This study investigates the developmental pattern and relationships between oral narrative textual skills, spelling, and written narrative textual skills in monolingual and bilingual language-minority children, L1-Chinese and L2-Italian. The aims were to investigate in monolingual and BLM children: the developmental patterns of oral and writing skills across primary school years; the pattern of relationships between oral narrative textual competence, spelling skills, and written narrative textual competence with age and socio-economic status taken under control. In total, 141 primary school (...) children from grades 2 to 5 in Central Italy aged between 7 and 11 years obtained scores for oral and written narrative textual competence, spelling accuracy in dictation, and written texts. One-way ANOVA and ANOVA with robust method analyses and Bonferroni’s correction showed that BLM children had poorer spelling skills in dictation and written narrative textual competence than their monolingual peers. After preliminary correlation analysis, the results of hierarchical regression showed that the relationship between oral and written narrative textual competence is completely mediated by spelling accuracy in BLM children. These results suggest that adequate performance in written narrative textual competence depends on adequate spelling accuracy in writing stories. The Sobel test verified the power of this mediation. In monolinguals, the strongest predictor of written narrative textual competence is oral narrative textual competence. This relation is stronger in older children whose spelling skills are automatized. The identified pattern of relationships shows a complex network of oral and written processes. The scarce spelling skills characterizing BLM children may explain why spelling skills determine a low written narrative textual level. Scarce spelling skills absorb cognitive resources, hindering high-level cognitive processes that regulate narrative production. In monolinguals, the medium of writing does not impact narrative textual competence. Children’s oral narrative textual competence easily transfers into their written narrative productions. These findings have implications for the assessment and instruction of literacy skills in young BLM children and their monolingual peers. (shrink)

Meta­data in various forms pervades our institutions, technologies, and daily lives. Meta­data is a distinct focus of academic research and professional practice for many people within the library and information sciences (LIS). This article is an exploration of the concept of “meta­data.” It presents a high-level introduction to the topic with analysis of key research problems and practical challenges. The paper discusses varying understandings of what “meta­data” means, the origin and evolution of meta­data as an important topic within (...) information and data fields, and the central characteristics of that which gets called “meta­data.” Meta­data can be understood as both process and product and can result from both human effort and computational techniques. Given the central role meta­data have in the establishment of know­ledge, evidence, and truth, it is necessary for researchers and professionals within LIS to think critically about our meta­data practices and systems. (shrink)

With reference to medieval England M. T. Clanchy argues that “the growth in the uses of literacy [between 1066 and 1307] is indicated by, and was perhaps primarily a consequence of, the production and retention of records on an unprecedented scale.” That is, rather than view literacy as a step on the road to literature, to learning and high culture, Clanchy stresses the interrelationship between literacy and administrative practice. Writing creates the possibility of documentation; documentation brings more people into (...) contact with the written word ; and, in time, as documentation becomes accepted as necessary, as mental habits adjust to it, as reliance upon it increases, so it in turn stimulates further expansion in the uses of literacy. (shrink)

La contribution se propose de mettre en évidence les problèmes épistémologiques et méthodologiques posés par l’annotation discursive de productions écrites d’élèves et les choix techniques qu’implique sa mise en œuvre. Dans un premier temps, l’article montre l’intérêt scientifique de la constitution de « grands » corpus scolaires rassemblant plusieurs centaines de textes d’élèves d’école primaire et de collège de niveaux scolaires différents répondant à une même consigne. L’unicité de la consigne permet de comparer les productions en vue d’élaborer une cartographie (...) des moyens linguistiques choisis par les élèves et de mettre en évidence des indicateurs de progressivité. Dans un second temps, sont présentés les enseignements tirés de l’expérience d’annotation discursive qui a abouti à la création de la ressource ANNODIS, corpus de textes en français écrit standard annoté discursivement. Elle s’interroge sur les adaptations nécessaires pour traiter des textes d’élèves et définit des principes de travail généraux notamment sur le choix de la version de texte à annoter, la définition du modèle d’annotation et les guides d’annotation. Sont ensuite exposés deux chantiers d’annotation portant sur des textes d’élèves de fin d’école primaire en réponse à une consigne mettant en jeu la cohésion textuelle, qui demande d’insérer dans un texte narratif trois phrases comportant des pronoms et des syntagmes nominaux anaphoriques. Les notions sont illustrées par l’analyse de deux textes d’élèves de 5° Primaire. L’annotation des Relations de Discours procède successivement, dans une démarche proche de celle d’Annodis, par segmentation du texte en Unités de Discours Élémentaires, analyse de la cohérence temporelle et annotation des Relations de discours. L’annotation des chaînes de référence dans les textes d’élèves suppose des adaptations plus importantes du guide d’annotation antérieurement élaboré. Les premiers essais permettent ainsi de définir des principes de travail pour l’annotation des textes d’élèves. (shrink)

High-level theory is the view that high-level properties---the property of being a dog, being a tiger, being an apple, being a pair of lips, etc.---can be represented in perceptual experience. Low-level theory denies this and claims that high-level properties are only represented at the level of perceptual judgment and are products of cognitive interpretation of low-level sensory information (color, shape, illumination). This paper discusses previous attempts to establish high-level theory, (...) their weaknesses, and an argument for high-level theory that does not have these weaknesses. (shrink)

The investigation of learners’ interlanguage could greatly contribute to the teaching of English as a foreign language and the development of teaching materials. The present study investigates the collocational profiles of large-scale written production by English learners with varied L1 backgrounds and different proficiency levels. Using the British National Corpus as reference corpus, learners’ collocation use was extracted by corpus query language and further identified by t-score via Python programming language. The collocation list consists of 2,501 make/take + noun (...) collocations. Findings show that proficient learners tend to use collocations containing more semantically complicated and abstract noun elements for varied communication tasks. Moreover, advanced learners are inclined to use collocations comprised of more difficult and longer noun elements. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Origins of Buddhist Monastic Codes in China: An Annotated Translation and Study of the Chanyuan QingguiMario PoceskiThe Origins of Buddhist Monastic Codes in China: An Annotated Translation and Study of the Chanyuan Qinggui. By Yifa. Kuroda Institute, Classics in East Asian Buddhism. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2002. Pp. xxiii + 352.Despite the central place of monasticism in the historical development of Chinese Buddhism, studies on the (...) topic, with some prominent exceptions, are not as developed as other aspects of Chinese Buddhist history. Rev. Yifa's excellent book on the Chinese Buddhist monastic codes, The Origins of Buddhist Monastic Codes in China: An Annotated Translation and Study of the Chanyuan Qinggui, goes a long way toward rectifying this situation. This book provides a wealth of information on the production of texts about monastic discipline and the institutional history of Chinese Buddhism, as well as a reliable translation of the Chanyuan qinggui (Rules of purity for Chan monasteries), compiled in 1103, the oldest comprehensive monastic code produced by the Chan school. As someone with a background in both the religious and academic worlds, Yifa (an abbess in the Foguang Shan order with a Ph.D. from Yale), brings to the subject a high level of scholarship and keen sensitivity to the intricacies of monastic life and institutions. As an end product of her comprehensive research into monastic literature and other pertinent sources, this book (based on her 1996 Ph.D. dissertation) makes an important contribution to Buddhist studies by helping to illuminate the institutional history of Chinese [End Page 499] Buddhism up to the Song period (960-1279), thereby reshaping our understanding of the evolution of monasticism in China and the place of the Chan school in that protracted process.The first part of the book is a historical overview of the development of monastic regulations during roughly the first millennium of Chinese Buddhist history. This provides a broad context for understanding the emergence, contents, and functions of Chan monastic codes such as the Chanyuan qinggui. The first half of chapter 1 surveys the history of Chinese engagements with the Vinaya (the canonical code of monastic discipline) and the growth of associated textual production, which included translations of and commentaries on the Vinayas of various schools of Indian Buddhism and the creation of related works by Chinese monks. The Chinese texts include monastic codes and instruction manuals created by noted monks such as Daoan (312-385), Huiyuan (334-416), and Zhiyi (538-597). Such texts were meant to supplement the Vinaya and provide sets of regulations and guidelines for a range of issues and procedures relevant to the pursuit of monastic life in medieval China.The second half of the chapter contextualizes the Chan school's involvement in the production of monastic legislation, first by commenting on the legend concerning Baizhang Huaihai's (749-814) creation of the first Chan monastic code (see below), which, according to tradition, signaled the Chan school's move toward institutional independence, and then by surveying the subsequent legacy and influence of the Chanyuan qinggui in China and Japan (but not Korea).The second chapter discuses major influences that shaped the monastic rules and practices codified in the Chanyuan qinggui. The first key area of influence was the Vinaya texts and traditions. The author shows how many of the rules included in the Chan code can be traced back to Indian precedents, especially Vinaya rules. Accordingly, the Chan regulations often represented the continuation of received traditions rather than original developments unique to the Chan school. The second key area was the influence of Chinese culture, which included the various strategies used by the imperial state to exert control over the monastic order, and a plethora of Chinese ritual practices and patterns of social interaction that the author lumps under the category of "Confucian ritual" (a broad characterization that perhaps should be reconsidered). This is arguably the most creative part of the book. Yifa's careful analysis does an excellent job of placing the emergence of Chan monastic codes in relation to the relevant religious and historical milieus. Doing this undermines normative/traditional views about Chan's uniqueness and independence, instead... (shrink)

The linguistic complexity of words has largely been studied on the behavioral level and in experimental settings. Only little is known about the neural processes underlying it in uninstructed, spontaneous conversations. We built up a multimodal neurolinguistic corpus composed of synchronized audio, video, and electrocorticographic (ECoG) recordings from the fronto-temporo-parietal cortex to address this phenomenon based on uninstructed, spontaneous speech production. We performed extensive linguistic annotations of the language material and calculated word complexity using several numeric parameters. We (...) orthogonalized the parameters with the help of a linear regression model. Then, we correlated the spectral components of neural activity with the individual linguistic parameters and with the residuals of the linear regression model, and compared the results. The proportional relation between the number of consonants and vowels, which was the most informative parameter with regard to the neural representation of word complexity, showed effects in two areas: the frontal one was at the junction of the premotor cortex, the prefrontal cortex, and Brodmann area 44. The postcentral one lay directly above the lateral sulcus and comprised the ventral central sulcus, the parietal operculum and the adjacent inferior parietal cortex. Beyond the physiological findings summarized here, our methods may be useful for those interested in ways of studying neural effects related to natural language production and in surmounting the intrinsic problem of collinearity between multiple features of spontaneously spoken material. (shrink)

For years now the “Tübingen School”, represented above all by Konrad Gaiser and Hans Krämer, has had an important position, philologically and philosophically speaking, in current research on Plato. Its richly documented and constantly sophisticated “New Image of Plato” has resulted in a “para-digm-change” in Plato-interpretation as well as developing many of its aspects. It revises the basic attitude, which can be traced back to Schleiermacher, that Plato’s published dialogues are the one authentic source for any adequate and complete comprehension (...) of Platonic thought. By contrast it is especially Krämer and Gaiser who in numerous publications have energetically—and to great effect—drawn attention to what have since Aristotle come to be known as the “unwritten doctrines” and—taking up and modifying specific intentions of L. Robin, J. Stenzel, P. Wilpert and others—attempted to present them not only as a necessary supplement to the dialogues of Plato but even more as the systematically conceived centre, the “essential” in Platonic thought. This hermeneutical maxim has made it possible to reconstruct the basic features of a principles-theory for Plato which not only constitutes the systematic fundament of the Platonic dialogues but has become decisive for the basic conceptual and ontological structure of Neoplatonism and the philosophical systems which are connected with it materially and historically speaking. This has not meant suppressing the dialogues or demoting them to a “quarry” for the real-authentic: thanks to the principles-theory and the theorems connected with it, much which used to have to appear as a break, as something enigmatic or giving rise to discrepancy or aporia, can now be understood in a more thorough way, a way which is more intense in terms of argumentation and even more complex in terms of substance, without that which Plato considered it impossible to say being laid bare in a dull abstraction. Thomas Alexander Szlezák’s book testifies to the degree to which taking seriously those doctrines of Plato which he himself was very “serious” about can be productive—precisely for a new interpretation of the dialogues themselves. Amidst the virtually endless deluge of publications on Plato, a deluge which continues to swell to worrying proportions because of superfluous repetition, Szlezák’s book stands out very strikingly through the originality of its perspective, through the consistent realization of a basic idea which is highly instructive for the subject-matter at hand and through the thoroughness of its examination of competing and above all of opposing ideas which are—with greater or lesser reason—sceptical as regards the new Plato paradigm. Plato’s criticism—discussed in great detail by Szlezák—of the written communicating of philosophical thought becomes for him the key to the question as to the relationship of the oral pursuit of philosophy and the written presentation of the living dialogue. In accordance with Platonic writing-critique it is very much intrinsic to the philosophical logos that it can defend itself, can help itself, that it is in a position productively to continue the questions which are placed in it and which it is asked and in so doing refer to “timiotera”, to “all that is more valuable”, i.e. more extensively justified; not only must these “timiotera” not be explicitly stated, but they ought consciously to be held back, to be omitted and reserved for conversations with real friends who are capable of understanding a higher problem-level. Books, thus also dialogues published in written form, are not inherently able to do this: they “are constantly saying the same thing” and remind one at times of “the prolonged din of cymbals”. It follows from this that “he who has knowledge”, he who has knowledge of “timiotera” and has a sensible attitude towards them, “Plato” the author of philosophical book-dialogues, quite consciously and consistently omits the “problems which are especially to do with principle”. (shrink)

Writing and reading are closely related and are thus likely to have a common orthographic representation. A fundamental question in the literature on the production of written Chinese characters concerns the structure of orthographic representations. We report on a Chinese character handwriting pedagogical corpus involving a class of 22 persons, 232 composite character types, 1,913 tokens, and 13,057 stroke records, together with the inter-stroke interval, which reflects the parallel processing of multilevel orthographic representation during the writing execution, and 50 (...) orthographic variables from the whole character, logographeme, and stroke. The results of regression analyses show that orthographic representation has a hierarchy and that different representational levels are active simultaneously. In the multilevel structure of orthographic representation, the representation of the logographeme is absolutely dominant. Writing and reading have both commonalities and individual differences in their orthographic representations. The online processing of the logographeme unit probably occurs at the ISI before the initial stroke of the current logographeme, which may also cascade to the first subsequent logographeme. In addition, we propose a new effective character structure unit for describing orthographic complexity. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Rhetoric 35.2 (2002) 96-119 [Access article in PDF] Re-Marking Slave Bodies: Rhetoric as Production and Reception Steven Mailloux There is much talk nowadays about the double nature of rhetoric: rhetoric as a practical guide for composing and rhetoric as a theoretical stance for interpreting. The two uses can be viewed as complementary, as flip sides of the same holistic approach to rhetorical studies. But they can also (...) appear in conflict: production models of writing and speaking versus reception models of reading and listening; models for inventing rhetoric versus models for analyzing it. Indeed, though the two models can be mutually supportive, they have often developed in tension within the evolution of academic disciplines over the last 125 years. Different emphases on one or the other model have resulted in different departmentalized disciplines and varied divisions within those departments, as we are all so well aware. One might even claim that advocating one or the other model has contributed significantly to the fragmentation of rhetoric as an interdiscipline during the last century and to the distribution of its parts into various academic units. In many English departments, for example, the continuing divisions between literature and composition faculty arise from contrasting professional interests in reception models focused on interpreting literary works versus production models focused on composing student texts. A similar reception/production antagonism appears in the history of speech departments separating from English departments. In 1915, when seventeen teachers of public address broke off from the National Council of Teachers of English, the production (oratory or debate) model they favored was at odds with the reception (philological or hermeneutic) model of most literature faculty. 1I don't mean to suggest that different choices between models of production and reception fully account for the academic fragmentation of rhetorical study. Nevertheless, practical antitheses do constitute disciplinary [End Page 96] identities. Antitheses between production and reception—between writing/speaking, on the one hand, and reading/listening, on the other—have variously combined with other distinctions between written texts versus oral performances as objects of study and between scientific research versus humanistic scholarship as intellectual traditions, and these assorted configurations of interpretive practices and institutional formations did help shape disciplinary identities throughout the past century. We are now faced with a situation in which rhetoric is distributed across several departments and programs, not in an integrated interdiscipline but as disciplinary fragments, where rhetorical critics in literary and cultural studies, for example, don't read deeply either in the work of rhetoric/ composition faculty in their own departments or the rhetorical scholarship produced in other departments such as communications or classics.Historically, I believe, the separation of written rhetoric (literature and composition) from oral rhetoric (public address and debate) within the academic humanities, this separation of English and speech departments, has been just as debilitating for rhetorical study as the literature/composition split within English departments alone. One might speculate about how these divisions encouraged the eventual exclusion of oratory from British and U. S. literary canons. More important, these divisions have resulted in a fragmented disciplinary approach to everything having to do with tropes, arguments, and narratives in culture, including most recently the study of local and global communication networks, old and new literacies, and past and present media revolutions.In the present essay I suggest an alternative to this disciplinary fragmentation of rhetoric. This alternative, call it rhetorical hermeneutics, learns from the more holistic approach to language arts found at the elementary and secondary levels of our U. S. educational system, where writing, speaking, reading, and listening (and sometimes viewing) are practices often taught in relation to one another. 2 Here production and reception models form parts of the same integrated framework for understanding and participating in the cultural conversations of diverse public spheres. In the following sections, I address these issues of model selection first by considering the objection that rhetorical hermeneutics is exclusively a method of reading and not a heuristic for writing. Then I move to an example of rhetorical hermeneutics in practice: a reception study of rhetorical productions... (shrink)

The relationship between first and second language literacy was examined by identifying the skills and processes developed in the first language that were transferred to the second language. The performance of 40 university students from The People's Republic of China, Hong Kong, Vietnam and Australia were compared on a series of tasks that assessed phonological awareness and reading and spelling skills in English. The results indicated that the Hong Kong students (with non-alphabetic first language literacy) had limited phonological awareness compared (...) to those students with alphabetic first language literacy. The reading and spelling tasks showed no differences between the groups on real word processing. However, the students from Hong Kong had difficulty processing nonwords because of their poor phonological awareness. The results supported the hypothesis that people learning English as a second language (ESL) transfer their literacy processing skills from their first language to English. When the phonological awareness required in English had not been developed in the first language, ESL students were limited to a whole-word, visual strategy. The findings indicate that students from non-alphabetic written language backgrounds might have difficulties with new, or unfamiliar words when attending universities where English is the medium of instruction. (shrink)

The purpose of this study is to analyse the structure of written argumentative texts produced by pupils in grades 3, 5, 7 and 11 in relation to three different tasks: Group A — subjects are assigned a topic question consisting of a single statement ; Group B — subjects are given a topic question consisting of both a statement and its opposite ; Group C — subjects are given an initial and a final sentence of a text, which they (...) have to complete, and which refers to opposite opinions . Six different types of text organization were evidenced on the basis of the argumentative moves presented in the texts, the linguistic indexes used to express the relationships between the moves, the presence or absence of counter-arguments and the type of argumentation or reasoning used. The organization of the texts range from a simple affirmation of a position to a use of data or reasons to support a position, to others still in which two positions are presented in the body of a unitary structure, developed ‘in parallel’ and interconnected regularly. Our analysis found a well-defined tendency corresponding to the age levels in the types of texts produced by the subjects. The texts produced by the younger group, the pupils in elementary school, contained a fairly simple structural organization, characterized by very few argumentations or a lack of explicitness of the essential moves and a juxtaposing of arguments. The older subjects, in particular those attending secondary school, were able to produce texts which were more complex with regard to the presence and the organization of the argumentative moves, and more coherent and cohesive with respect to their articulation of opinions and use of adequate linguistic indices to analyze t topic. As regards the different types of tasks, when the subjects were presented explicitly with two opposite opinions , they developed both positions in their responses, contrary to the situation in which they produced one position when only one of two opinions was presented. (shrink)

The purpose of this study is to analyse the structure of written argumentative texts produced by pupils in grades 3, 5, 7 and 11 in relation to three different tasks: Group A — subjects are assigned a topic question consisting of a single statement (open question); Group B — subjects are given a topic question consisting of both a statement and its opposite (opposite opinions); Group C — subjects are given an initial and a final sentence of a text, (...) which they have to complete, and which refers to opposite opinions (oriented task). Six different types of text organization were evidenced on the basis of the argumentative moves presented in the texts, the linguistic indexes used to express the relationships between the moves, the presence or absence of counter-arguments and the type of argumentation or reasoning used. The organization of the texts range from a simple affirmation of a position (repitition of the proposition or its opposition without any support) to a use of data or reasons to support a position, to others still in which two positions are presented in the body of a unitary structure, developed ‘in parallel’ and interconnected regularly. Our analysis found a well-defined tendency corresponding to the age levels in the types of texts produced by the subjects. The texts produced by the younger group, the pupils in elementary school, contained a fairly simple structural organization, characterized by very few argumentations or a lack of explicitness of the essential moves and a juxtaposing of arguments. The older subjects, in particular those attending secondary school, were able to produce texts which were more complex with regard to the presence and the organization of the argumentative moves, and more coherent and cohesive with respect to their articulation of opinions and use of adequate linguistic indices to analyze t topic. As regards the different types of tasks, when the subjects were presented explicitly with two opposite opinions (though in different terms), they developed both positions in their responses, contrary to the situation in which they produced one position when only one of two opinions was presented. (shrink)

Africa is the most vulnerable region of the world due to anthropogenic climate change challenges on account of dependence on nature for the sustenance of agriculture as her main source of income, high level of poverty, and low level of literacy. Climate change adaptation involves strategies of adjusting to the negative effects of climate change, while climate change mitigation involves techniques that help to reduce production of greenhouse gases through burning fossil fuels. The African worldview from the (...) frontier of Nigerian epistemological and ontological perspectives as it finds expression in climate change adaptation and mitigation is built on the foundations of its relationship with nature, traditional religion and belief systems, agricultural practices, and some other day-to-day practices. Worldview analysis of the contemporary Nigerian has been conducted and classified into Original African, Westernized African, and Little Here-and-There African, a paradigm existing in Nigerians irrespective of level of Western education. What will be the fate of the younger Nigerian climate scientist in a globalized and technologically competitive world? This question gives rise to further discussion on the principles and application of the theory of Culturo-Techno-Contextual Approach as postulated by Peter A. Okebukola and applied to creating an environment for meaningful learning on climate change adaptation and mitigation for the future generations of Nigerians. (shrink)

Although typically realized by free items, degree modification has a number of morphological exponents in Polish, including the neoclassical prefix arcy-, which, while originally attaching to profession-denoting nouns with a view to indicating a higher rank in a hierarchy, has come to perform the function of reinforcement in conjunction with adjectival bases. Since the scarce previous research concerned with the aforementioned prefixal reinforcer builds only on lexicographic material, this paper offers a quantitative, corpus-based account of the productivity of the formative (...) at issue by providing its TTR (type-token ratio) and HTR (hapax-token ratio) measures, calculated by dividing the number of, respectively, types of adjectival bases and hapax adjectives by that of all relevant tokens, in two periods in the history of Polish, namely in the Baroque epoch, when arcy- gained a strong foothold in language practice owing to the then prevalent rhetorical tendency toward a profuse employment of elements of foreign provenance, and in contemporary Polish. The results of the empirical analysis indicate a dramatic decrease in the level of the bound form’s productivity over time, to the point that the probability of an arcy-adjective encountered by a language user being unique fell from nearly 30% in the Baroque period to less than 1% at present time, which can be accounted for in terms of the formative having been superseded by more recent, functionally analogous prefixes, particularly super- and mega-. (shrink)

Le travail présenté dans cet article s’inscrit dans une recherche qui a pour but la constitution d’un corpus scolaire et le développement d’un outil d’aide à son exploitation à partir de l’annotation de phénomènes linguistiques saillants. Nous nous concentrerons ici sur les écrits produits en fin de classe de CP par des scripteurs encore débutants. L’objet de ce travail est d’explorer les possibilités qu’offre le traitement automatique des langues pour appréhender ces écrits particulièrement éloignés de la norme. L’hypothèse est que (...) la connaissance du contexte de production facilite ce processus. Nous mesurons cet apport au travers d’un exemple de traitement, à savoir le développement d’un outil d’aide à l’annotation de certaines erreurs orthographiques. Après une rapide présentation du projet et des caractéristiques du corpus élaboré, l’article propose un exposé détaillé du module d’annotation de ces erreurs. Il en expose la méthode d’identification et de correction au moyen d’une ressource lexicale de formes phonologiques ainsi que le modèle d’annotation élaboré. (shrink)

Based on the Competition Model, the current study investigated how cue availability and cue reliability as two important input factors influenced second language (L2) learners' cue learning of the English article construction. Written corpus data of university-level Chinese-L1 learners of English were sampled for a comparison of English majors and non-English majors who demonstrated two levels of L2 competence in English article usage. The path model analysis in structural equation modeling was utilized to investigate the relationship between the (...) input factors and L2 usage (frequency and accuracy of article cue production). The findings contribute novel and scarce empirical evidence that confirms a central claim of the Competition Model, i.e., the changing importance of cue availability and cue reliability in the frequency and accuracy of production. Cue availability was found to determine L2 production frequency regardless of level of L2 competence. Cue reliability was the input factor that differentiated competence levels. When learners stayed at a relatively lower L2 proficiency, cue reliability played an important role in influencing L2 frequency of usage rather than accuracy of usage. When learners developed increased exposure to and stronger competence in the target language, cue reliability played a significant role in determining learners' success of cue learning. The study is methodologically innovative and expands the empirical applicability of the Competition Model to the domain of second language production and construction learning. (shrink)

We argue for a perspective on bilingual heritage speakers as native speakers of both their languages and present results from a large-scale, cross-linguistic study that took such a perspective and approached bilinguals and monolinguals on equal grounds. We targeted comparable language use in bilingual and monolingual speakers, crucially covering broader repertoires than just formal language. A main database was the open-access RUEG corpus, which covers comparable informal vs. formal and spoken vs. written productions by adolescent and adult bilinguals with (...) heritage-Greek, -Russian, and -Turkish in Germany and the United States and with heritage-German in the United States, and matching data from monolinguals in Germany, the United States, Greece, Russia, and Turkey. Our main results lie in three areas. We found non-canonical patterns not only in bilingual, but also in monolingual speakers, including patterns that have so far been considered absent from native grammars, in domains of morphology, syntax, intonation, and pragmatics. We found a degree of lexical and morphosyntactic inter-speaker variability in monolinguals that was sometimes higher than that of bilinguals, further challenging the model of the streamlined native speaker. In majority language use, non-canonical patterns were dominant in spoken and/or informal registers, and this was true for monolinguals and bilinguals. In some cases, bilingual speakers were leading quantitatively. In heritage settings where the language was not part of formal schooling, we found tendencies of register leveling, presumably due to the fact that speakers had limited access to formal registers of the heritage language. Our findings thus indicate possible quantitative differences and different register distributions rather than distinct grammatical patterns in bilingual and monolingual speakers. This supports the integration of heritage speakers into the native-speaker continuum. Approaching heritage speakers from this perspective helps us to better understand the empirical data and can shed light on language variation and change in native grammars. Furthermore, our findings for monolinguals lead us to reconsider the state-of-the art on majority languages, given recurring evidence for non-canonical patterns that deviate from what has been assumed in the literature so far, and might have been attributed to bilingualism had we not included informal and spoken registers in monolinguals and bilinguals alike. (shrink)

We examined the associations between the characteristics of Instagram users and the features of their photographs. Narcissism, life satisfaction, and loneliness were employed for user variables and the features at high- and low-levels were employed to analyze the Instagram photographs. An online survey was conducted with 179 university students, and their Instagram photographs, 25,394 in total, were collected and analyzed. High-level features were extracted using Computer Vision and Emotion Application Programming Interfaces in Microsoft Azure Cognitive Services, and (...) low-level features were extracted utilizing the program written by the authors. The results of correlation analysis indicate that narcissism, life satisfaction, and loneliness were significantly associated with a part of photograph features at high- and low-levels. The results of the predictive analysis suggest that narcissism, loneliness in total, and social loneliness could be predicted with acceptable accuracy from Instagram photograph features, while characteristics such as life satisfaction, family loneliness, and romantic loneliness could not be predicted. Implications of this research and suggestions for further research were presented. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:A Theory of Bioethics by David DeGrazia and Joseph MillumColin Hoy (bio) and Winston Chiong (bio)Review of David DeGrazia and Joseph Millum, A Theory of Bioethics (Cambridge University Press, 2021)David DeGrazia and Joseph Millum’s A Theory of Bioethics 2021 arrives at a curious time for an ambitious effort at systematic theory construction, seemingly out of step with bioethical fashion. At the same time, a prominent group of philosophical (...) bioethicists authored an article, possibly with a touch of defensiveness, to “make the case that philosophy and philosophers still have a very important and meaningful role to play in contemporary bioethics” (Blumenthal-Barby et al. 2021). Meanwhile, the annual meeting of the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities included several expressions of impatience with the historical privileging of philosophy over more empirical, situated, and community-oriented approaches to moral problems in health.DeGrazia and Millum’s work itself reflects the current state of bioethics and how it has changed since the heyday of grand bioethical theory construction in the late twentieth century. To apply Parfit’s philosophical taxonomy (1984), the general frameworks promulgated by theorists like Veatch, Engelhardt, and Gert, as well as Beauchamp and Childress, were by necessity revisionary. These bioethical theories were whole-cloth alternatives to a conventional and paternalistic medical ethos that was already widely acknowledged as unsatisfactory. Today, however, bioethics is a mature and institutionalized field, with well-established practices and a corpus of accepted tenets (alongside matters of ongoing but generally demarcated controversy). A plausible and fruitful contemporary theory of bioethics must be largely descriptive, in Parfit’s sense, providing an intellectual framework that gives coherence and sense to existing practice, while at the same time clarifying matters of confusion.In contemporary bioethics, a central component of this practice is the application of the four principles of biomedical ethics—non-maleficence, beneficence, justice and autonomy—not merely as originally proposed by Beauchamp and Childress (2019), but in their refined form, following decades of exchange, critique, and revision. DeGrazia and Millum’s theory begins with two core values: well-being and respect for rights holders. [End Page 321] The bulk of the book then applies the method of reflective equilibrium to specify these two values in terms of the canonical four principles, here treated as “mid-level” constructs with readier application to specific cases than the two core values. Experienced bioethicists may have an uncanny sense of setting off from a new trailhead, and yet, eventually finding themselves still walking a familiar path. However, this way of introducing and explicating the four principles will likely be more accessible to a wider audience, including high-level undergraduates and graduate students not already versed in the revisions, refinements, and compromises embedded in Beauchamp and Childress’s discussions.Two other features recommend this book as a resource for trainees and interested non-experts seeking to deepen their understanding of bioethics. First, the clarity of its style and organizational approach provides a welcome orientation for non-specialists. The chapters are structured so that major contending perspectives are outlined before the authors develop arguments for their own positions in that context. Each chapter proceeds by considering applications of the broader theory, showing how it can illuminate potential candidate approaches or policies, as well as demonstrating how to use the tools of ethical analysis to evaluate these proposals in both ideal and non-ideal cases. This didactic approach to the relationship between conceptual argument and practice will be accessible to many who are initially unfamiliar with or intimidated by theory. Second the commendable decision to make the book electronically available and accessible also has the potential to broaden the reach of the work, and in particular, to engage parties in under-resourced settings, which have so often been overlooked in bioethical discourse.As noted above, while the authors’ approach is descriptive in Parfit’s sense, it is not necessarily conservative. In many places, the authors highlight how their theory includes elements or renders conclusions that are not broadly accepted, and following the method of reflective equilibrium, they advocate for these positions both in terms of broad principles and particular judgments about cases. This begins with their dual-value... (shrink)

The article analyzes textbooks and offers an insight into the didactical manuals written in early socialism. Textbooks of modest volume, published at the end of the forties and in the fifties of the last century, reflected the basic requirements of educational policy. The main goal of music education was to educate students to sing by notes. The publications were conceived as theoretical instructions for musical literacy. The first didactical manual written by Joža Požgaj was published, which in its (...) revised version was used in music teaching for many years. Textbooks written in the first half of the 1960s, after the educational reform, were adapted to children’s age, while didactical manuals focused on enriching the lessons with songs, literary examples, games, stories, the use of school instruments etc. The attention shifted from music literacy to singing as dominant activity in music teaching, but again with the aim of acquiring basic musical vocabulary. (shrink)

Since its inception, modern anthropology has stood at the confluence of two mutually constitutive modes of knowledge production: participant-observation and theoretical analysis. This unique combination of practice and theory has been the subject of recurrent intellectual and methodological debate, raising questions that strike at the very heart of the discipline. How Do We Know? is a timely contribution to emerging debates that seek to understand this relationship through the theme of evidence. Incorporating a diverse selection of case studies ranging from (...) the Tibetan emotion of shame to films of Caribbean musicians, it critically addresses such questions as: What constitutes viable anthropological evidence? How does evidence generated through small-scale, intensive periods of participant-observation challenge or engender abstract theoretical models? Are certain types of evidence inherently better than others? How have recent interdisciplinary collaborations and technological innovations altered the shape of anthropological evidence? Extending a long-standing tradition of reflexivity within the discipline, the contributions to this volume are ethnographically-grounded and analytically ambitious meditations on the theme of evidence. Cumulatively, they challenge the boundaries of what anthropologists recognise and construct as evidence, while pointing to its thematic and conceptual potential in future anthropologies. (shrink)

The internet offers adolescents a huge window of opportunities, but these opportunities are not always exempt from risks. Indeed, many young people are nowadays confronted with spam, gruesome or violent images and content including pornography, drugs, racism, and even suicide. We surveyed 815 Flemish 15- to 19-year-olds about the online risks they have been confronted with and on how they cope with these risks. We controlled for digital literacy levels, socio-demographics and personality traits. Interestingly, our research shows that not only (...) adolescents with a high level of internet literacy but also those with lower internet literacy levels, such as youths enrolled in vocational education, tend to be more frequently exposed to online risks. Also worthwhile noting is the fact that a high level of self-confidence positively correlates with exposure to risky online content. In general, adolescents do not consult anybody when it comes to coping with risks and negative experiences online. However, a good parent-child relationship pays off as kids with a good parental relationship encounter aggressive, sexual or value-based content less frequently. (shrink)

ContextBehavioral observation scales are important for understanding and assessing social skills. In the context of collaborative problem-solving skills, considered essential in the 21st century, there are no validated scales in French that can be adapted to different CPS tasks. The aim of this study is to adapt and validate, by annotating a new video corpus of dyadic interactions that we have collected, two observational scales allowing us to qualitatively assess CPS skills: the Social Performance Rating Scale and the Social Skills (...) of Collaboration Scale.MethodThe construct validity of these two scales was assessed by exploratory factor analysis and inter-item correlations. We also checked inter-judge agreement using inter-class correlation coefficients. Internal consistency was determined using Cronbach’s alpha and convergent and divergent validity by assessing correlations between the two scales and measures of depression and alexithymia. Finally, the discriminative properties of the two scales were analyzed by comparing the scores obtained by a group of anxious individuals and a non-anxious control group.ResultsThe results show that our two scales have excellent inter-item correlations. Internal consistency is excellent. Inter-rater agreement ranged from moderate to high. Finally, convergent validity was significant with the alexithymia scale, as was divergent validity with the depression scale. Anxious individuals had lower scores on both scales than non-anxious individuals.ConclusionBoth scales show good psychometric properties for assessing social skills relevant to different collaborative tasks. They also identify individuals with difficulties in social interaction. Thus, they could allow monitoring the effectiveness of training social skills useful in CPS. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:274 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY poisoning, spying, etc., which would render postwar mutual confidence impossible, shall not be countenanced. It is mainly with an eye to these preliminary articles that Professor Wilhelm Miiller argues for Kant's relevance to contemporary political problems. Miiller begins by drawing an analogy between the Peace of Basle (1795) and the Treaty of Versailles: in both instances, it is claimed, secret reservations at the treaty table, (...) the identification of defeated nation with "guilty" nation, and the deprivation of an entire "guiltless" people of "the most primitive right to live" helped lay the foundations for future wars. Miiller sees in the willful dispersion, through motives of revenge and greed, of the possessions of conquered nations after both World Wars a "reversion to the wildest barbarism." He defends Kant's stricture against standing armies as being "simply and logically irrefutable" in spite of Kant's toleration--understandable in 1795--of limited and voluntary militias adequate for national defense. He infers from Kant's warning against national economic dependency the urgent need to exclude international capitalism from world politics. He suggests that Kant's principle of non-interference in the internal affairs of nations has been violated in the splitting of East from West Germany. And he insinuates that the present form of government in the U.S. is democratic and republican only in name, being in actuality a capitalist oligarchy whose two-party system tends to degenerate into a one-party system. Professor Miiller is entitled to his views. The reader, however, is entitled to a more objective exposition of Kant's essay and perhaps even to hope for a more critical and searching appraisal of Kant's doctrines. One opportunity for the latter surely offers itself in regard to Kant's analogy between personal and international morality. The analogy might conceivably break down over the difficulty of assigning collective moral and legal responsibility. If, as Kant maintains, a state is a moral person, it should follow that it and not merely its constituent members taken singly has moral responsibility for what it undertakes. Leaving aside the question of whether or not Kant thought through the implications of his premise, it is clear that Professor Miiller has not done so. Whereas he considers atrocious the branding of the German people as guilty of international crime in either World War, he allows himself the judgment that the "Christian" people of Europe and America were guilty of mass-murder on both occasions. The inconsistency is evident. Left unexamined and even unmentioned are the following: Kant's well-known ethical principles--the concept of practical reason, the phenomenal-noumenal duality, the notion of design in nature, the doctrine of the Categorical Imperative binding on any rational will--upon which he explicitly grounds Perpetual Peace; his efforts to refute the notion of theoretical conflict between morality and politics; his misleading use of the language of the social contract theorists throughout the essay; his proposal, anticipatory of later British philosophers, that the principle of publicity is a necessary if not sufficient condition of morally proper legislation. Perpetual Peace deserves more than Professor Mfiller has given it. PETER FUSS University of California, Riverside The Earlier Letters of John Stuart Mill 1812-1848. Edited by Francis E. Mineka, with an Introduction by F. A. Hayek. Two vols. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, Routledge g: Kegan Paul. Pp. xxvii + 784. $20.00.) These two volumes of early correspondence are the first volumes to appear of a projected new edition of Mill's collected works. If the subsequent volumes maintain the high level of competence achieved here, the new edition will prove a valuable assistance to nineteenth- BOOK REVIEWS 275 century scholars. Of the 537 letters published, 238 have never before been in print, and 72 others have hitherto appeared only in part. Most of the work of assembling the letters was done by F. A. Hayek, but the extremely useful annotation was prepared by Francis E. Mineka. We are told that he and Dwight N. Lindley are planning an edition of the later letters (1849-1873). The earliest letter extant (printed in facsimile and hitherto unpublished) was written, at the age of 6, to Bentham. It... (shrink)

The Mamluk period of Islamic history witnessed a very vivid life of scientific endeavours. This was mainly due to the fact that the higher education institutions (madrasa) established by the Seljuqid and Ayyubid dynasties continued to develop as well as that Mamluk sultans and their commanders gave great importance to charitable institutions of education. With the facilities provided by these charities, Cairo and Damascus grew into important centres of attraction for scholars and teachers from all over the Islamic world. In (...) this atmosphere, a serious training activity was going on in almost every branch of religious and intellectual sciences alongside production of scientific works in these areas, in which both scientific traditions of earlier generations was preserved and continuity was maintained with considerable amount of detail and depth. The Mamluks, thus, became an important basin that nourished all regions of the Islamic world in terms of science and intellectual culture. The Mamluk period was also prolific in terms of tafsīr literature. A tafsīr chair was established in each one of the educational institutions, such as madrasas, mosques and khangāhs, where various tafsīr courses were taught, and tafsīr texts were read, by distinguished figures of the era. In these courses, the main text was usually the al-Kashshāf of al-Zamakhsharī (d. 538/1144), who had hitherto gained a dominant position in the tafsīr science, followed by the tafsīrs by al-Bayḍāwī (d. 685/1286) modelled on al-Kashshāf and al-Baghawī (d. 516/1122). Moreover, one of the peculiarities of the Mamluks in the scientific life was the public courses, called al-mīʿād, in which books were perused in public on tafsīr, ḥadith, or admonitions (mawʿiẓa). It is evident that these lessons and the tafsīr books had serious contributions to the development of the tafsīr literature and these tafsīrs were welcomed in every part of the Islamic world and have been taught until today. Works by prominent exegetes, such as al-Qurṭubī (d. 671/1273), al-Khāzin (d. 741/1341), Abū Ḥayyān (d. 745/1344), Samīn al-Ḥalabī (d. 756/1355), Ibn Kathīr (d. 774/1373), al-Biqāī (d. 885/1480) and al-Suyūtī (d. 911/1505) are most notable examples of such works of the period. In the Mamluk period, a good number of works was produced in the literary forms of commentary (sharḥ), gloss (ḥāshiya) and adjudication (muḥākamāt), a fact that reflects the scientific and intellectual level of the time. While commentaries and glosses were generally focused on the tafsīrs by al-Zamakhsharī and al-Bayḍāwī, the critiques and the adjudications, discussing different positions in these tafsīrs or commentaries and glosses on them constitute the textual evidence attesting to the high level of scientific activities. Of these texts comes first the commentary on al-Kashshāf by Quṭb al-Dīn al-Rāzī (d. 766/1365) which has determined the course of the discussions of the later commentaries. Among the most remarkable works of the Mamluks was the commentary on al-Kashshāf by the Hanafīte verifying scholar, Akmal al-Dīn al-Bābartī (d. 786/1384), and ʿAbd Allah b. Yūsuf al-Zaylaʿī’s (d. 762/1360) work. Taqī al-Dīn Ibn Taymiyya (d. 728/1328), who lived in Damascus at an early period of the Mamluks, developed a system of thought and science, at the heart of which he placed the Prophet, his companions and the following generation (al-salaf). This approach, which amounts the revitalization of the Salafist thought, was also reflected in the tafsīr area, while Ibn Taymiyya adopted a tafsīr method based on narrations, assumed a staunch attitude against the opinions based on sectarian affiliations, and, in this context, made harsh criticisms against the tafsīrs written before him. The tafsīr work, which was targeted most by his criticism arrows, was the al-Kashshāf, the most commonly read exegesis in the madrasas of the Mamluk period. He also sometimes accused the exegetes, such as Ibn ʿAṭiyya (d. 541/1147), a Sunnite exegete, of giving weight to the views of the theologians and stated that the ideal exegesis was that of al-Ṭabarī (d. 310/923), which generally depends on the views of al-Salaf with solid transition chains.Tafsīr education and works in the Mamluk period have not yet been given sufficient scholarly attention. This study therefore aims to show that this period had many peculiar aspects regarding tafsīr education and studies and that it had notable influence both on the Ottoman period and the modern times. Based on the historical data and products it contends that this period successfully continued the tradition of tafsīr as well as enjoyed a dynamic and an in-depth scholarly vitality on the area. (shrink)

In this contribution, an aspect of the research of one of the more distinct voices in South African theology, Jaco Gericke, is contextualised and outlined. Although Old Testament Theology is an oft-enough reflected on topic by South African Bible scholars, such a theology is never written by South African scholars. However, Gericke’s work tends in this direction. His work on God-talk, theo-logy, is the more important for our time, because it often relates to the kind of ideas popularly related (...) to for instance God as creator in the Genesis texts. Gericke’s work is however also attractive to intellectuals who work from the precepts of modernism or who are engaged in interdisciplinary research or who for purposes of decoloniality explore alternatives to Western scholarship. However, it is initially not easy for many readers to understand Gericke’s contribution in combining philosophy and Old Testament studies, both practised on high levels. To this end, three instances of Gericke’s argumentation are related as examples, with explanatory and interpretative comments made to demonstrate the high heuristic value of his contributions.Contribution: Jaco Gericke’s work can be characterised as theo-logy, in that he takes seriously the implications of modernism for ‘God-talk’. He combines Philosophy and Old Testament Exegesis as academic enterprises, the intellectual productivity of which is demonstrable by means of examples. (shrink)

In the Middle Ages, even more so than today, history writing could be an act of political engagement. In an era without formal representation, the ability to persuade audiences of particular views of the past could be a significant weapon for those seeking to gain rhetorical leverage in political disputes. Yet “useful” history could be compiled from existing works as well as written from scratch. Because of the technologies of transmission in the age before printing, texts were essentially unstable: (...) even authoritative works were vulnerable to editing and repackaging by copyists in ways that could fundamentally alter their original meanings. Moreover, because of the organization of manuscript production, historical compilations were more likely to reflect the views of communities rather than individual authors. Modern historians have observed that the Carolingian and Anglo-Norman periods, both of which witnessed a revival of interest in the writing of new history, also saw surges in the production of historical compilations that functioned as responses to high-level political events and contributed to the formation of social identities. (shrink)

The spread of English is so much an integral part of globalization that it has become an essential global literacy skill. In Asia, this poses immense challenges to governments and English language teaching and teacher education professions as they attempt to meet this demand from students for a high level of English proficiency. This volume examines English language education policies across ten Asian jurisdictions, the corresponding teacher education policies, and how these policies affect teachers and teacher educators. Each (...) chapter covers a different jurisdiction, and is written by a scholar engaged in the implementation of government policies on English language and teacher education, providing the reader with insiders' perspectives. It gives a fascinating glimpse into the remarkable similarities in the challenges posed to these countries and the critical issues that have emerged from the local responses despite their markedly different socioeconomic, political, cultural and historical backgrounds. (shrink)

The van Wijngaarden grammars are two-level grammars that present many interesting properties. In the present article I elaborate on six of these properties, to wit, (i) their being constituted by two grammars, (ii) their ability to generate (possibly infinitely many) strict languages and their own metalanguage, (iii) their context-sensitivity, (iv) their high descriptive power, (v) their productivity, or the ability to generate an infinite number of production rules, and (vi) their equivalence with the unrestricted, or Type-0, Chomsky grammars.

Previous discussions of the origins of writing in the Ancient Near East have not incorporated the neuroscience of literacy, which suggests that when southern Mesopotamians wrote marks on clay in the late-fourth millennium, they inadvertently reorganized their neural activity, a factor in manipulating the writing system to reflect language, yielding literacy through a combination of neurofunctional change and increased script fidelity to language. Such a development appears to take place only with a sufficient demand for writing and reading, such as (...) that posed by a state-level bureaucracy; the use of a material with suitable characteristics; and the production of marks that are conventionalized, handwritten, simple, and non-numerical. From the perspective of Material Engagement Theory, writing and reading represent the interactivity of bodies, materiality, and brains: movements of hands, arms, and eyes; clay and the implements used to mark it and form characters; and vision, motor planning, object recognition, and language. Literacy is a cognitive change that emerges from and depends upon the nexus of interactivity of the components. (shrink)

This article reports the findings from a study of discursive representations of the future role of technology in the work of the US National Intelligence Council. Specifically, it investigates the interplay of ‘techno-optimism’ and propositional certainty in the NIC’s ‘Future Global Trends Reports’. In doing so, it answers the following questions: To what extent was techno-optimism present in the discourse? What level of propositional certainty was expressed in the discourse? How did the discourse deal with the inherent uncertainty of (...) the future? Overall, the discourse was pronouncedly techno-optimist in its stance towards the future role of technology: high-technological solutions were portrayed as solving a host of problems, despite the readily available presence of low-technology or no-technology solutions. In all, 75.1% of the representations were presented as future categorical certainties, meaning the future was predominantly presented as a known and closed inevitability. The discourse dealt with the inherent uncertainty of the subject matter, that is, the future, by projecting the past and present into the future. This was particularly the case in relation to the idea of technological military dominance as a guarantee of global peace, and the role of technology as an inevitable force free from societal censorship. (shrink)

The article first addresses the importance of cognitive modeling, in terms of its value to cognitive science (as well as other social and behavioral sciences). In particular, it emphasizes the use of cognitive architectures in this undertaking. Based on this approach, the article addresses, in detail, the idea of a multi-level approach that ranges from social to neural levels. In physical sciences, a rigorous set of theories is a hierarchy of descriptions/explanations, in which causal relationships among entities at a (...) high level can be reduced to causal relationships among simpler entities at a more detailed level. We argue that a similar hierarchy makes possible an equally productive approach toward cognitive modeling. The levels of models that we conceive in relation to cognition include, at the highest level, sociological/anthropological models of collective human behavior, behavioral models of individual performance, cognitive models involving detailed mechanisms, representations, and processes, as well as biological/physiological models of neural circuits, brain regions, and other detailed biological processes. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:274 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY poisoning, spying, etc., which would render postwar mutual confidence impossible, shall not be countenanced. It is mainly with an eye to these preliminary articles that Professor Wilhelm Miiller argues for Kant's relevance to contemporary political problems. Miiller begins by drawing an analogy between the Peace of Basle (1795) and the Treaty of Versailles: in both instances, it is claimed, secret reservations at the treaty table, (...) the identification of defeated nation with "guilty" nation, and the deprivation of an entire "guiltless" people of "the most primitive right to live" helped lay the foundations for future wars. Miiller sees in the willful dispersion, through motives of revenge and greed, of the possessions of conquered nations after both World Wars a "reversion to the wildest barbarism." He defends Kant's stricture against standing armies as being "simply and logically irrefutable" in spite of Kant's toleration--understandable in 1795--of limited and voluntary militias adequate for national defense. He infers from Kant's warning against national economic dependency the urgent need to exclude international capitalism from world politics. He suggests that Kant's principle of non-interference in the internal affairs of nations has been violated in the splitting of East from West Germany. And he insinuates that the present form of government in the U.S. is democratic and republican only in name, being in actuality a capitalist oligarchy whose two-party system tends to degenerate into a one-party system. Professor Miiller is entitled to his views. The reader, however, is entitled to a more objective exposition of Kant's essay and perhaps even to hope for a more critical and searching appraisal of Kant's doctrines. One opportunity for the latter surely offers itself in regard to Kant's analogy between personal and international morality. The analogy might conceivably break down over the difficulty of assigning collective moral and legal responsibility. If, as Kant maintains, a state is a moral person, it should follow that it and not merely its constituent members taken singly has moral responsibility for what it undertakes. Leaving aside the question of whether or not Kant thought through the implications of his premise, it is clear that Professor Miiller has not done so. Whereas he considers atrocious the branding of the German people as guilty of international crime in either World War, he allows himself the judgment that the "Christian" people of Europe and America were guilty of mass-murder on both occasions. The inconsistency is evident. Left unexamined and even unmentioned are the following: Kant's well-known ethical principles--the concept of practical reason, the phenomenal-noumenal duality, the notion of design in nature, the doctrine of the Categorical Imperative binding on any rational will--upon which he explicitly grounds Perpetual Peace; his efforts to refute the notion of theoretical conflict between morality and politics; his misleading use of the language of the social contract theorists throughout the essay; his proposal, anticipatory of later British philosophers, that the principle of publicity is a necessary if not sufficient condition of morally proper legislation. Perpetual Peace deserves more than Professor Mfiller has given it. PETER FUSS University of California, Riverside The Earlier Letters of John Stuart Mill 1812-1848. Edited by Francis E. Mineka, with an Introduction by F. A. Hayek. Two vols. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, Routledge g: Kegan Paul. Pp. xxvii + 784. $20.00.) These two volumes of early correspondence are the first volumes to appear of a projected new edition of Mill's collected works. If the subsequent volumes maintain the high level of competence achieved here, the new edition will prove a valuable assistance to nineteenth- BOOK REVIEWS 275 century scholars. Of the 537 letters published, 238 have never before been in print, and 72 others have hitherto appeared only in part. Most of the work of assembling the letters was done by F. A. Hayek, but the extremely useful annotation was prepared by Francis E. Mineka. We are told that he and Dwight N. Lindley are planning an edition of the later letters (1849-1873). The earliest letter extant (printed in facsimile and hitherto unpublished) was written, at the age of 6, to Bentham. It... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Before Confucius: Studies in the Creation of the Chinese ClassicsJohn S. MajorBefore Confucius: Studies in the Creation of the Chinese Classics. By Edward L.Shaughnessy. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997. Pp. ix + 262. $19.95.The eight essays in this collection (six of them previously published) show the combination of boldness and erudition that is characteristic of all of Edward Shaughnes-sy's work. The results of his investigations (...) are always interesting and felicitously expressed, and if one sometimes resists following the author quite so far down the evidentiary and interpretive road as he himself is willing to go, the intellectual journey is always a rewarding one.The common thread in these essays is Shaughnessy's belief that the Chinese classics, although admittedly written in their final form at a time well after the era [End Page 314] to which they refer-that is, during the Warring States Period or even the Han—preserve much material that authentically refers to, and was originally written more-or-less contemporaneously with, events of the Western Zhou era. He adduces evidence from bronze inscriptions, archaeologically recovered texts, positional and calendrical astronomy, and other securely datable sources to argue for the authenticity of portions of the classics, notably the Book of Documents, the Book of Poetry, and the Book of Changes.Publication of these essays comes just when the antiquity of the classics is being challenged more vigorously than at any time since the "doubting antiquity" movement of the 1920s. In particular, the evidence presented by Bruce and Taeko Brooks and their associates in meetings of the Amherst-based Warring States Working Group tends to support a view not only that the classics were written down much later than the events they purport to describe (almost everyone agrees about that) but that much of the "historical" material in the classics is closer to legend than to fact, and may well represent later confabulation for purposes of political or philosophical advantage. Shaughnessy's Before Confucius and the Brookses' The Original Analects (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998) strikingly represent two poles of the contemporary disagreement about the nature and authenticity of the Chinese classics.As a charter member of the Warring States Working Group who has consistently dissented from its more radical antiquity-doubting positions, I am perhaps unusually well placed to comment on the questions of dating raised by Shaughnessy's work. It seems to me that the key to the synthesis that I suspect will form over the next decade or so is the nature of the archaeologically recovered texts of the Warring States Period that have emerged from the ground in such profusion in recent decades, and continue to do so. These attest to several unexpected things, including the extent to which texts were possessed, copied, and circulated at the time; the implied high level of literacy among the contemporary ruling class; the degree to which assemblages of texts from individual tombs seem not to represent schools, master-disciple lineages, or clear doctrinal or ideological groupings, but rather to testify to a strong eclectic tendency among the contemporary literate elite; and the degree to which recovered texts anticipate later received texts, but in variant and/or partial form (for example, the Guodian Laozi text, recognizably Laozi but a far cry from the complete, received Daodejing).In view of all this, it seems to me reasonable to say that on the one hand a fair amount of material may well have come down to later ages from the Western Zhou and Spring and Autumn periods (through many vicissitudes of copying, recitation, variation, repairs to broken and misarranged bundles of slips, and so on), to enter wide circulation as texts in the Warring States Period. On the other hand, the late Warring States and Han editors of the textual tradition that had come down to them collated, amalgamated, sorted, augmented, and otherwise shaped the texts to a somewhat larger degree than has sometimes been supposed, and it is extremely unlikely that any of the Chinese classics were in circulation in anything like their received form at the end of the Spring and Autumn periods. Thus, while I... (shrink)

This is a review-essay on William Haver’s recent translation of three essays by Nishida Kitarō in a volume entitledOntologies of Production. Nishida is one of the founders of the famous Kyoto School of philosophy and, while his philosophy is not really Marxist, Haver attempts to bring Nishida into dialogue with Marx in his Introduction and through his selection of essays to translate. I attempt to situate Haver’s translation in a brief discussion of a recent debate on how to write modern (...) Japanese intellectual history and, through this examination, I suggest a framework for analysing modern intellectual history drawing on the work of Harry Harootunian, Moishe Postone and Jacques Bidet. In short, this framework attempts to relate the production of ideas to the temporal dynamic associated with capital, the commodity-form and other related mediations that make up the modern global capitalist system. Then I turn to Haver’s Introduction and translations and both explain some of the key concepts of Nishida and show how, using the framework that I outlined, Nishida’s work can be conceived of as failing to understand its own conditions of possibility in the multiple mediations of capitalism. For this reason, Nishida’s work, like many other romantic critiques of capitalism, criticises the abstractions of modernity at an abstract level, failing to account for the mediations of capitalism such as class and the commodity. (shrink)

The importance of writing as a means of communication in a society formerly without it, or where writing has been confined to particular groups, is enormous. It objectifies speech, provides language with a material correlative, and in this material form speech can be transmitted over space and preserved over time. In this book the contributors discuss cultures at different levels of sophistication and literacy and examine the importance of writing on the development of these societies. All the articles except the (...) first were specially written for this book and the extensive introduction unites and synthesizes the material. (shrink)

When learning a new math concept, should learners be first taught the concept and its associated procedures and then solve problems, or solve problems first even if it leads to failure and then be taught the concept and the procedures? Two randomized-controlled studies found that both methods lead to high levels of procedural knowledge. However, students who engaged in problem solving before being taught demonstrated significantly greater conceptual understanding and ability to transfer to novel problems than those who were (...) taught first. The second study further showed that when given an opportunity to learn from the failed problem-solving attempts of their peers, students outperformed those who were taught first, but not those who engaged in problem solving first. Process findings showed that the number of student-generated solutions significantly predicted learning outcomes. These results challenge the conventional practice of direct instruction to teach new math concepts and procedures, and propose the possibility of learning from one's own failed problem-solving attempts or those of others before receiving instruction as alternatives for better math learning. (shrink)

Spectroscopy is a scientific topic at the interface between Chemistry and Physics, which is taught at high school level in relation with its fundamental applications in Analytical Chemistry. In the first part of the paper, the topic of spectroscopy is analyzed having in mind the well-known Johnstone’s triangle of chemistry education, putting in evidence the way spectroscopy is usually taught at the three levels of chemical knowledge: macroscopic/phenomenological, sub-microscopic/molecular and symbolic ones. Among these three levels, following Johnstone’s recommendations (...) the macroscopic one is the most useful for high school students who learn spectroscopy for the first time. Starting from these premises, in the second part of the paper, we propose a didactic sequence which is inspired by the historical evolution of spectroscopic instruments from the first spectroscopes invented by Gustav Kirchhoff and Robert Bunsen in 1860 to the UV–vis spectrophotometers which became common since the 1960s. The idea behind our research is to analyze the conceptual advancements through the history of spectroscopy and to identify the key episodes/experiments and spectroscopic instruments. For each of them, a didactic activity, typically an experiment, is then proposed underlining the relevant aspects from the chemistry education point of view. The present paper is the occasion to reflect on the potentialities of an historical approach combined with a laboratorial one, and to discuss the role of historical instruments and related technological improvements to teach spectroscopy. (shrink)

Disputes at the intersection of national security, surveillance, civil liberties, and transparency are nothing new, but they have become a particularly prominent part of public discourse in the years since the attacks on the World Trade Center in September 2001. This is in part due to the dramatic nature of those attacks, in part based on significant legal developments after the attacks (classifying persons as “enemy combatants” outside the scope of traditional Geneva protections, legal memos by White House counsel providing (...) rationale for torture, the USA Patriot Act), and in part because of the rapid development of communications and computing technologies that enable both greater connectivity among people and the greater ability to collect information about those connections. -/- One important way in which these questions intersect is in the controversy surrounding bulk collection of telephone metadata by the U.S. National Security Agency. The bulk metadata program (the “metadata program” or “program”) involved court orders under section 215 of the USA Patriot Act requiring telecommunications companies to provide records about all calls the companies handled and the creation of database that the NSA could search. The program was revealed to the general public in June 2013 as part of the large document leak by Edward Snowden, a former contractor for the NSA. -/- A fair amount has been written about section 215 and the bulk metadata program. Much of the commentary has focused on three discrete issues. First is whether the program is legal; that is, does the program comport with the language of the statute and is it consistent with Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches and seizures? Second is whether the program infringes privacy rights; that is, does bulk metadata collection diminish individual privacy in a way that rises to the level that it infringes persons’ rights to privacy? Third is whether the secrecy of the program is inconsistent with democratic accountability. After all, people in the general public only became aware of the metadata program via the Snowden leaks; absent those leaks, there would have not likely been the sort of political backlash and investigation necessary to provide some kind of accountability. -/- In this chapter I argue that we need to look at these not as discrete questions, but as intersecting ones. The metadata program is not simply a legal problem (though it is one); it is not simply a privacy problem (though it is one); and it is not simply a secrecy problem (though it is one). Instead, the importance of the metadata program is the way in which these problems intersect and reinforce one another. Specifically, I will argue that the intersection of the questions undermines the value of rights, and that this is a deeper and more far-reaching moral problem than each of the component questions. (shrink)

L’article présente le projet ORFEO (outils pour l’étude du Français écrit et oral). Ce projet a consisté à rassembler 4M de mots de Français oral et 6M de mots d’écrit à partir de ressources existantes. Les ressources orales ont été unifiées dans un format trs et alignées avec les fichiers sons au phonème. Les corpus sont présentés avec des métadonnées qui permettent de constituer des sous-corpus d’étude. Les données orales ont été segmentées et annotées en POS et relations de dépendance (...) semi automatiquement. La précision des annotations a fait l’objet d’une évaluation. L’ensemble est interrogeable à partir d’une plateforme adaptée du logiciel libre ANNIS. La ressource sera mise à disposition en open source courant 2017. (shrink)

This study examined lexical bundles used differently by Chinese and American PhD students of linguistics in their dissertation abstracts. Two corpora were built, with each having 700 dissertation abstracts produced by Chinese and American PhD students of linguistics, respectively. The study then used lexical analysis software to retrieve frequently used three-word LBs, from which LBs having different frequencies at a significant level across the two corpora were identified and termed as bundles used differently. BUDs were then categorized and analyzed (...) manually in terms of structure, function, and distribution in rhetorical moves. The major findings were: 57.14% of the frequently used LBs were BUDs, of which 90.67% had occurrences in both corpora. The BUDs distributed inequivalently across categories and moves, with the text-oriented category and the move of Result having the most BUDs; and BUDs exhibited two major patterns: the Chinese and American students filled different constituents into structurally and functionally similar constructions, and used LBs of dissimilar functions to fulfill the same communicative purposes. These findings indicate that variations in LB use have a high pedagogic value and confirm the need for using corpora to identify and teach core genre-specific vocabularies to second/foreign language learners. (shrink)