What are the semantic representations that underlie language production? We use structural priming to distinguish between two competing theories. Thematic roles define semantic structure in terms of atomic units that specify event participants and are ordered with respect to each other through a hierarchy of roles. Event structures instead instantiate semantic structure as embedded sub‐predicates that impose an order on verbal arguments based on their relative positioning in these embeddings. Across two experiments, we found that priming for datives depended on (...) the degree of overlap in event structures. Specifically, while all dative structures showed priming, due to common syntax, there was a boost for compositional datives priming other compositional datives. Here, the two syntactic forms have distinct event structures. In contrast, there was no boost in priming for dative light verbs, where the two forms map onto a single event representation. On the thematic roles hypothesis, we would have expected a similar degree of priming for the two cases. Thus, our results support event structural approaches to semantic representation and not thematic roles. (shrink)

Business Ethics, the Environment &Responsibility, Volume 31, Issue 4, Page 1185-1192, October 2022.

Causal processes can give rise to distinctive distributions in the linguistic variables that they affect. Consequently, a secure understanding of a variable's distribution can hold a key to understanding the forces that have causally shaped it. A storied distribution in linguistics has been Zipf's law, a kind of power law. In the wake of a major debate in the sciences around power-law hypotheses and the unreliability of earlier methods of evaluating them, here we re-evaluate the distributions claimed to characterize phoneme (...) frequencies. We infer the fit of power laws and three alternative distributions to 166 Australian languages, using a maximum likelihood framework. We find evidence supporting earlier results, but also nuancing them and increasing our understanding of them. Most notably, phonemic inventories appear to have a Zipfian-like frequency structure among their most-frequent members (though perhaps also a lognormal structure) but a geometric (or exponential) structure among the least-frequent. We compare these new insights the kinds of causal processes that affect the evolution of phonemic inventories over time, and identify a potential account for why, despite there being an important role for phonetic substance in phonemic change, we could still expect inventories with highly diverse phonetic content to share similar distributions of phoneme frequencies. We conclude with priorities for future work in this promising program of research. (shrink)

This book proposes a review of important Western philosophies and their significance for managers, management academics, and management consultants. It argues that management is an applied philosophical endeavor.

The purpose of this article is to argue that the ethical concepts and principles that made Peter Drucker a leading figure in management can be analysed in the terms of the oldest Western worldview, ancient heroism. A description of the salient features of heroism is offered first, followed by an overview of Drucker’s ‘Management by Objectives’ framework. These expositions show that ancient heroism is an important component of MBO and reveal its strengths and weaknesses.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to explore Turkish students’ perceived relevance of Facebook, the value of Facebook advertisements and the ethics of Facebook targeting users with advertisements. Design/methodology/approach Latent class cluster analysis is estimated to determine whether segments exist and whether covariates differ among segments. Findings Segments differ on Facebook relevance and advertisement targeting ethics and usefulness and the covariates gender, hours spent on Facebook during the week and personality. The segment that finds Facebook most relevant and uses (...) it the most disapproves of Facebook’s targeted advertisements. Facebook is an organization that relies heavily on advertising dollars for survival. This fact should be emphasized; otherwise, Facebook may not be able to sustain itself. Originality/value The paper provides an understanding of Facebook from a marketing perspective for a country at the crossroads of Europe and Asia. (shrink)

In many communities around the world, speech to infants and small children has increased mean pitch, increased pitch range, increased vowel duration, and vowel hyper-articulation when compared to speech directed to adults. Some of these IDS and CDS features are also attested in foreigner-directed speech, which has been studied for a smaller range of languages, generally major national languages, spoken by millions of people. We examined vowel acoustics in CDS, conversational ADS, and monologues directed to a foreigner in the Towet (...) dialect of the Papuan language Nungon, spoken by 300 people in a remote region in northeastern Papua New Guinea. Previous work established that Nungon CDS entails optional use of consonant alteration, special nursery vocabulary, and special morphosyntax. This study shows that Nungon CDS to children aged 2;2–3;10 lacks vowel hyper-articulation, but still displays other common prosodic traits of CDS styles around the world: increased mean pitch and pitch range. A developmental effect was also attested, in that speech to 2-year-olds contained vowels that were significantly longer than those in speech to 3-year-olds, which in turn had vowels of similar duration to those in Nungon ADS. We also found that Nungon FDS vowel triangles, measured from monologues primarily directed to a non-native speaker, were significantly larger than those of either CDS or conversational ADS, indicating vowel hyper-articulation. The Nungon pattern may align with the patterns of vowels in Norwegian IDS, CDS, and FDS, where hyper-articulation is found in FDS, but not CDS or IDS. The languages of the New Guinea area constitute 20% of the world's languages, but neither an acoustic comparison of vowels in CDS and ADS, nor an acoustic study of FDS, has previously been completed for any language of New Guinea. The function of an FDS style in a small, closed community like those of much of New Guinea may differ from that in larger societies, since there are very few non-native speakers of Nungon. Thus, this study uses monologues recorded with a foreign researcher as interlocutor to study Nungon FDS. (shrink)

Despite the fact that Ayn Rand did not influence the best artists, she did leave an important legacy for the American imagination and literary establishment. Rand's influence is arguably more multi-genre than any other author. Some multi-genre authors who were possibly influenced by Rand include: John Steinbeck (literature), Mickey Spillane and Ian Fleming (detective fiction), Ira Levin, Cameron Hawley, Erika Holzer and Kay Nolte Smith (popular fiction) and Terry Goodkind (science fiction). Her influence represents an important balance between many (...) various types of American Literature and is a credit to the hybrid and versatile nature of her fiction. (shrink)