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Since the early 2010s, the arts and culture in Sweden have taken a stand against the prevailing epistemic ignorance of the country's Indigenous Sámi people by confronting majoritarian society with the realities of settler colonialism. This article suggests that theatre and performance form part of this Sámi cultural activism and highlights the decolonial labour of Giron Sámi Teáhter, the oldest professionally driven touring company in the Swedish part of Sápmi. Taking one specific production as a springboard, the article demonstrates the larger, structural issues at stake. Giron Sámi Teáhter deploys the stage as a vibrant, decolonial forum where the history of settler colonialism and the Sámi people's struggle toward self-determination is performed, celebrated and encouraged. The company has long striven to gain official status as the national theatre for Sámi performing arts in Sweden and the article therefore also outlines the financial and political impediments encountered by Giron Sámi Teáhter. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently, many question answering systems that derive answers from linked data repositories have been developed. The purpose of this survey is to identify the common features and approaches of the semantic question answering (SQA) systems, although many different and prototype systems have been designed. The SQA systems use a formal query language like SPARQL and knowledge of a specific vocabulary. This paper analyses different frameworks, architectures, or systems that perform SQA and classifies SQA systems based on different criteria. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Social media are an emerging new paradigm in interdisciplinary research in crisis informatics. They bring many opportunities as well as challenges to all fields of application and research involved in the project of using social media content for an improved disaster management. Using the Central European flooding 2013 as our case study, we optimize and apply methods from the field of natural language processing and unsupervised machine learning to investigate the thematic and temporal structure of German social media communication. By means of topic model analysis, we will investigate which kind of content was shared on social media during the event. On this basis, we will, furthermore, investigate the development of topics over time and apply temporal clustering techniques to automatically identify different characteristic phases of communication. From the results, we, first, want to reveal properties of social media content and show what potential social media have for improving disaster management in Germany. Second, we will be concerned with the methodological issue of finding and adapting natural language processing methods that are suitable for analysing social media data in order to obtain information relevant for disaster management. With respect to the first, application-oriented focal point, our study reveals high potential of social media content in the factual, organizational and psychological dimension of the disaster and during all stages of the disaster management life cycle. Interestingly, there appear to be systematic differences in thematic profile between the different platforms Facebook and Twitter and between different stages of the event. In context of our methodological investigation, we claim that if topic model analysis is combined with appropriate optimization techniques, it shows high applicability for thematic and temporal social media analysis in disaster management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article describes the process of creating a Finnish language FrameNet or FinnFN, based on the original English language FrameNet hosted at the International Computer Science Institute in Berkeley, California. We outline the goals and results relating to the FinnFN project and especially to the creation of the FinnFrame corpus. The main aim of the projectwas to test the universal applicability of frame semantics by annotating real Finnish using the same frames and annotation conventions as in the original Berkeley FrameNet project. From Finnish newspaper corpora, 40,721 sentences were automatically retrieved and manually annotated as example sentences evoking certain frames. This became the FinnFrame corpus.Applying theBerkeley FrameNet annotation conventions to the Finnish language required some modifications due to Finnish morphology, and a convention for annotating individual morphemes within words was introduced for phenomena such as compounding, comparatives and case endings. Various questions about cultural salience across the two languages arose during the project, but problematic situations occurred only in a few examples, which we also discuss in the article. The article shows that, barring a few minor instances, the universality hypothesis of frames is largely confirmed for languages as different as Finnish and English. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article describes a class of speech varieties whose members have traditionally been called "slang" or "argot" in a large and long-standing literature. Despite the size of this literature, the characteristics of these speech varieties have remained obscure to those who purport to study them. The thing called "slang" has traditionally been reduced to the repertoires that count as samples of the thing without attention to either (a) the reflexive processes through which samples of the thing come to be differentiated from other discursive behaviors or (b) the social-interpersonal processes through which slang expressions undergo change in form and significance for different members of a language community. This article examines these reflexive social processes by considering examples from a large number of languages and historical periods. It offers a comparative framework for studying the forms of social life that such discursive behaviors enable or displace. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The first round of elections for local people's congresses was an important moment in the Chinese Communist Party's efforts to create an image of the common people as the “masters of the country.” Lower-class people were portrayed in official propaganda as “masters” who were also supporters of the Party. Yet, those “masters” nevertheless displayed diverse political attitudes that were influenced by different local political cultures, particularly in Beijing and Shanghai. The official propaganda promoting the “masters” was a Communist strategy to gain political legitimacy that ironically created the foundation for heterodox mass movements. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In the past quarter century, Hungary has offered fertile ground for innovative developments in foreign language (FL) education. The appropriate, albeit disparaging, label applied to Hungary in the mid-1970s – ‘a land of foreign language illiterates’ (Köllő 1978: 6) – no longer applies. In the wake of the dramatic changes of 1989, the number of FL speakers rose quite rapidly. As a beneficial side-effect, applied linguistic and language education research, areas which used to be relegated to the lowest rung of the academic ladder, began to be recognised as legitimate fields of scientific inquiry, offering young researchers the opportunity to embark on an academic career. As a result, Hungarian authors are now regular contributors to distinguished journals, and researchers from Hungary are welcome speakers at international conferences.However, Hungarian authors often choose to publish their research studies in local journals and volumes which are not easily accessible to the international research community, especially if written in Hungarian. The aim of this review, therefore, is to give an overview of such studies to demonstrate the breadth and depth of recent research conducted in Hungary. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This essay follows recent work in environmental history to explore the history of recycling in physical sciences in Britain and North America since the seventeenth century. The term ‘recycling’ is here used broadly to refer to a variety of practices that extended the life of material resources for doing science in the early modern period. These included practices associated with maintenance, repair, exchange and the adaptation or reuse of material culture. The essay argues that such practices were common in early modern science, and informed experimental spaces and techniques and the ideas that they generated. The essay considers some of the varied motivations that led to such practices, and concludes by examining the endurance of recycling in science since the end of the eighteenth century, particularly in recent efforts to create sustainable scientific research practices. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Aristotle's Ethica Eudemia (EE) Book 2 Chapter 2 contains, at lines 1220b10–11, a well-known crux in the phrase ἐν τοῖς ἀπηλλαγμένοις. The context makes clear that Aristotle is using this phrase to refer to some writing or other, but scholars have been puzzled both about what the phrase means and what writing it refers to. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The target paper claims to contribute to the conceptualisation of kinship but is, in fact, only concerned with descriptive kinship terminologies. It uses Optimal Theory to analyse this vocabulary but it is not clear if this is to be understood as a psychological phenomenon. Jones does not make clear how this special vocabulary might relate to kinship in general. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Private ordering-i.e., development of extralegal forums and forms of dispute processing by nonhierarchical groups-has preoccupied legal economists for nearly three decades. According to the prevailing analysis, private orders grow in socially-flat market communities without any intervention by the state. This article challenges the received view on two fronts: First, it establishes a causal connection between the development of private orders and a social hierarchy. Second, the article demonstrates that the state often intentionally assumes a proactive role in the creation of these orders. To illustrate this two-pronged theory of private ordering, this article offers a detailed analysis of three well-known cases that have been considered prototypes of private ordering by market communities: the Diamond Dealers Club of New York, the kibbutz in Israel, and ranch owners in Shasta County, California. Finally, the article argues for a need to re-evaluate the feasibility and desirability of private ordering and privatization of law. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reviews the proliferation of terms that have been coined to denote the language environment of the young child. It is argued that terms are often deployed by researchers without due consideration of their appropriateness for particular empirical studies. It is further suggested that just three of the dozen or more available terms meet the needs of child language researchers in most instances: CHILD-DIRECTED SPEECH, INFANT-DIRECTED SPEECH and EXPOSURE LANGUAGE. The phenomena denoted by these terms are then considered. The term REGISTER is generally borrowed for this purpose from sociolinguistics. However, close inspection of this concept reveals that the notion of REGISTER needs to be constrained, in specified ways, in order to be of any real value within the field of child language research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The analysis of societies, and of systems of business within them, has tended to be heavily influenced by institutionalist perspectives. Many scholars using this approach include culture as a subset of institutions, but often without specifying the logics of doing so. Others remove culture from the account, or acknowledge its significance without placing it clearly in their models. Culturalists, however, tend not to venture into the details of economic coordination and action. To resolve the theoretical challenges posed by this set of contrasting views, it is necessary to specify how culture works and how it is different from institutions. As ‘the societal effect’ is the influence of culture on institutions, it may thus be easier to study its workings. Here culture is seen, following Sorge, as meaning relevant within a series of semantic spaces, each related to a field of action, the total integrated coherently by social axioms binding the spaces and the meanings within them into a total societal fabric of meaning. The private sector of the Chinese economy is analysed, drawing from recent extensive empirical reports as to its functioning. Theory development is in line with business systems theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the epistemologies of religion and politics in Africa. It mentions that religious modes of thinking have a pervasive influence on the politics of Africa. Due to this, a theoretical model that was set out in the book "Worlds of Power" that shows the relationship between politics and religion in sub-Saharan Africa is presented. The model examines the range of social phenomena observable in Africa to formulate a definition of religion that incorporates features relevant to its specific context. It suggests that religion and politics become two facets of power that are in constant interaction. The author recommends that analysts should consider how spiritual power works as a political force in contemporary societies.

The article focuses on temple formation and the changing monastic patronage in Sri Lanka during the twentieth and twenty-first century. It delves into the significance of ideal ritual performance, caste discrimination, and merit-making to lay donors in motivating them toward the establishment of monastic institutions to acquire temple patronage. An overview of temple building in Sri Lanka is provided.

The recent scaling down of mobile device form factors has increased the importance of predictive text entry. It is now also becoming an important communication tool for the disabled. Techniques related to predictive text entry software are discussed in a generalized, language-independent manner. The essence of predictive text entry is twofold, consisting of (1) the design of codes for text entry, and (2) the use of adaptive language models for decoding. Code design is examined in terms of the information-theoretical efficiency. Four adaptive language models are introduced and compared, and experimental results on text entry with these models are shown for English, Thai and Japanese. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article sets forth the contrast between the image of the horses in Beowulf and the image of Anglo-Saxon horses that can be derived from archaeology, historical narratives, wills, law codes and glossaries. It focuses particularly on the issue of colour, represented in the poem by the difficult word fealu and its derivative, ??ppelfealu. It argues that the horses described in Beowulf do not match up closely with Anglo-Saxon horses recorded in any century and that they would have struck the poem's tenth-century audience as very strange. This strangeness has implications for our understanding of Anglo-Saxon reception of the poem. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

An approach to Gospel narratives that treats them as realistically depicted stories and emphasises the way their details function within the time-of-Jesus scenes they portray yields substantial exegetical results. Alternative approaches such as allegorical reading, focus on theological words, and the pursuit of intra-Gospel allusions sometimes stand in tension with this kind of concrete reading, and can distract interpreters from attending to surface-level scenes and details. The value of concrete reading and the effects of alternative approaches may be seen through examining several texts: the Nicodemus narratives of John; Mark 8.22-6; John 1.35-9; Mark 14.38; and John 21.15-17. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Heil's article claims that there is evidence supporting the authenticity of the 'pericope adulterae' based on the linguistic links that have been established between the story and the Johannine narrative. Heil's arguments fall short on both external and internal grounds. In the case of linguistic linkages, he only compares special vocabulary and not any unique syntactical features. Heil dismisses the syntactical and lexical characteristics of the 'pericope adulterae' without warrant, and draws parallels which are unconvincing and not unique to John. The 'pericope adulterae' should not be attributed to John as it is inconsistent with his style.

Historiography and epistemology are two subjects not often brought together in sociolegal studies. This article takes reconstructions of legal history as a subject of sociological investigation. The institutional "acceptability" of any historical representation is a complex social achievement since there are no objective criteria for verifying historical accounts. I juxtapose two competing reconstructions of Fourteenth Amendment history, by legal scholars Charles Fairman and William Crosskey, and examine how both reconstructions took place with reference to preexisting interpretive frameworks. I also examine the social and institutional settings in which these histories interacted and competed for credibility. The Fairman/Crosskey dispute served to socialize future participants in Fourteenth Amendment debate. With the Fairman/Crosskey exchanges, battle lines were drawn and topics of debate were established. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Analyzes the concepts of indeterminancy, ethnophilosophy, linguistic and African philosophy. Focus on methodologies; Indeterminancy Thesis (IT) proposed by W.V.O. Quine; Some formative insights of Quine about the nature of language, nature of meaning, and the relationships between languages arising from IT; Quine's translation guidelines; Characteristics of ethnophilosophy; Philosophy of language.

Opinion. Examines whether findings regarding verse-making techniques of modern folksongs could be applied to the Homeric epics, and whether they could be made to reflect on the making of ancient epic poetry. Comparison of verse making at the level of phraseology and modern folk poetry; Reference to Parry and Lord theory of oral composition.

Describes the pressures of collectivization on reindeer herders of northeastern Siberia and the reorganization of labor by contracts under perestroika.