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The widespread use of English in science and scholarship has stressed the increasing need for reference tools which provide non-native, especially junior, researchers with useful information about the collocational patterns as well as conventionalized phraseology of non-technical words prototypical of specialized discourses. Within this lexicographic trend, the GRELIC research group research (GRELIC) has developed SciE-Lex, a lexicographic tool which includes morphosyntactic and contextual information about the combinatory potential of general words commonly used in biomedical discourse. This article serves the purpose of checking the validity of SciE-Lex by means of a qualitative survey distributed among a group of experts who were asked to explore and rate the dictionary by highlighting its weaknesses and strengths. The analysis of their reports have revealed interesting findings with respect to the adequacy of SciE-Lex as a lexicographic tool addressed to the biomedical community as well as to the appropriateness of the inclusion of contextual information of non-specialized terms prototypical of biomedical discourse. This pre-evaluation has informed the revision process of the dictionary and thus has greatly contributed to verifying its usefulness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most of the new knowledge about our past that is generated in cultural heritage disciplines is produced in non-structured forms, such as project reports, monographs, or research papers. This proliferation of cultural heritage knowledge in textual discourse form requires support for information structuration and extraction of the semantic relations embedded in these texts, in order to fully understand and post-process them. Previous works show that discourse analysis techniques can represent pieces of textual information in a highly structured manner, identifying the semantic relations between them and the entities referred to in the discourse according to well-established linguistic patterns. This is particularly useful for aligning the structure and information extracted with information system post-processing techniques, such as natural language processing, that are currently applied to cultural heritage. In this paper, we apply discourse models through a previously developed methodology to a real case study to represent and analyse cultural heritage textual narratives. Then, we perform an empirical study with cultural heritage experts in order to validate the models obtained, the resultant information, some usability aspects of the approach, and the degree of agreement between experts. The main objective was to obtain empirical and quantitative validation of the application of our proposed discourse analysis methodology to narratives in cultural heritage, its implications for different specialists, and its possibilities as a methodology to assist in providing structure to and capturing the semantics of freestyle documents, to automatize some discourse information extraction tasks and to facilitate their post-processing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A major challenge in the philosophy of mathematics is to explain how mathematical language can pick out unique structures and acquire determinate content. In recent work, Button and Walsh have introduced a view they call 'internalism', according to which mathematical content is explained by internal categoricity results formulated and proven in second-order logic. In this paper, we critically examine the internalist response to the challenge and discuss the philosophical significance of internal categoricity results. Surprisingly, as we argue, while internalism arguably explains how we pick out unique mathematical structures, this does not suffice to account for the determinacy of mathematical discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents two experiments comparing presupposition triggers that differ with respect to Focus-sensitivity. The hypothesis was that Focus-sensitive (+ focus) triggers require a linguistic antecedent in the discourse model, whereas presuppositions of triggers lacking Focus-sensitivity (– focus) are satisfied as entailments of the Common Ground. Each experiment tested a distinct prediction of this hypothesis, namely (i) being subject to salience, operationalized relative to the QUD, and (ii) global accommodation difficulty. Experiment 1 compared too as a + focus trigger and again as a – focus trigger in short dialogues and manipulated the presence or absence of material intervening between the target sentence containing the trigger and the utterance satisfying its presupposition. Intervening material led to a decrease in ratings as well as longer full sentence reading times of the target sentence for too but not again , in line with the prediction. Experiment 2 compared four trigger pairs that differed in Focus-sensitivity relative to presuppositionless control in a rating study in contexts that did not explicitly satisfy their presupposition. As predicted, + focus triggers showed a larger decrease in ratings than – focus triggers. The picture that emerges from these results is that the same kind of meaning - presuppositions - can be grounded in different aspects of the context in relation to an independent property of the trigger - Focus-sensitivity - which directly affects the discourse behavior of a trigger. The paper concludes with a discussion of some implications of the findings for linguistic theory, in particular anaphoricity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I observe a number of new plural and (apparently) quantified examples of free indirect discourse (FID) and protagonist projection (PP). I analyse them within major current theoretical approaches, proposing extensions to these approaches where needed. In order to derive the wide range of readings observed with plural protagonists, I show how we can exploit existing mechanisms for the interpretation of plural anaphora and plural predication. The upshot is that the interpretation of plural examples of perspective shift relies on a remarkable concert of covert semantic and pragmatic operations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the late Elizabethan period Ireland became a critical focus of the Tudor regime as the Nine Years War (c.1593-1603) threatened English rule in the second Tudor kingdom and the country became a theatre of the Anglo-Spanish War (1585-1604). As a result of this military emergency officials in Ireland began composing a deluge of policy papers from the mid-1590s onwards. Over two hundred of these treatises are extant. This paper provides the first systematic overview of this war-time discourse on Ireland. In doing so it sheds light on these writings and their significance for the history of late Elizabethan Ireland. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the late Elizabethan period Ireland became a critical focus of the Tudor regime as the Nine Years War (c.1593-1603) threatened English rule in the second Tudor kingdom and the country became a theatre of the Anglo-Spanish War (1585-1604). As a result of this military emergency officials in Ireland began composing a deluge of policy papers from the mid-1590s onwards. Over two hundred of these treatises are extant. This paper provides the first systematic overview of this war-time discourse on Ireland. In doing so it sheds light on these writings and their significance for the history of late Elizabethan Ireland. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Work in feminist and critical race aesthetics brings out a complex interaction between aesthetic, ethical, and political value. The interest in ethico-political considerations is also found in recent literature around art and ethics, such as debates about the work of immoral artists, cultural appropriation and heritage, and art in public spaces. These discussions are characterized by a social structural approach to the ethico-political value of art that focuses on relations between artworks, other artefacts, and individuals in specific sociohistorical contexts and as they emerge from specific social organizations. In this paper I present the main features and assumptions behind these social structural approaches to the values of art. I examine accounts that take ethico-political value to depend on artworks' contributions to public discourse and on their role in constituting social structures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Historians of science and medicine have long argued for the need to recover non-specialist views of medicine and health, as research has often concentrated on practitioner accounts. In this paper, we examine medical discourse in the British periodical the Monthly Review. Published monthly from 1749 to 1844, the Monthly was greatly influential in its time. However, it has received limited scholarly attention, due in part to the unwieldy size of its corpus, which spans 96 years and 246 volumes, each composed of three–six monthly issues. We employ statistical topic modelling to analyse the Monthly , revealing the presentation and prevalence of various public medical discourses, as well as how these discourses varied over the course of the periodical's almost 100 years. As the Monthly aimed to review every published text, it provides records of and contemporary discussions about thousands of texts currently lost from archives. This analysis of the Monthly ultimately sheds light on the medical topics and texts that featured prominently in British public discourse during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent times, there has been a surge of interest in, and enthusiasm for, contextualist views about prudential discourse—thought and talk about what has prudential value or contributes to someone's well-being. In this paper, I examine and reject two cases for radical forms of prudential contextualism, proposed by Anna Alexandrova and Steve Campbell. Alexandrova holds that the semantic content of terms like 'well-being' and 'doing well' varies across contexts. Campbell proposes that there are plural prudential concepts at play in prudential discourse (and in philosophical reflection upon such discourse) and that we find evidence of this in the conflicting commitments of prudential discourse. The negative aim of the paper is to show that Alexandrova and Campbell have not given us a good case for ambitious forms of contextualism about prudential discourse. The positive aim of the paper is to provide alternative, aspectualist, explanations of the features of prudential discourse that their discussions highlight. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There are competing accounts of dignity and no agreement about how to adjudicate between them, but this does not prevent dignity from playing an important role in the law. In fact, this very multiplicity enables dignity to perform a range of functions, both explicit and implicit, intended and unintended. Its 'open character' allows dignity to serve as a locus of agreement, but it can also silence debate and limit speaker control of how their statements are received and interpreted. This paper considers dignity's roles in recent English court judgments relating to withdrawal of ventilation and associated care from three unresponsive, paralysed infants: Charlie Gard, Alfie Evans, and Isaiah Haastrup. It presents a critical discourse analysis focusing on the judgments of first instance in relation to these infants. It argues that a range of conceptions of dignity are operationalised, serving four functions: to express esteem; to establish a hierarchy of credibility; to justify a best interests judgment, and to socialise that judgment. The overall effect is that dignity serves to compel acceptance of, rather than providing reasons to support, a best interests judgment. While recognising the value of unspecified invocations of dignity, we voice a warning about its potential to stifle debate and legitimise and enforce existing power relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper centers on discourses where instead of accepting or rejecting an assertion, a hearer uses an epistemic possibility claim to bring a new subject matter to the original speaker's attention and consequently leads this speaker to change her mind and retract the initial claim. To analyze such resistance moves , we develop a new theory of attention-shift-induced belief change in which attention is modeled using granularity-levels or resolutions of logical space and refining a speaker's attention can allow her to combine more of her resolution-sensitive information and potentially change her beliefs. We integrate this theory into pre-existing machinery from the literature on formal models of discourse to account for both the informational and attentional dynamics in epistemic resistance discourses, and to lay out some of the formal prerequisites for a more comprehensive theory of resistance moves in general. Along the way, we introduce the new concept of a subject matter under public attention (SUP) and compare this with the more familiar concept of a question under discussion (QUD). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Partee (2009) conjectures a formal semantics for natural language (hereafter, single-type semantics) that interprets CPs and referential DPs in the same semantic type: properties of situations. Partee's semantics contrasts with Montague semantics and its recent contenders (dubbed dual - or multi-type semantics) which assume distinct basic types for the semantic values of referential DPs (i.e. individuals) and CPs (i.e. propositions, truth-values, or sets of assignment functions). Partee's conjecture is motivated by results in event semantics and discourse representation theory, which support the indirect uni-directional shiftability between propositions and individuals. However, none of these results supports the identity of the types for individuals and propositions. Our paper improves upon the strength and scope of Partee's support for single-type semantics. In particular, it identifies a number of new arguments for the adoption of single-type semantics which display this semantics' greater unificatory and explanatory power. These arguments are based on the ability of single-type semantics to provide a uniform account of the distributional similarities between DPs and CPs, to explain the truth-evaluability of DP fragments, and to capture semantic inclusion relations between CPs and referential DPs. To further support single-type semantics, we defend it against a number of objections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background Tobacco use is a leading but preventable cause of non-communicable diseases and premature death. The legislature has a key role in setting tobacco control policies. Smoking trends are decreasing thanks to the introduction of effective tobacco control policies in Turkey and these policies may have been shaped by how politicians' interpreted social problems that were prominent during the development and implementation of tobacco regulations. Aim This paper explores the long-term national relationship between tobacco consumption, tobacco control policies and the associated political discourse in Turkey, considering the varying influences through national leadership on this important public health agenda. This relationship is studied by comparing a time series analysis of tobacco consumption trends with a policy analysis of the minutes of deliberations at the Grand National Assembly of Turkey (GNAT). Methods This study uses Bayesian time series analysis in order investigate whether the tobacco control policies and related activities influenced the annual per adult cigarette consumption in Turkey. We used a novel method to identify change points in tobacco trends and whether they correspond with key policy changes intended to alter usage after adjusting for the effect of other non-policy related covariates, such as the purchasing power. The policy analysis included an examination of the minutes of deliberations at the GNAT—which is the Turkish parliament and unicameral Turkish legislature—1 year before and 1 year after the break years associated with an increase or decrease in tobacco consumption. Results and recommendations Tobacco consumption increased with the encouragement of tobacco production and the entrance of multinational companies in the country in 1976 and 1993, respectively. The National Tobacco Law of 1996 and comprehensive amendments in 2008, including smoke-free public places and tax increases, appear to have helped reduce tobacco consumption in Turkey. The focus of Parliamentary discussions throughout this period changed, becoming less supportive of tobacco over time. However, throughout the period there remained discussions focussing on concerns around the implications for the economy and the privatization agenda, national agriculture and the welfare of farmers. Effective control appears to require certain political ingredients to be implemented: politicians who are well informed on tobacco control measures and understand the range of issues surrounding the policies (not only those directly health-related); and supportive public health information in the community. Evidence-based public health policy should be introduced to the politicians. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses the formation of Finnish innovation policy from the mid-1980s to 2010. Inspired by Foucauldian thinking in line with selected social-constructivist policy approaches, it conceptualises innovation policy as a discourse constituted of policy knowledge and policy-making practices. Our alternative approach towards policy formation, introduced in this paper, highlights the role of rules, and gradual changes in these, in defining truth values in policy knowledge, which in turn actualise in policy practice. The paper shows three phases in the investigated policy in Finland. Based on theoretical insights on policy formation, the paper argues that changes in innovation policy cannot be explained as a rational learning process or as isomorphic convergence processes across countries. Rather, they are an outcome of highly politicised negotiations in trans-local contexts where the role of a nation state can vary over time. Another finding is that changes in policy occur in relatively slowly. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper analyses the intricacies of using English in a traditionally non-English context such as Somalia through the work of its foremost anglophone writer, Nuruddin Farah. Farah uses English to re-imagine the nation and promote intra-, pan- and transnational discourses within and outside Africa. The analysis of Farah has been informed by the articulations of Ernest Renan, Ernest Gellner and Benedict Anderson, within the view of Somalia's now-contested exceptionalism. In Farah's hands, English becomes a vehicle for bringing together diverse linguistic, literary, cultural and religious expressions into a genre that facilitates transnational discourse. The paper argues that the anglophone African literary tradition that Farah embraces gains the capacity to transcend national boundaries and broadens – rather than limits – the scope and coverage of national and transnational literatures. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Sohail Karmani's paper (2005) entitled ‘English, “terror” and Islam’ made a compelling case against the role of English in the demonization of Islam and the perpetuation of western hegemony, and he made an equally strong case for more explicit awareness of the ideologies underlying ELT practices. Although I find myself in general agreement with Karmani's position, I think his paper left a lot of issues unexplored. So, the objective of this paper is to examine some important implications of the relatively undertheorized issue of how the global spread of English is received and acted upon. Drawing on what I call ‘the power potential’ inherent in any language, I argue that, instead of considering English and its putative hegemonic discourses as an inhibitive and imposed encumbrance, we need to take into account how the language is constantly and unpredictably appropriated and creatively reshaped and expropriated to give voice to emerging agencies and subjectivities. In conclusion, I suggest that appropriation, far from being drenched in a confrontational idiom, is a move towards new sites of collaboration and contestation, towards much wider human possibilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our paper consists of three parts. In the first part we explain the concept of mental fictionalism. In the second part, we present the various versions of fictionalism and their main sources of motivation. We do this because in the third part we argue that mental fictionalism, as opposed to other versions of fictionalism, is a highly undermotivated theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discourse intonation attempts to explain how intonation patterns in English affect the communicative value of speech, through the use of falling and rising tones along with changes in pitch. The teaching of intonation seems to sit naturally with communicative language learning, but it is not an easy aspect of English to incorporate into the EFL classroom. Discourse intonation, with its emphasis on communicative value, is appealing theoretically for instructors and for practical reasons (aiding in understanding naturally spoken English) for learners. This paper reports on a study conducted at a language school in Japan, which aimed to establish a balance between the aspects of discourse intonation that could survive in the classroom and those that would help students to better understand spoken English. The study finds support for the teaching of some features of discourse intonation but also suggests that some features are too subtle to survive in practical teaching. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Shortly after the publication of The Reflective Practitioner (1983) and the sequel Educating the Reflective Practitioner (1987) ‘reflection-in-action’ became a major concept in teacher education. The concept has, however, been criticised on ontological/epistemological as well as practice oriented accounts ( Van Manen, 1995; Newman, 1999 ; Erlandson, 1995). In this paper I argue that reflection-in-action is a theoretical construction that snatches the interacting, working, and producing bodies from their practices, and consequently, matters of politics, of discipline, of institutional interaction and of the workings of social categories are reduced to matters of thinking. Turning to Foucault (1991) I claim that the doctrine of reflection is interwoven in the logic of discipline. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper develops an attack on quasi realism in ethics, according to which expressivism about ethical discourse—understood as the thesis that the states that discourse expresses are non representational—is consistent with some of the discourse's familiar surface features, thus ‘saving the ethical appearances’. A dilemma is posed for the quasi-realist. Either ethical discourse appears, thanks to those surface features, to express representational states, or else there is no such thing as its appearing to express such states. If the former then, by expressivism, the appearance presented by ethical discourse is false, so the ethical appearances are not saved. If the latter, it is unintelligible why an appeal to projection should be needed to explain how the surface features come to express non representational states if no explanation is needed—as evidently none is—to explain how they come to express representational states. The conclusion of this argument is then argued to converge with some other considerations which show that there is no gap between ethical discourse's possessing the surface features in question and its expressing representational states. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Human rights discourses are increasingly being coupled to discourses on citizenship and citizenship education. In this paper, I consider the premise that human rights might provide a theoretical underpinning for citizenship. I categorise citizenship into five main categories—moral, legal, identity-based, participatory and cosmopolitan. Bringing together theoretical and documentary evidence, I argue that human rights cannot logically be a theoretical underpinning for citizenship, regardless of how citizenship may be conceptualised. This is because human rights discourses are located within a universalist frame of reference, in contrast to that of citizenship, which is located within a more particularist frame. Human rights are conceptually distinct from citizenship, and the conflating of human rights with citizenship not only is conceptually incoherent, but may actually obstruct the empowerment and active participation of individual citizens in the context of a political community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Civil religious themes have long been integral to public discourse in Ameba. Specifically the themes of mission and destiny, best known in the form of Manifest Destiny, still carry the country through periods of foreign conflict. This paper analyzes the discourses of President George Bush during the Persian Gulf War and President Bill Clinton during the Kosovo conflict. I identify the themes of mission by example and mission by intervention and argue that these forms of mission are intertwined. The use of these themes by presidents of different political ponies indicates that while they remain useful, they are adapting for a changing political and economic world system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A growing trend in social research concerning illicit drug use has entailed suspending regard for conventional questions such as the etiology of drug problems and the outcomes achieved by assorted interventions in favor of focusing analytic attention on how drug problems are socially constructed in and through human praxis. In this paper, I use a constructionist approach to demonstrate and explain endogenous are accounts of what I am calling the ecology of addiction in drug abuse treatment discourse. These accounts posit a space "out there" marked by its degradation dirtiness, solitude, and savagery which commonly tempts those who must live there to also behave amorally, licentiously, and/or savagely I explain these accounts by showing their fundamental utility in light of specific conceptual puzzles that participants in drug abuse treatment discourse must inevitably solve. Namely, speaking in terms of this ecology of addiction provides participants with a compelling narrative means for reconciling the following two claims 1) they are chronically prone to enslavement by their addictions, and 2) their addictions can he controlled through ongoing participation in a communal project of mutual help. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]