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This paper explores the path from ecological discourse (ED) to ecological behaviour (EB) in environmental protection from the perspective of the ecolinguistic continuum. ED (i.e. beneficial and destructive discourse) is taken as a new indicator for improving individual EB in environmental protection. Based on the questionnaire survey data of 992 participants from 27 (79.4%) provinces, autonomous regions, and municipalities in China, a tentative structural equation model (SEM) is established consisting of ED, ecological values (EV), ecological intention (EI), and EB. Through the path analysis (mediating and moderating effect test) by AMOS 23.0 software, the results show that ED cannot directly affect EB, which may be mediated by EV or EI, or both of the two, but the probability of an individual's ecological practice will be increased by the influence of beneficial ED as input. Furthermore, under the moderating of ED, the probability of transforming EI into EB is greater than that of EV, suggesting that ED has a bigger voice in EI→EB, and a positive and significant moderating effect of beneficial discourse is tested. Thus, ED as an indicator provides a new perspective on environmental protection and sustainable development. Potential applications for this indicator are also included. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper utilizes Rapaille's (2006) concept of culture codes and Hall's (2001) encoding and decoding model of communication to identify the culture codes of scientific concepts in global scientific online discourse. As an example, we attempted to identify the culture codes of the concept of "image", because this concept can be interpreted in different ways in Russian and international scientific discourse. To identify these codes, we analyzed the interpretations of the concept of "image" in scientific online discourse in Russia and abroad. We studied the titles, key words, and abstracts of papers published in 2014–2018 that appeared in the Russian Science Citation Index (RSCI) and the Scopus abstract and citation database. As a result, we identified the culture codes of the concept of "image" in Russian and international scientific online discourse and compared the culture codes of RSCI-indexed and Scopus-indexed papers. The method we utilized may be used for revealing the culture codes of any scientific concept (using any citation database), which can contribute to revealing and understanding the interpretations of these concepts by researchers from different countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Iran is one of the countries with the highest number of the cases of capital relocation throughout its history. During the past four centuries, at least, six different cities have played the role of the capital for the country. This paper examines the most recent push for the capital relocation in Iran. By examining the public debate over the topic in the major periodicals of the country, the paper analyzes the underlying discourse that gives political impetus for the capital relocation. It shows that while the majority of the academics opposes such a move, politicians eagerly pursue such a massive project. More importantly the analysis suggests that in the twenty-first century, an old-established discourse on the role of the capital still plays a significant role in forming the public debate and political decisions on the capital relocation in Iran. Based on this discourse, the political system observes the capital relocation as a vital way for encouraging decentralization and decreasing the population of Tehran. The paper suggests that the underlying discourse for the capital relocation in Iran is in bold contrast to the common themes of capital relocation in other countries, particularly newly formed nations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on studies of the ideas of A. N. Prior on time, discourse and metaphysics. It mentions the letter sent by New Zealander Jonathan Bennett to Prior on January 21, 1955 regarding the paper "The Logic of Obligation and the Obligations of the Logician," by Prior, which Bennett suggested to have a book entitled "From a Logical Angle." It says that Prior never followed the suggestion of Bennett and focus instead on the publication of other books and papers.

Discussions around assessment integrity often focus on the exam conditions and the motivations and values of those who cheated in comparison with those who did not. We argue that discourse needs to move away from a binary representation of cheating. Instead, we propose that the conversation may be more productive and more impactful by focusing on those who do not cheat, but who are tempted to do so. We conceptualise this group as being at risk of future cheating behaviour and potentially more receptive of targeted strategies to support their integrity decisions. In this paper we report on a large-scale survey of university students (n = 7,511) who had just completed one or more end of semester online exams. In doing so we explore students' reported temptation to cheat. Analysis surrounding this "at risk" group reveals students who were Tempted (n = 1379) had significant differences from those who Cheated (n = 216) as well as those who were Not tempted (n = 5916). We focus on four research questions exploring whether there are specific online exam conditions, security settings, student attitudes or perceptions which are more strongly associated with the temptation to cheat. The paper offers insights to help institutions to minimise factors that might lead to breaches of assessment integrity, by focusing on the temptation to cheat during assessment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes that intuitive technologies play a vital role in cognition and cultural reception. The case of music is considered in particular. The perceived temporality of contemporary technology is shown to be an artificial barrier to the acknowledgement of longer-term dynamics. The increased role of explanatory metaphors from technology is traced across various fields of study. Processes of sense-making—conscious or otherwise—are seen as an informal, unreflected repertory of mechanisms ranging from predictive models to instrumental metaphors. It is suggested that these derive by assimilation and induction from the technological milieu within which the subject develops and operates. The acquisition of these models and metaphors is itself an imaginative process, based on experience ranging from partial expertise to fantastical extrapolation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The growing economic importance of urban networks transforms the political relations in metropolitan regions. New forms of regional cooperation emerge, but many municipalities outside the cities which have become a vital part of metropolitan networks resist this urban led development. This paper analyses why while the importance of areas outside the cities for metropolitan regions has increased, many oppose this and regard this as an unwanted urban incursion threatening the interests and identities of their communities in well-established territories. This paper analyses the backgrounds of these political conflicts by looking at the different perspectives on identity and legitimacy. It develops a typology of the different legitimising identity discourses used by urban and non-urban administrations to promote or resist cooperation in metropolitan regions. There is a clear and coherent contrast between backward and inward looking 'thicker', and forward and outward looking 'thinner' legitimising identity discourses. These are based on opposing views on nine related aspects which help to better understand the deep roots of the opposition between urban competitiveness and territorial protection. The typology of different legitimising identity discourses is a useful tool to analyse the growing resistance in more peripheral regions to the further strengthen the global competitiveness of metropolitan regions. The examples in this paper of how legitimising identity discourses are used in the Netherlands—where economic policies like in many other countries focus on the strengthen of metropolitan regions—showed not only how these divisions fuel conflicts, but also how these are sometimes bridged through cooperation legitimised by a partially shared identity discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Currently, multiturn dialogue models generate human-like responses based on pretrained language models given a dialogue history. However, most existing models simply concatenate dialogue histories, which makes it difficult to maintain a high degree of consistency throughout the generated text. We speculate that this is because the encoder ignores information about the hierarchical structure between sentences. In this paper, we propose a novel multiturn dialogue generation model that captures contextual information at the sentence level and at the discourse level during the encoding process. The context semantic information is dynamically modeled through a difference-aware module. A sentence order prediction training task is also designed to learn representation by reconstructing the order of disrupted sentences with a learning-to-rank algorithm. Experiments on the multiturn dialogue dataset, DailyDialog, demonstrate that our model substantially outperforms the baseline model in terms of both automatic and human evaluation metrics, generating more fluent and informative responses than the baseline model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper traces the evolution of patterns in architecture since early Modernism and links it to the socio-political and technological context of each period. The theme of patterns and its applications is a suitable one through which to rethink architecture's values about making and living in relation to theories, ideals and priorities. A comparative examination of patterns further prompts revisiting concepts, notions, models and problematics of Twentieth-century architecture, this present time through a computational framing. In respect, this paper first draws upon systemic, structural, geometric and relational patterns developed since early Modernism; then, it delves into dynamic and adaptive patterns employed during late Modernism to respond to the emerging challenges of urban life. It is with the advent of computing that late Modernism's aspirations have found a strong advocate by which to support complex pattern thinking, adding a cross-scientific perspective into architecture's discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Grosu (J East Asian Linguist 19:231-274, ) argues against analyses of Japanese and Korean internally headed relative clauses in terms of discourse anaphora and in favor of an analysis which postulates a functional category ChR (Choose Role) in the syntax of these constructions, the semantics of which allows quantificational disclosure. The present paper constitutes a follow-up on Grosu (), with the interrelated goals of (i) strengthening Grosu's arguments against discourse anaphora approaches and in favor of a grammar-based quantificational disclosure approach, (ii) improving substantively on the syntactic and semantic characterization of the functional category ChR, and (iii) justifying the introduction of additional mechanisms that render that analysis adequate with respect to a substantially wider set of data types. The proposals made in the present paper strengthen Grosu's central thesis, which is that, despite undeniable partial similarities to discourse anaphora, Japanese and Korean internally headed relatives are bona fide relatives. The paper shows the semantic fruitfulness of this analysis by discussing a series of examples of increasing semantic complexity and by arguing that Japanese and Korean internally headed relatives provide striking evidence for a semantic scope mechanism that has been independently discussed in the context of the semantics of plurality and cumulative readings, a mechanism that allows part of the meaning of (argument) noun phrases to take local (adverbial) scope. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This conceptual and theoretical research argues about some implications of the post-development era for rural entrepreneurship as a new developmental strategy and approach. This paper tries to remind us that the entrepreneurship is not an easy ride and has some dark sides; therefore, there is a pressing need to make entrepreneurship more welcoming to criticism and to clarify its common sense ways of thinking and practicing. From the methodological point of view, this study is some sort of an explanatory and instrumental case study and its focus is on the process of rural development in Iran as a specific event or phenomenon. The paper draws on Campbell Jones and André Spicer's critical theory and approach and is inspired by Aram Ziai's skeptical post-development in order to unmask the mainstream entrepreneurship discourse and practice in Iran. The paper claims that although rural entrepreneurship is not a deceitful mirage or malignant myth, its current situation in Iran is definitely a sharp deviance from the classic development goals, and therefore the deconstruction of its mainstream discourse and practices is an urgent need. As the main propose of the paper, this deconstruction should be based on a skeptical and critical unmasking theoretical framework. Through answering some important questions, one of the main arguments of the paper is that now it is time to return to the classical goals of development, but after exercising some radical discursive and practical entrepreneurial policy changes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is threefold: to perform a (meta)discursive archaeology of the concepts post-truth and fake news, to critically reflect on the change in the application of these concepts between the various domains of discourse such as public intellectual field or academic research and mainstream media, and finally to show how the concept of post-truth is now used against the very intellectual milieu it originates from. Whereas the first objective deals with the historical reconceptualization process, the second shows—drawing on the case of social networks—how the concept of fake news infects topics of public relevance, while the third demonstrates how ubiquitous the critique of the left and postmodern intellectual tradition is. This paper combines Foucault's and Agamben's approaches to reconstruct the changes and evolution of the concept and the knowledge that defines it. It considers various sources in which this discourse exists regardless of their ideological background—from intellectual discussions on its formation and critiques of the phenomenon it stands for, to journalistic materials which constitute the body of post-truth and fake news discourse today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Implicit discourse relation classification is one of the most challenging tasks in discourse parsing. Without connectives as linguistic clues, classifying discourse relations usually requires understanding text semantics at the word level, sentence level, and sentence span level. In this paper, we mainly proposed a graph-based model for relation classification. A semantic graph is firstly built to describe the syntactic dependencies and sentence interaction. Then, based on the learning principle of graph neural networks, a bidirectional gated recurrent unit (Bi-GRU) was introduced to work with graph attention network (GAT), which allows the expanded GAT to capture syntactic dependencies of long-distance nodes and selectively mine semantic features from multi-hop neighborhood nodes. In addition, we utilized the hierarchical self-organization ability of hyperbolic spaces to classify multi-level discourse relations, improving the accuracy of fine-grained discourse relation classification. Experimental results on Penn Discourse Treebank 2.0 (PDTB 2.0) demonstrated that our model could achieve improvements without any external knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

According to moral error theory, moral discourse is error-ridden. Establishing error theory requires establishing two claims. These are that moral discourse carries a non-negotiable commitment to there being a moral reality and that there is no such reality. This paper concerns the first and so-called non-negotiable commitment claim. It starts by identifying the two existing argumentative strategies for settling that claim. The standard strategy is to argue for a relation of conceptual entailment between the moral statements that comprise moral discourse and the statement that there is a moral reality. The non-standard strategy is to argue for a presupposition relation instead. Error theorists have so far failed to consider a third strategy, which uses a general entailment relation that doesn't require intricate relations between concepts. The paper argues that both entailment claims struggle to meet a new explanatory challenge and that since the presupposition option doesn't we have prima facie reason to prefer it over the entailment options. The paper then argues that suitably amending the entailment claims enables them to meet this challenge. With all three options back on the table the paper closes by arguing that error theorists should consider developing the currently unrecognised, non-conceptual entailment claim. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I argue that tense is a discourse feature in Mandarin if tense is extended to mean temporal location in general instead of grammaticalized location in time, as defined in Comrie (Tense, 1985). The evidence comes from the observation that tense does not affect temporal relations in Mandarin. The final endpoint imposed on an activity by past tense is not accessible to the other sentences in the same discourse while the final endpoint imposed by rhetorical relations, such as Narration, is. I argue that this difference results from the fact that in Mandarin tense does not impose a final endpoint until a coherent discourse is formed. I also discuss the implications of this paper for the determination of temporal locations in Mandarin, the status of Tense Phrase (TP) in Mandarin, the semantics of the perfective le, and modeling Mandarin discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper conceptualizes the absence of multilateral protection for environmental refugees. It does this by critically scrutinizing interviews conducted with United Nations ambassadors and senior diplomats in 2004 ( n = 45) in a number of key policy-making locations. These interviews reveal that an absence of policy on environmental refugees has been reproduced by discursive politics at the United Nations. The reasons for which are explored here in this paper, and include shifting attitudes towards the role of multilateralism and environmental issues generally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the Brazilian military governments of the 1960s, systematic economic development of the Amazon began. Social and environmental concerns have entered Amazonian discourses and policies only since the 1990s. Since then, reports of threats to forests and indigenous people have alternated with reports of socio-economic progress and environmental achievements. These contradictions often arise from limited thematic, sectoral, temporal, or spatial perspectives, and lead to misinterpretation. Our paper offers a comprehensive picture of discourses, policies, and socio-environmental dynamics for the entire region over the last five decades. We distinguish eight historical policy phases, each of which had little effect on near-linear dynamics of demographic growth and land-use expansion, although some policies showed the potential to change the course of development. To prevent local, national, and international actors from continuing to assert harmful interests in the region, a coherent long-term commitment and change in the collective mindset are needed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In inquiry-based science lessons teachers face the challenge of adhering to curricular goals while simultaneously following students' intuitive understandings. Improvisation (improv) provides a useful frame for understanding teaching in these inquiry-based contexts. This paper builds from prior work that uses improv as a metaphor for teaching to present a translated model for analysis of teaching in an inquiry-based, elementary school science lesson context. We call our model instructional improv, which shows how a teacher spontaneously synthesizes rules of improv with teaching practices to support student learning, engagement, and agency. We illustrate instructional improv through case study analysis of video recorded classroom interactions with one teacher and 26 first and second grade students learning about the complex system of honey bee pollination in a mixed reality environment. Our model includes the following defining features to describe how teaching happens in this context: the teacher 1) tells a story; 2) reframes mistakes as opportunities; 3) agrees; 4) yes ands; 5) makes statements (or asks questions that elicit statements); and 6) puts the needs of the classroom ensemble over individuals. Overall, we show how instructional improv helps explain how teachers can support science discourse and collective storytelling as a teacher (a) shifts power and agency to students; (b) balances learning and agency; and (c) makes purposeful instructional decisions. Findings have immediate implications for researchers analyzing interactions in inquiry-based learning environments and potential future implications for teachers to support inquiry learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper deals with methodological principles of Schumpeter's academic writings. Those principles led Schumpeter to create diverse works and were reflected systematically in some of his writings, where Schumpeter emerged as a theorist of science. Besides working on specific topics, Schumpeter dealt systematically with methodological issues in different works. Schumpeter's History of Economic Analysis, in particular, must be regarded as the one study among his diverse works which is considered not only his latest but also his most relevant analysis concerning social sciences and the role of economics in relation to sociology, history, and other academic branches. The substantial preface of the History of Economic Analysis can be regarded as a manual on how to refer to different academic branches and integrate them into a coherent universal social science, which is far removed from being an autistic, narrow economic science of some modern representation. Although Schumpeter's History of Economic Analysis has been extensively printed in several editions, the idea is that the preface especially reveals somewhat neglected thoughts in Schumpeterian discourse. While Schumpeter is mostly regarded as a pioneer of evolutionary economics, this paper argues that Schumpeter could also, perhaps primarily, be interpreted as a well-reasoning institutionalist aiming at a universal social science. From today's point of view, Schumpeter is a truly interdisciplinary theorist. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents an empirical evaluation of coreference resolution that covers several interrelated dimensions. The main goal is to complete the comparative analysis from the SemEval-2010 task on Coreference Resolution in Multiple Languages. To do so, the study restricts the number of languages and systems involved, but extends and deepens the analysis of the system outputs, including a more qualitative discussion. The paper compares three automatic coreference resolution systems for three languages (English, Catalan and Spanish) in four evaluation settings, and using four evaluation measures. Given that our main goal is not to provide a comparison between resolution algorithms, these are merely used as tools to shed light on the different conditions under which coreference resolution is evaluated. Although the dimensions are strongly interdependent, making it very difficult to extract general principles, the study reveals a series of interesting issues in relation to coreference resolution: the portability of systems across languages, the influence of the type and quality of input annotations, and the behavior of the scoring measures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The discourse on CRS began late in Spain. Its permeation into political institutions also began later than in many Western countries. The Spanish government neither contributed nor reacted to the green paper Corporate social responsibility. A business contribution to sustainable development, published by the European Commission in 2002. However, the publication of this document gave the definitive impulse for the start of the Spanish debate on CSR. After this initial impulse, the debate rapidly developed into a consolidated field of discourse. This field is the object of the present paper. Here, we seek to elaborate on a concept of corporate social citizenship viewed as a “field of discourse”, which is being produced by an epistemic community, at Spanish yet also at a global level. Thus, we seek to depict the contours of the Spanish discourse on CSR, researching its evolution over the last 5 years. We focus on its main actors, the central topics on its agendas, the conflicts that are appearing, and how they are being dealt with. In order to achieve these objectives, we focus primarily on the transcription of 61 speeches made by different stakeholders at the Spanish Parliament during 2005. This initiative of the Spanish Parliament is unique of its kind. A special sub-commission was created to discuss the role that Spanish public institutions should play regarding corporate social responsibility. Sixty-one experts from different areas (academia, business, trade unions, and NGOs) were invited to present their views on CSR. Members of the sub-commission had the opportunity to discuss with these experts the nature, limits, results and evolution of CSR, seeking with special interest their opinions on the role that the Spanish Government should play in the consolidation of CSR in Spain. The thesis of this paper is that through an exhaustive analysis of the transcriptions of these interventions at the Spanish Parliament, we can identify who constitutes the Spanish epistemic community on CSR. We can also trace the main contours of this field of discourse, to identify the main actors in its development (particularly, of course, on the binding point between CRS and government) and the main issues discussed, as well as the “hot topics”. The presentation will also locate the uniqueness of this debate generated in parliament within the context of the wider Spanish debate on CSR. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we analyze the combination of speech and FIR filter design aspect to achieve good results in speech quality. A new approach in the time domain based on the least Pth norm is presented to extract maximum information that represents speech. The aim of this paper is to improve the perceived quality of speech through the introduction of least Pth norm algorithm that attenuates speech contaminated with noise. This approach relates to a filter bank structure and a method for filtering and separating an information signal into different bands, particularly for filtering and separation of speech signals. Then the desired signal is reconstructed from the independent components representing every band. This approach differs from the traditional approaches since no priori knowledge of the noise statistics is required, instead the noise signals are only assumed to have finite energy. Since the estimation criterion for the filter design is to minimize the worst possible amplification of the estimation error signal in terms of modeling errors and additive noise, this approach is highly robust and appropriate in practical speech analysis and synthesis. This paper presents a least Pth approach to the optimal design of FIR digital filter banks in the minimax sense for speech analysis and synthesis. The signal to noise ratio (SNR) of around 50–60 dB is achieved with various speech samples. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the mathematics education literature, there is currently a debate about the mechanisms by which group discussion can contribute to mathematical learning and under what conditions this learning is likely to occur. In this paper, we contribute to this debate by illustrating three learning opportunities that group discussions can create. In analyzing a videotaped episode of eight middle school students discussing a statistical problem, we observed that these students frequently challenged the arguments that their colleagues presented. These challenges invited students to be explicit about what mathematical principles, or warrants, they were implicitly using as a basis for their mathematical claims, in some cases recognize the modes of reasoning they were using were invalid and reject these modes of reasoning, and in other cases, attempt to provide deductive support to justify why their modes of reasoning were appropriate. We then describe what social and environmental conditions allowed the discussion analyzed in this paper to occur. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I offer a reflection on my personal experience of networked learning using the approach of personal inquiry. I address the issue of identity and my experience of presenting myself on-line; my experience of participating in the formation of the learning group; and what I describe as the `weight of the words', my experience of using this new medium of communication. I follow this with a theoretical exploration which attempts to understand these aspects of my experience. I argue that in the networked learning environment, the taken-for-granted processes of identity work and group formation are disturbed. The unease provoked by this requires greater effort towards the establishment of identity and group, whilst at the same time opening up the possibility for more fluidity and openness to the other. In my experience as a learner, the newness and uncertainty of the experience compelled me towards seeking certainty and closure. I was not able to make best use of the opportunity for the greater fluidity and openness offered by the networked learning environment. I close the paper by suggesting how teachers may be able to support the conditions that would enable learners to make best use of this opportunity. I argue that the learning community has to be seen as fundamentally an ethical one based on responsibility to the other and that this requires the opening up of conversations between learners and teachers for the sharing and negotiation of experiences and ways of working. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Be it the 1873 World’s Fair in Vienna, which established the city's status as a link between the Occident and Orient, or the very first Great Exhibition in 1851 in London, which showcased the then British empire to a global public and the world to its domestic visitors. World’s fairs have been and are still an indispensable part of a shared human history as well as an indicator of a country's economic and cultural relevance on a global scale. They are undoubtedly politically motivated drivers of collective memories and, in turn, nation-building processes. This is why they are not only publicly discussed and thoroughly documented in archives but also often manifested in buildings that long outlast these events and themes but continue to tell their tales. This article elaborates on the ways in which world’s fairs (or expos) have been used as catalysts to develop cities and how they themselves – though ephemeral phenomena – ultimately found their way into urban landscapes and historiography. Moreover, based on his own empirical studies on the last two expos of Shanghai (2010) and Milan (2015), the author elaborates on the placemaking procedures that precede and follow these mega-events, reflecting on the ensuing public discourse to (de)legitimate them, its limitations, and effects on the urban legacy of the aforementioned expos. He then presents an overarching discussion on their built heritage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper assesses the significance of stakeholder discourses on uses of water by aquaculture for public policy. Our discourse analysis focuses on the experiences with inland aquaculture in Thailand, drawing from interviews with stakeholders, and evidence in public documents such as newspapers and television news reports. A key finding is that fish farms suffer significant losses from polluted run-off entering water bodies where fish are grown. Mass mortality events in river cage culture, in particular, attract media attention and are the core of the aquaculture-as-victim discourse. Fish farms are also adversely impacted by river management and current water allocation policies. Inland shrimp farming has received more negative media and scientific attention than fish farming, and is the focus of the aquaculture-as-villain discourse. A third, aquaculture-as-benign discourse, is used widely to describe fish pond culture, and more rarely to promote aquaculture in low-quality water bodies or as part of integrated nutrient and waste re-use farming systems. The findings strongly imply that aquaculture farmers should be included as a stakeholder in the management of watersheds and rivers, as well as the negotiation and allocation of water resources. They also suggest a need for aquaculture development policies to pay closer attention to water quality and allocation issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The discourse of the field of higher education is complex, as is its analysis. Citation analysis is means of examining communicative processes. This study investigates citations in the papers of three core journals in higher education, Research in Higher Education, Review of Higher Education, and Journal of Higher Education. The results demonstrate that citation practices have remained relatively stable over time with regard to the format of cited items and the people and sources cited. The consistency applies, even with the electronic availability of a greater amount, and greater diversity, of materials. Some differences from past practices are also presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we present a constraint satisfaction approach to the pragmatic control of the language generation process in dialogue systems. After a brief problem statement providing motivational background for a constraint satisfaction approach to context sensitive language generation, a theoretical framework designed and implemented in part by the authors (in the context of several research and development projects) will be argued for in concise manner. Particularly, the way in which constraints influence the generation of context-sensitive, relevant utterances in simultaneous interaction with several human speakers will be considered in detail, providing a computational framework for handling “pragmatic” aspects, such as the degree of illocutionary force, semantic ellipsis, or lexical selection of concessive connectors. Then, limiting cases of our approach will be pointed out, showing in what measure by acting on the constraints we can enlarge these limits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Inquiring into the causes behind the spread of secularism in the modern world, this paper proposes that the concept has proliferated owing to its peculiar property as culture: It is simultaneously a piece of culture and also a reflection upon culture. In its latter capacity, it imagines a world in which alternative religious belief systems divide people. It spreads as a piece of culture because it enables sharing and, hence, community, across the cultural boundaries erected by religious belief. For this reason, some governments have embraced the concept and incorporated it into official state discourse. Other governments, in turn, have copied the language of secularism not for its intended meaning but for pragmatic purposes—namely, to proclaim a position within the community of modern nations. State discourse, however, irrespective of the reasons for which it was adopted, affects how ordinary people reason about religion. Reasoning from the possibility of alternative religions opens a space for unbelief. Through an analysis of constitutional language, census data, and interviews, the paper concludes that secularism has more to do with the circulation of discourse and the reasons behind it, than with an immanent versus transcendent solution to the puzzle of existence—the transcendent solution being the foundation for the circulation of religious belief itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this paper is to shed some light on the familiar puzzle of free indirect discourse (FID). FID shares some properties with standard indirect discourse and with direct discourse, but there is currently no known theory that can accommodate such a hybrid. Based on the observation that FID has ‘de se’ pronouns, I argue that it is a kind of an attitude report. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates how specific notions of gender and ethnicity are integrated into diversity discourses presented on 241 top European company websites. Large European companies increasingly disclose equality and diversity policies in statements on websites. Such statements may be used to promote an ethical image of the company in terms of how well it manages diversity and guards against discrimination. In this paper, we argue that diversity statement discourses are important as they play a key part in socially constructing how diversity should be regarded in the company by minority and majority groups, as well as indicating corporate values to external stakeholders (investors, government, community, press etc.). Sometimes, the notions of gender or ethnic diversity are positioned as a liability in need of protection, whilst in others, as a source of competitive advantage. We find evidence of use of discursive tools such as problematisation, rationalisation, fixation, reframing and naturalisation of the notions of gender and ethnic diversity, reinforced by use of symbols, such as statistics, photographs, membership badges and awards. Few statements directly associate gender and ethnic diversity with enhanced corporate performance. We found that diversity statements sometimes appear to reinforce existing business stereotypes of women and people from ethnic minorities, and in a few discourses, create new ones, particularly evident in photographs illustrating the diversity web pages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

People living in the northeast of Thailand interchangeably label themselves and are labelled by others as Isan, Thai Isan, Lao Isan, Thai or Lao, depending on the ethnic, political, social or familial nuances of any given situation. I use the term Lao Isan to refer specifically to Isan people of Lao origin or ethnicity. Lao Isan are subject to complex and often competing notions of Isan-ness, Lao-ness and Thai-ness by insiders and outsiders. Using data derived from an ethnographic study of popular Thai television and Lao Isan youth (aged 17-25) living in the city of Khon Kaen and the town of Mahasarakham in northeast Thailand in 2002, this paper explores contemporary and co-existing interpretations of Isan identity or Khwampenisan among Lao Isan youth in relation to self-image and connections with national understandings of physical beauty as they are perpetuated in Thaiproduced television programs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the salience of the Second World War in paving the way for Singapore to attain formal independent status in 1965, it was not until the 1990s that war events were inserted into the state's narratives, and 'mapped' onto its spaces as visible national fodder to bind citizens together. Since then, memoryscapes in many forms have proliferated over the state's cityscape. After tracing the genesis of official war commemorative gestures within Singapore, the paper examines the ways in which Singaporeans have responded to them. Specifically, the paper argues that, while Singaporeans recognize the importance of remembering the war as nationally significant, this has not translated into any physical attempt or desire-beyond the discursive-to participate in the state's commemorative endeavours. In analyzing factors that may have hindered the actual bodily practice of war remembrance in Singapore, nationalized war memoryscapes are also seen as embodying numerous politics due to tensions arising from a collision between what the state and its people perceive to be ideal means of remembering and representing the war within national discourses in the context of the present. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper looks at judgments of guilt in the face of alleged wrong-doing, be it in public or in private discourse. Its concern is not the truth of such judgments, although the complexity and contestability of such claims will be stressed. The topic, instead, is what sort of activities we are engaged in, when we make our judgments on others' conduct. To examine judging as an activity it focuses on a series of problems that can occur when we blame others. On analysis, we see that these problems take the form of performative contradictions, so that the ostensible purposes of assigning guilt to others are undermined. There is clear evidence from social psychology that blame is especially frequently and inappropriately attributed to individuals in modern Western societies. On the other hand, it has often been observed how suspicious we are about the activity of judging – thus a widespread perception that a ‘refusal to judge’ is somehow virtuous. My suggestion is that the sheer difficulty of attributions of responsibility, in the face of a complex and often arbitrary moral reality, frequently defeats us. This leads to a characteristic set of distortions when we blame, so that it is no surprise that we have become suspicious of all blaming activities. Yet, the paper argues, these problems need not arise when we hold others responsible. This paper therefore investigates what, exactly, can be questionable about attempts to assign guilt, and the structural logic that lies behind these problems – what will be called, adapting a term from social psychology, a “belief in a just world.” Such a belief takes for granted what needs to be worked for through human activity, and therefore tends to be counter-productive in dealing with misdeeds and adverse outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a comprehensive pragmatic theory of contrastive topic and its relation to focus in English. In discussing various constructions involving contrastive topics, it argues that they make reference to complex, hierarchical aspects of discourse structure. In this, it follows and spells out a proposal sketched in Roberts (1996, p. 121ff), using the formal tools found in Büring (1994, 1997b). It improves on existing accounts in the accuracy with which it predicts the non-occurrence of the accent patterns associated with focus and contrastive topic, and locates the analysis of contrastive topics within a broader picture of discourse and information structure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The stakeholder approach offers the opportunity to consider corporate responsibility in a wider sense than that afforded by the stockholder or shareholder approaches. Having said that, this article aims to show that this theory does not offer a normative corporate responsibility concept that can be our response to two basic questions. On the one hand, for what is the company morally responsible and, on the other hand, why is the corporation morally responsible in terms of conventional and post-conventional perspectives? The reason why the stakeholder approach does not offer such a definition, as we shall see, is because the normative stakeholder approaches tend to confuse the social validity with the moral validity or legitimacy. It leads us to a conventional definition of corporate moral responsibility (CMR) that is not relevant to the pluralistic and global framework of our societies and economies. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate this intuition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we claim that the disambiguation ofreferring expressions in discourse can be formulated in terms automatedreasoners can address. Specifically, we show that consistency,informativity and minimality are criteria which (i) can be implementedusing automated reasoning tools and (ii) can be used to disambiguatenoun-noun compounds, metonymy and definite descriptions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper conducts a comparative study between L1 and L2 (L1 Bengali) English discourse level speech planning to investigate differences between L1 and L2 English speaker groups in the organization of discourse-level speech planning. For this purpose, English speech of 10 L1 English and 40 L1 Bengali speakers of the same discourse are analyzed in terms of using prosodic and acoustic cues by applying hierarchical discourse prosody framework. From this analysis, between-group differences in discourse level speech planning are found through the speech rate, locations of discourse boundary breaks as well as size and scope of speech planning and chunking units. Result of analysis shows that the speech rate of L1 English speakers is higher than that of L2 English speakers, L2 English speakers contain more break boundary than that of the L1 English speakers at every discourse level in the organization, which exhibit the fact that L2 English speakers use more intermediate chunking units and larger scale planning units than that of L1 English speakers. Between-group differences are also found through the analysis of phrase component at prosodic phrase level and accent component at the prosodic word level. These findings can be attributed to L2 English speakers' improper phrasing, improper word level prominence and the ambiguous difference between content words and function words. The study concludes that the deficiencies in English strategy for L1 Bengali speakers' discourse-level speech planning compared to L1 English speakers are due to the influence of L1 (Bengali) prosody at the L2 discourse level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Proponents of Jatropha curcas portrayed the crop as a 'sustainable biofuel' that was less threatening to food security and forests than other energy crops, creating a reputation that helped jatropha projects to multiply quickly throughout the global South. However, many jatropha initiatives failed to thrive and ultimately collapsed. This paper investigates how actors involved with jatropha in Kenya explained their visions of bioenergy at two points in time. In 2009, when many activities were beginning, I interviewed small-scale farmers, NGO staff, researchers, donors, government officials and members of the private sector about their expectations of jatropha as an energy crop. In late 2013, after jatropha activities in the country had dwindled, I re-interviewed many of the same individuals about their current views and their explanations of the events that had transpired since the initial fieldwork. Synthesizing these two sets of representations provides insight into how biofuel projects have been constructed, negotiated and renegotiated. Early hopes for jatropha rested on the belief that it could achieve many goals simultaneously, but when it failed to meet expectations proponents chose between two strategies: (1) 'unbundling' these goals to pursue separately the various aspirations they had initially attached to jatropha; and (2) seeking a new means of achieving the same bundle of goals. Understanding the choices made by jatropha actors in Kenya contributes to knowledge on the political ecology of biofuels and responsible innovation, and may signal patterns to come as even greater expectations are attached to multi-use feedstocks in pursuit of the bioeconomy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines four major arguments advanced by opponents of race and gender conscious affirmative action and rebuts them on the basis of moral considerations. It is clear that the problem of past racial/gender discrimination has not disappeared; its effects linger, resulting in a wide disparity in opportunities and attainment between minorities/women and whites/males. Affirmative action, although not the "perfect solution," is by far the most viable method of redressing the effects of past discrimination. Thus it cannot be dismissed lightly by way of arguing for mere colorblindness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is about the ongoing conflict between elements of the Huichol people of western Mexico with allied NGOs, and the Canadian mining company First Majestic in the Wirikuta/Catorce region in northern Mexico. Specific groups of the Huichol make yearly 400 km pilgrimages from their communities in western Mexico to Wirikuta, a vast region they consider highly sacred and therefore, in which mining cannot be tolerated. However, mining has existed in the region for over 200 years, and the local, permanent, non-Huichol inhabitants of this region have shown a strong support for First Majestic's underground silver mining project. We center our analysis on discourse, highlighting the underlying discursive systems or languages that shape and support them. In our framework, languages are considered as systems through which claims of morality, legitimacy and truth are produced and communicated in the public sphere by social actors in order to mobilize people and resources. We identify three central languages in play throughout this conflict: the language of indigenous rights, the scientific language of biodiversity conservation, and the language of development, particularly as expressed through the notion of 'sustainable mining.' We argue that the role of discourse in conflict is central in the development of conflicts and useful for their understanding. Although the discourse of indigenous rights has proven effective for the Huichols to temporarily halt the mining project, the company's use of the language of development, as in their 'community projects', has been successful in legitimizing the project and strengthening local support. The language of conservation, invoked in parallel to claims in terms of indigenous rights, has had mixed results for the Huichols. Finally, we seek to establish connections from the Wirikuta/Catorce conflict to broader trends in national policy and global issues of land/resource conflicts between communities and extractive industries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Educational landscape reports have historically contributed to advocating for changes that would benefit learners, including recommendations for digital technologies and their use. The COVID-19 pandemic has considerably affected education, pushing institutions to quickly adapt to the emergency through the use of technology. This scenario has impacted the discourse on educational technologies and their implementation. Seeking to better understand this discourse and its potential impact on education, drawing from a range of scholarly literature—including discourse analysis, critical discourse studies, and studies on educational technology and change—this study focuses on how technology has been presented in a major yearly publication in 2020, 2021, and 2022. This study adds to the literature by presenting findings that show that technology corporations can play a crucial role in shaping educational technology discourses in landscape reports, including how technology should be adopted and the very future of higher education. Additionally, it reinforces the need for critical awareness of how different publications may push corporate agendas disguised as impartial expert guidance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reflects on where AI is headed and the world along with it, considering trust, ethics and safety. Implicit in artificial thinking and doomsday appraisals is the engineered divorce from reality of sublime human embodiment. Jeffrey White, Dietrich Brandt, Jan Soeffner, and Larry Stapleton, four scholars associated with AI & Society, address these issues, and more, in the following exchange. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Online discussion is a popular form of web-based computer-mediated communication and is a dominant medium for cyber communities in areas of information sharing, customer support and distributed education. Automatic tools for analyzing online discussions are highly desirable for better information management and assistance. For example, a summary of student Q&A discussions or unresolved questions can help the instructor assess student dialogue efficiently, which can lead to better instructor guidance for student learning by discussion. This paper presents an approach for classifying student discussions according to a set of discourse structures, and identifying discussions with confusion or unanswered questions. Inspired by the existing spoken dialogue analysis approaches, we first define a set of forum 'speech acts' (F-SAs) that represent roles that individual messages play in threaded Q&A discussions, such as questions, raising issues, and answers. We then model discourse structures in discussion threads using the F-SAs, such as whether a question was replied to with an answer. Finally, we use such discourse structures in classifying and identifying discussions with unanswered questions or unresolved issues. We performed an analysis of the discussion thread classifiers and the system showed accuracies from 0.79 to 0.87 on several discussion classification problems. This analysis of human conversation via online discussions provides a basis for development of future information extraction and intelligent assistance techniques for online discussions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There have been changes in the political economy since the 1980s, and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) has changed as well. Scholars have noted shifts in OECD discourse in some policy fields since that time: shifts away from what might be called classic neoliberal perspectives. This paper reflects on the changes in the political economy and in OECD and explores how they might be related to changes in OECD discourse in higher education. Specifically, it examines country reviews of higher education systems conducted by OECD in the mid-1990s and the late-2000s for evidence of shifts in its higher education discourse. Instead of a softening of neoliberal perspectives, it finds a further entrenchment of assumptions associated with neoliberalization. It also describes what appears to be a deepening contradiction in the discourse concerning the private and public benefits of higher education. Finally, it reflects on how the contexts of the political economy as framed by OECDs discourse, affects its proposed goals and strategies for higher education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Semantic role labeling is traditionally viewed as a sentence-level task concerned with identifying semantic arguments that are overtly realized in a fairly local context (i.e., a clause or sentence). However, this local view potentially misses important information that can only be recovered if local argument structures are linked across sentence boundaries. One important link concerns semantic arguments that remain locally unrealized (null instantiations) but can be inferred from the context. In this paper, we report on the SemEval 2010 Task-10 on 'Linking Events and Their Participants in Discourse', that addressed this problem. We discuss the corpus that was created for this task, which contains annotations on multiple levels: predicate argument structure (FrameNet and PropBank), null instantiations, and coreference. We also provide an analysis of the task and its difficulties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Not only are the problems teachers pose throughout their teaching of great importance but also the ways in which they use those problems make this a critical component of teaching. A problem-posing episode includes the problem setup, the statement of the problem, and the follow-up questions. Analysis of problem-posing episodes of precalculus instructors suggests that their mindset influences how they pose problems. In this paper, we describe the reflexive relationship between an instructor's mindset and problem-posing episodes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we present first results from annotating abstract (discourse-deictic) anaphora in German. Our annotation guidelines provide linguistic tests for identifying the antecedent, and for determining the semantic types of both the antecedent and the anaphor. The corpus consists of selected speaker turns from the Europarl corpus. To date, 100 texts have been annotated according to these guidelines. The annotations show that anaphoric personal and demonstrative pronouns differ with respect to the distance to their antecedents. A semantic analysis reveals that, contrary to suggestions put forward in the literature, referents of anaphors do not tend to be more abstract than the referents of their antecedents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the coming decades, accelerating processes of climate change are expected to impact the world's fisheries. These changes will likely exacerbate ongoing challenges in the governance of small-scale fisheries, which play a significant role in supporting livelihoods and food security throughout the world. Among fishers in Mexico, the perceived impacts of climate change on coastal fisheries are increasingly salient. The purpose of this paper is to examine how the realities of climate change and other socio-environmental phenomena are discursively co-produced by fishers and government actors in a distinct type of political arena: the general assemblies of federated fishing cooperatives. Fishing cooperatives in Mexico organize into regional-level federations, which in turn form national-level confederations. Confederations are therefore multi-level, nested organizations for collective action and political representation. Here, we examine the interactions between fishers and federal government officials in the 2016 general assembly of one confederation, which represents 25 federations with 338 cooperatives. The general assembly of the confederation serves as a political space for open democratic participation among members and, in this case, discussions between fishers and government representatives. The discourses employed by fishers and government actors reveal tensions about the role of the state, the purpose of scientific knowledge in resource management, and the nature of the cooperative small-scale fishing sector. Insights from this case are used to advance discussions about the value of examining discursive practices to gain insights about fisheries policy, through a critical discussion of the Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) framework. We theorize discursive practices as part of politicized performances that coalitions of actors use to express policy preferences and weave together governance narratives, which are useful for understanding positions and broader debates at the national level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]