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A correction to the article "Composition and the Cases-An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy" that was published in the 2016 issue is presented.

The article explores the ways on how to address issues concerning instructional quality and equity as universities increase their reliance on part-time and non-tenure-tract faculty. It suggests integrating non-tenure-track faculty into the culture of the department and institution. It highlights how the composition program makes such cultural change in the English department of Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina. The program relies more heavily on non-tenure-track faculty for teaching composition, wherein their teaching loads have gone from four-four to three-three. Director Georgia Rhoades of the Writing Across Curriculum (WAC) program notes that none of their non-tenure-track instructors were fully employed in 1998 and only two have taught at three-quarter time.

Our tolerance for, and promotion of, linguistic irregularity is a key arbitrator between Arbib's proposal that holistic protolanguage preceded culturally imposed compositionality, and the standard view that discrete units with word-like properties came first. The former, coupled with needs-only analysis, neatly accounts for the second-order linguistic complexity that is rationalised as fuzzy grammaticality, subclass exception, and full irregularity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An important question in language evolution is whether segmentation as a linguistic process is able to yield compositionality. Segmentation is hypothesized to be a process to bridge the gap between holistic and compositional lexicons. However, to date no thorough analytical method has been provided to test the feasibility of segmentation. In this paper, an analytical model is presented that can predict the probability of encountering various kinds of overlaps by observing utterance pairs, and the probability of finding confirmation in the language for newly extracted segments. Language users start by using a previously evolved holistic lexicon to communicate about simple environments. They segment these holistic utterances to smaller pieces, which can be used as elements of a compositional lexicon. The model reveals that the feasibility of segmentation depends on the definition of counterexamples, i.e. those associations (pairs), which either cause ambiguous extraction of segments, or do not allow segmentation at all. On one hand if inexact overlaps are considered to be contradictory (i.e. causing confusion) to a perfect exact overlap, then the probability is so minuscule that it renders the role of segmentation marginal during language evolution. On the other hand, if such inexact counterexamples are able to be segmented unambiguously due to extra cognitive capacities, segmentation may have a much higher feasibility. Keywords: segmentation; fractionation; analysis; holistic; protolanguage; compositionality [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes a coevolutionary scenario on the origins of compositionality and word order regularity in human language, and illustrates it using a multi-agent, behavioral model. The model traces a ‘bottom-up’ process of syntactic development; artificial agents, by iterating local orders among lexical items, gradually build up basic constituent word order(s) in sentences. These results show that structural features of language (e.g. syntactic categories and word orders) could have coevolved with lexical items, as a consequence of general learning mechanisms (e.g. pattern extraction and sequential learning) initially not language-specific. Keywords: Computer simulation; language origin; coevolution; compositionality; word order regularity [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A correction to the article "Pure quotation and general compositionality" that was published in the 2011 issue is presented.

Presents information on new graduate studies in rhetoric and composition, offered at Pennsylvania State University in University Park in 1984. Number of courses to be completed by students in theory of research methods of rhetoric and composition; Overview of the rhetoric and composition faculty in English at the university.

The article presents a list of topics for local composition which include An Hour at the Railway Station, What Folk Say Going Out of Church and the First Settlers of the Town.

The article offers news briefs related to education in New Hampshire. It discusses the article of professor Harlan P. Amen that is about gentlemanliness and self control in his country. Abner L. Merrill has given the amount of $1,000 to the high school and Robinson Seminary of Exeter for winning in the English composition and declamation.

The article discusses the data from the study concerning the aims of composition work in high schools in Iowa. Some of the aims of the composition work include correctness, expression, paragraphing, sentence structure among others. Almost 49 percent of the aims can be grouped under the grammatical correctness category.