The Universal Grammar of the Laws of War

Author(s):  
Heather Harrison Dinniss
Keyword(s):  

2018 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 46-54
Author(s):  
Irmala Sukendra ◽  
Agus Mulyana ◽  
Imam Sudarmaji

Regardless to the facts that English is being taught to Indonesian students starting from early age, many Indonesian thrive in learning English. They find it quite troublesome for some to acquire the language especially to the level of communicative competence. Although Krashen (1982:10) states that “language acquirers are not usually aware of the fact that they are acquiring language, but are only aware of the fact that they are using the language for communication”, second language acquisition has several obstacles for learners to face and yet the successfulness of mastering the language never surmounts to the one of the native speakers. Learners have never been able to acquire the language as any native speakers do. Mistakes are made and inter-language is unavoidable. McNeili in Ellis (1985, p. 44) mentions that “the mentalist views of L1 acquisition hypothesizes the process of acquisition consists of hypothesis-testing, by which means the grammar of the learner’s mother tongue is related to the principles of the ‘universal grammar’.” Thus this study intends to find out whether the students go through the phase of interlanguage in their attempt to acquire second language and whether their interlanguage forms similar system as postulated by linguists (Krashen).


Author(s):  
Eric Lander ◽  
Liliane Haegeman

This chapter investigates spatial-deictic systems (e.g. English this vs. that, or Latin hīc vs. iste vs. ille) from a wide range of typologically diverse languages. We propose that spatial deixis is encoded as a three-way contrast in Universal Grammar (UG): Proximal ‘close to speaker,’ Medial ‘close to hearer,’ and Distal ‘far from speaker and hearer.’ The empirical core of the chapter focuses on two phenomena: (i) syncretism and (ii) morphological containment. It is shown that only certain kinds of syncretism patterns are attested crosslinguistically: Syncretism cannot target Proximal and Distal without also targeting Medial (a case of *ABA). Furthermore, the cases of morphological containment we have found show that Distal contains Medial, which, in turn, contains Proximal. A functional sequence of three heads is posited that captures our generalizations in a simple and effective way.


Author(s):  
Tilman Rodenhäuser

Analysing the development of the concept of non-state parties to an armed conflict from the writings of philosophers in the eighteenth century through international humanitarian law (IHL) treaty law to contemporary practice, three threads can be identified. First, as pointed out by Rousseau almost two and a half centuries ago, one basic principle underlying the laws of war is that war is not a relation between men but between entities. Accordingly, the lawful objective of parties cannot be to harm opponents as individuals but only to overcome the entity for which the individual fights. This necessitates that any party to an armed conflict is a collective, organized entity and not a loosely connected group of individuals. Second, de Vattel already stressed that civil war is fought between two parties who ‘acknowledge no common judge’ and have no ‘common superior’ on earth....


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document