The design(ing) of language

Author(s):  
Grant Goodall

Courses on invented languages can do much more than just introduce students to linguistics. Through three case studies, it is shown that as students learn how to design a language, they also learn about the design of human language in a way that is unlikely to occur in other courses. The first case study involves the creation of a lexicon, in relation to John Wilkins’ invented language of 1668 and to Saussurean arbitrariness, commonly regarded as a fundamental design property of human language. The second case study concerns phonemic inventories. By designing their own from scratch, students see the competing pressures that phonemic inventories must satisfy in all languages. The third case study concerns inflectional morphology and the pressures that determine the form of particular morphemes. All of these case studies are accessible to students and help them engage with important aspects of the design properties of human language.

2019 ◽  
Vol 15 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 43-65
Author(s):  
Christian Lequesne ◽  
Gabriel Castillo ◽  
Minda Holm ◽  
Walid Jumblatt Abdullah ◽  
Halvard Leira ◽  
...  

Summary Diversity and its management have become an issue in all organisations. Ministries of foreign affairs (MFAs) do not escape the issue. In the 2000s, states decided to consider more ethnic diversity in the recruitment of their diplomats. In some countries, this new goal requires affirmative action programs. This article is based on three case studies. The first case study analyses two Western countries — France and Norway — where MFAs have to reflect the diversity of immigration in their societies. The second case study analyses the case of Brazil, a country where the legacy of slavery still causes discrimination in the recruitment of diplomats. The third case study analyses ethnic diversity in the MFAs of India and Singapore, which recognise multiculturalism or multiracialism. The study draws five comparative conclusions to generalise on why MFAs in the world cannot escape the challenge of ethnic diversity in their recruitment policy.


Author(s):  
Christy Constantakopoulou

This chapter provides a summary of the previous case studies. It discusses the four networks examined over the course of the book,. The first case study explores the history of the Islanders’ League. It proposes that the League is the expression of a strong regional island identity. The second case study focuses on the history of monumentalization of Delos. By exploring the different funding sources for building activity on Delos, it shows the active engagement of the Delian community, the Hellenistic kings, and other non-royal individuals in the monumentalization processes. The third case study examines the Delian network of honours which was geographically immense, with the southern Aegean as the primary region of local interaction, and with specific clustering beyond this primary region. The fourth case study focuses on the evidence of the Delian inventories in order to reconstruct the social dynamics of dedication.


2001 ◽  
Vol 100 (1) ◽  
pp. 167-179 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yong Zhong

This article re-examines the political economics of current Chinese television through three case studies into the operation of China Central Television Station (CCTV). It precedes the case studies with a review of a number of perspectives of Chinese television regarding its relation to businesses and its function as a propaganda instrument. The first case study presents an example to demonstrate the nature of the relationship between CCTV and its business partners. The second case study shows that CCTV is becoming a huge official-profiteering monopoly. The third case study leads to the argument that counter-commercialisation enhances CCTV's ability to propagandise. On the basis of these case studies, I argue that commercialisation is not a one-way process and that it necessarily contains an equal and opposite reactive process that I identify as counter-commercialisation. I hope that the case studies will enhance knowledge about the complexity of Chinese television.


Author(s):  
Ashish Singla ◽  
Jyotindra Narayan ◽  
Himanshu Arora

In this paper, an attempt has been made to investigate the potential of redundant manipulators, while tracking trajectories in narrow channels. The behavior of redundant manipulators is important in many challenging applications like under-water welding in narrow tanks, checking the blockage in sewerage pipes, performing a laparoscopy operation etc. To demonstrate this snake-like behavior, redundancy resolution scheme is utilized using two different approaches. The first approach is based on the concept of task priority, where a given task is split and prioritize into several subtasks like singularity avoidance, obstacle avoidance, torque minimization, and position preference over orientation etc. The second approach is based on Adaptive Neuro Fuzzy Inference System (ANFIS), where the training is provided through given datasets and the results are back-propagated using augmentation of neural networks with fuzzy logics. Three case studies are considered in this work to demonstrate the redundancy resolution of serial manipulators. The first case study of 3-link manipulator is attempted with both the approaches, where the objective is to track the desired trajectory while avoiding multiple obstacles. The second case study of 7-link manipulator, tracking trajectory in a narrow channel, is investigated using the concept of task priority. The realistic application of minimum-invasive surgery (MIS) based trajectory tracking is considered as the third case study, which is attempted using ANFIS approach. The 5-link spatial redundant manipulator, also known as a patient-side manipulator being developed at CSIR-CSIO, Chandigarh is used to track the desired surgical cuts. Through the three case studies, it is well demonstrated that both the approaches are giving satisfactory results.


Author(s):  
Bérengère Lafiandra

This article intends to analyze the use of metaphors in a corpus of Donald Trump’s speeches on immigration; its main goal is to determine how migrants were depicted in the 2016 American presidential election, and how metaphor manipulated voters in the creation of this image. This study is multimodal since not only the linguistic aspect of speeches but also gestures are considered. The first part consists in presenting an overview of the theories on metaphor. It provides the theoretical framework and develops the main tenets of the ‘Conceptual Metaphor Theory’ (CMT). The second part deals with multimodality and presents what modes and gestures are. The third part provides the corpus and methodology. The last part consists in the corpus study and provides the main source domains as well as other rhetorical tools that are used by Trump to depict migrants and manipulate voters.


Author(s):  
Alex Ryan ◽  
Mark Leung

This paper introduces two novel applications of systemic design to facilitate a comparison of alternative methodologies that integrate systems thinking and design. In the first case study, systemic design helped the Procurement Department at the University of Toronto re-envision how public policy is implemented and how value is created in the broader university purchasing ecosystem. This resulted in an estimated $1.5 million in savings in the first year, and a rise in user retention rates from 40% to 99%. In the second case study, systemic design helped the clean energy and natural resources group within the Government of Alberta to design a more efficient and effective resource management system and shift the way that natural resource departments work together. This resulted in the formation of a standing systemic design team and contributed to the creation of an integrated resource management system. A comparative analysis of the two projects identifies a shared set of core principles for systemic design as well as areas of differentiation that reveal potential for learning across methodologies. Together, these case studies demonstrate the complementarity of systems thinking and design thinking, and show how they may be integrated to guide positive change within complex sociotechnical systems.


Risks ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (11) ◽  
pp. 204
Author(s):  
Chamay Kruger ◽  
Willem Daniel Schutte ◽  
Tanja Verster

This paper proposes a methodology that utilises model performance as a metric to assess the representativeness of external or pooled data when it is used by banks in regulatory model development and calibration. There is currently no formal methodology to assess representativeness. The paper provides a review of existing regulatory literature on the requirements of assessing representativeness and emphasises that both qualitative and quantitative aspects need to be considered. We present a novel methodology and apply it to two case studies. We compared our methodology with the Multivariate Prediction Accuracy Index. The first case study investigates whether a pooled data source from Global Credit Data (GCD) is representative when considering the enrichment of internal data with pooled data in the development of a regulatory loss given default (LGD) model. The second case study differs from the first by illustrating which other countries in the pooled data set could be representative when enriching internal data during the development of a LGD model. Using these case studies as examples, our proposed methodology provides users with a generalised framework to identify subsets of the external data that are representative of their Country’s or bank’s data, making the results general and universally applicable.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marc Schlossberg ◽  
◽  
Rebecca Lewis ◽  
Aliza Whalen ◽  
Clare Haley ◽  
...  

This report summarizes the primary output of this project, a book of COVID-era street reconfiguration case studies called Rethinking Streets During COVID-19: An Evidence-Based Guide to 25 Quick Redesigns for Physical Distancing, Public Use, and Spatial Equity. COVID-era needs have accelerated the process that many communities use to make street transformations due to: a need to remain physically distanced from others outside our immediate household; a need for more outdoor space close to home in every part of every community to access and enjoy; a need for more space to provide efficient mobility for essential workers in particular; and a need for more space for local businesses as they try to remain open safely. This project is the third in a series of NITC-supported case study books on best practices in street reconfigurations for more active, sustainable, and in this case, COVID-supportive uses. The full, 154-page book is available for free download from the National Institute for Transportation and Communities (NITC).


1997 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 40-53 ◽  
Author(s):  
E. G. Bradshaw ◽  
M. Lester

Abstract. The characteristics of substorm-associated Pi2 pulsations observed by the SABRE coherent radar system during three separate case studies are presented. The SABRE field of view is well positioned to observe the differences between the auroral zone pulsation signature and that observed at mid-latitudes. During the first case study the SABRE field of view is initially in the eastward electrojet, equatorward and to the west of the substorm-enhanced electrojet current. As the interval progresses, the western, upward field-aligned current of the substorm current wedge moves westward across the longitudes of the radar field of view. The westward motion of the wedge is apparent in the spatial and temporal signatures of the associated Pi2 pulsation spectra and polarisation sense. During the second case study, the complex field-aligned and ionospheric currents associated with the pulsation generation region move equatorward into the SABRE field of view and then poleward out of it again after the third pulsation in the series. The spectral content of the four pulsations during the interval indicate different auroral zone and mid-latitude signatures. The final case study is from a period of low magnetic activity when SABRE observes a Pi2 pulsation signature from regions equatorward of the enhanced substorm currents. There is an apparent mode change between the signature observed by SABRE in the ionosphere and that on the ground by magnetometers at latitudes slightly equatorward of the radar field of view. The observations are discussed in terms of published theories of the generation mechanisms for this type of pulsation. Different signatures are observed by SABRE depending on the level of magnetic activity and the position of the SABRE field of view relative to the pulsation generation region. A twin source model for Pi2 pulsation generation provides the clearest explanation of the signatures observed.


Author(s):  
Roi Wagner

This chapter examines two case studies that illustrate the limitations of the cognitive theory of mathematical metaphor in accounting for the formation of actual historical mathematical life worlds. The first case study deals with four medieval and early modern examples of relating algebra to geometry. These examples show that when two mathematical domains are linked, what passes between them cannot be reduced to “inferences,” as assumed by the theory of mathematical metaphor. The second case study reviews notions of infinity since early modernity and demonstrates that these notions are far too variegated and complex to be subsumed under a single metaphor—namely, George Lakoff and Rafael Núñez's basic metaphor of infinity, which tries to read all mathematical infinities as metaphorically projecting final destinations on indefinite sequences.


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