scholarly journals Shaping the Common Ground: State-Building, the Railway Network, and Regional Development in Finland

2020 ◽  
Vol 51 (2) ◽  
pp. 267-296
Author(s):  
Eduard J. Alvarez-Palau ◽  
Jordi Martí-Henneberg
Keyword(s):  
Rural Areas ◽  
Common Ground ◽  
Empirical Investigation ◽  
Metropolitan Areas ◽  
Transport Infrastructure ◽  
Combine Data ◽  
Railway Network ◽  
Local Networks ◽  
The Common ◽  
Municipal Level

Transport infrastructure played a key role in redefining Finland’s economic geography. An empirical investigation involving new gis databases that combine data about railways, population, and administrative boundaries at the municipal level between 1870 and 2000 permits the identification of three main phases of railway expansion: The first phase was a concentration of railways around Helsinki; the second, the construction of a grid-based national railway network, which coincided with a spread of the population into rural areas; and the third, an expansion of the railway into local networks when Finland’s industry began to coalesce around metropolitan areas.

The Semantics of Evidentials

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah E. Murray
Keyword(s):  
Recent Work ◽  
Common Ground ◽  
Formal Semantics ◽  
Empirical Support ◽  
Propositional Content ◽  
Primary Data ◽  
Truth Conditional ◽  
The Common ◽  
Issue Content

This book gives a compositional, truth‐conditional, crosslinguistic semantics for evidentials set in a theory of the semantics for sentential mood. Central to this semantics is a proposal about a distinction between what propositional content is at‐issue, roughly primary or proffered, and what content is not‐at‐issue. Evidentials contribute not‐at‐issue content, more specifically what I will call a not‐at‐issue restriction. In addition, evidentials can affect the level of commitment a sentence makes to the main proposition, contributed by sentential mood. Building on recent work in the formal semantics of evidentials and related phenomena, the proposed semantics does not appeal to separate dimensions of illocutionary meaning. Instead, I argue that all sentences make three contributions: at‐issue content, not‐at‐issue content, and an illocutionary relation. At‐issue content is presented, made available for subsequent anaphora, but is not directly added to the common ground. Not‐at‐issue content directly updates the common ground. The illocutionary relation uses the at‐issue content to impose structure on the common ground, which, depending on the clause type (e.g., declarative, interrogative), can trigger further updates. Empirical support for this proposal comes from Cheyenne (Algonquian, primary data from the author’s fieldwork), English, and a wide variety of languages that have been discussed in the literature on evidentials.

Can Groups Assert That P?

2019 ◽  
pp. 326-344
Author(s):  
Deborah Tollefsen
Keyword(s):  
Common Ground ◽  
Speech Act ◽  
Single Individual ◽  
Constitutive Rule ◽  
The Past ◽  
Group Members ◽  
The Common ◽  
Declarative Statement ◽  
John Macfarlane

When a group or institution issues a declarative statement, what sort of speech act is this? Is it the assertion of a single individual (perhaps the group’s spokesperson or leader) or the assertion of all or most of the group members? Or is there a sense in which the group itself asserts that p? If assertion is a speech act, then who is the actor in the case of group assertion? These are the questions this chapter aims to address. Whether groups themselves can make assertions or whether a group of individuals can jointly assert that p depends, in part, on what sort of speech act assertion is. The literature on assertion has burgeoned over the past few years, and there is a great deal of debate regarding the nature of assertion. John MacFarlane has helpfully identified four theories of assertion. Following Sandy Goldberg, we can call these the attitudinal account, the constitutive rule account, the common-ground account, and the commitment account. I shall consider what group assertion might look like under each of these accounts and doing so will help us to examine some of the accounts of group assertion (often presented as theories of group testimony) on offer. I shall argue that, of the four accounts, the commitment account can best be extended to make sense of group assertion in all its various forms.

scholarly journals Urban access across the globe: an international comparison of different transport modes

2021 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Hao Wu ◽  
Paolo Avner ◽  
Genevieve Boisjoly ◽  
Carlos K. V. Braga ◽  
Ahmed El-Geneidy ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Land Use ◽  
Road Network ◽  
Urban Economics ◽  
Metropolitan Areas ◽  
Transport Infrastructure ◽  
Compact Development ◽  
Unit Of Measurement ◽  
In Transit ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
American Cities

AbstractAccess (the ease of reaching valued destinations) is underpinned by land use and transport infrastructure. The importance of access in transport, sustainability, and urban economics is increasingly recognized. In particular, access provides a universal unit of measurement to examine cities for the efficiency of transport and land-use systems. This paper examines the relationship between population-weighted access and metropolitan population in global metropolitan areas (cities) using 30-min cumulative access to jobs for 4 different modes of transport; 117 cities from 16 countries and 6 continents are included. Sprawling development with the intensive road network in American cities produces modest automobile access relative to their sizes, but American cities lag behind globally in transit and walking access; Australian and Canadian cities have lower automobile access, but better transit access than American cities; combining compact development with an intensive network produces the highest access in Chinese and European cities for their sizes. Hence density and mobility co-produce better access. This paper finds access to jobs increases with populations sublinearly, so doubling the metropolitan population results in less than double access to jobs. The relationship between population and access characterizes regions, countries, and cities, and significant similarities exist between cities from the same country.

The Rural-Urban Continuum of Polarization: Understanding the Geography of the 2018 Midterms

The Forum ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Kenneth M. Johnson ◽  
Dante J. Scala
Keyword(s):  
Rural Areas ◽  
Urban Areas ◽  
Metropolitan Areas ◽  
Political Attitudes ◽  
The United States ◽  
Rural America ◽  
Rural Regions ◽  
Urban America ◽  
Urban And Rural Areas ◽  
The Continuum

Abstract This study of the 2018 congressional midterms demonstrates how voting patterns and political attitudes vary across a spectrum of urban and rural areas in the United States. Rural America is no more a monolith than is urban America. The rural-urban gradient is better represented by a continuum than a dichotomy. This is evident in the voting results in 2018, just as it was in 2016. We found that the political tipping point lies beyond major metropolitan areas, in the suburban counties of smaller metropolitan areas. Democrats enjoyed even greater success in densely populated urban areas in 2018 than in 2016. Residents of these urban areas display distinctive and consistent social and political attitudes across a range of scales. At the other end of the continuum in remote rural areas, Republican candidates continued to command voter support despite the challenging national political environment. Voters in these rural regions expressed social and political attitudes diametrically opposed to their counterparts in large urban cores.

scholarly journals Across the Divide: Looking for the common ground of Hindustani

2018 ◽  
Vol 52 (6) ◽  
pp. 2056-2079 ◽  
Author(s):  
DAVID LUNN
Keyword(s):  
Common Ground ◽  
Cultural Field ◽  
Literary Journals ◽  
The Common

AbstractThis article investigates some of the institutional and poetic practices around the idea of Hindustani in the period 1900–47. It charts the establishment of the Hindustani Academy in 1927 and explores some of its publishing activities as it attempted to make a positive institutional intervention in the Hindi–Urdu debate and cultural field more broadly. It then considers some aspects of poetic production in literary journals, including those associated with the Academy. Ultimately, it is an attempt to explore the grey areas that existed between Hindi/Hindu and Urdu/Muslim in the pre-Independence decades, and to make the case for studying the literature of both traditions simultaneously, along with emphasizing that attempts at compromise—including the perennially contested term ‘Hindustani’ itself—must be taken on their own terms.

scholarly journals THE RAILWAY NETWORK AND THE PROCESS OF POPULATION CONCENTRATION IN SPAIN, 1900-2001

2014 ◽  
Vol 32 (3) ◽  
pp. 351-379 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xavier Franch-Auladell ◽  
Mateu Morillas-Torné ◽  
Jordi Martí-Henneberg
Keyword(s):  
Total Population ◽  
Census Data ◽  
Population Distribution ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
Railway Network ◽  
Population Concentration ◽  
Central Hypothesis ◽  
Municipal Level

ABSTRACTThis paper proposes a methodology for quantifying the territorial impact on population distribution of the railway. The central hypothesis is that access to railway services provides the best-connected areas with a long-term comparative advantage over others that are less accessible. Carrying out a historical analysis and providing comparable data at the municipal level allows us to determine the extent to which the railway has fostered the concentration of population within its immediate surroundings. The case study presented here is that of Spain between 1900 and 2001, but the same methodology could equally be applied to any other country for which the required data are available. In this case, key data included a Geographic Information System with information about both the development of the railway network and census data relating to total population at the municipal level. The results obtained suggest the relevance of this methodology, which makes it possible to identify the periods and areas in which this influence was most significant.

Linguistic influences on gesture’s form

Gesture ◽  
2005 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 157-195 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer Gerwing ◽  
Janet Bavelas
Keyword(s):  
Common Ground ◽  
Symbolic Form ◽  
Communicative Function ◽  
Face To Face ◽  
Original Action ◽  
New Information ◽  
Physical Form ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Given ◽  
Linguistic Influences

Hand gestures in face-to-face dialogue are symbolic acts, integrated with speech. Little is known about the factors that determine the physical form of these gestures. When the gesture depicts a previous nonsymbolic action, it obviously resembles this action; however, such gestures are not only noticeably different from the original action but, when they occur in a series, are different from each other. This paper presents an experiment with two separate analyses (one quantitative, one qualitative) testing the hypothesis that the immediate communicative function is a determinant of the symbolic form of the gesture. First, we manipulated whether the speaker was describing the previous action to an addressee who had done the same actions and therefore shared common ground or to one who had done different actions and therefore did not share common ground. The common ground gestures were judged to be significantly less complex, precise, or informative than the latter, a finding similar to the effects of common ground on words. In the qualitative analysis, we used the given versus new principle to analyze a series of gestures about the same actions by the same speaker. The speaker emphasized the new information in each gesture by making it larger, clearer, etc. When this information became given, a gesture for the same action became smaller or less precise, which is similar to findings for given versus new information in words. Thus the immediate communicative function (e.g., to convey information that is common ground or that is new) played a major role in determining the physical form of the gestures.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document