scholarly journals Quirky negative concord

Jezikoslovlje ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 195-225
Author(s):  
Johan van der Auwera

This paper explores the interaction between connective negation (‘neither ... nor’) and negative concord, an issue that has not received much attention. It looks at different ‘negative concord’ languages, viz. Croatian, Spanish, and French. The approach is synchronic; the data come from existing descriptions and from native speaker judgments. The paper describes the many idiosyncrasies but also lays bare some of the similarities.

Multilingua ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 38 (1) ◽  
pp. 9-27
Author(s):  
Alexandra Jaffe

Abstract This article explores the carefully managed semiotic complex found in the Corsican village of Pigna with respect to the themes of pride and profit in the valuation of minority languages. This complex includes the careful coordination of color, graphics, the use of the Corsican language, as well as high-tech soundscaping of place through QR codes that tie specific locales to Corsican music and multilingual texts. This display, labeled the “poeticizing of the economy” by a key social actor, is directed both at the many tourists who visit the village as well as Corsican visitors and locals. It is linked to an effort to embed Corsican linguistic and musical heritage in new practices that both create place and integrate tradition and modernity. On the one hand, these practices can be linked to discourses of both “pride” and “profit” (Duchêne and Heller 2012) attested in many minority language contexts. On the other hand, I argue that the Pigna esthetic indexes a shift in the framework for cultural and linguistic revitalization from one that emphasizes a return to past native speaker communicative practice to one that focuses on the collective agency and identity associated with style and stylization and “transactional,” or situated authenticities.


2017 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 270-290
Author(s):  
Duoxiu Qian ◽  
David Kaufer

AbstractOver the past three decades, the Chinese government has repeatedly called for the effective transmission of its policies to the West through translation. Yet the effectiveness of translation and its evaluation has remained a ticklish issue, particularly for texts with a political agenda. Fidelity to literal denotative meaning at the grain of words and phrases is generally insufficient for the translation of such texts. Texts in these sensitive domains of the Chinese context call for exacting fidelity in tone, register, genre, stance, connotation, and, overall, rhetoric. The Chinese government, wishing to avoid misinterpretation, is concerned with sharing their policies with foreigners as closely as possible to the way the many authors of these policies understood them from the inside. In this paper, we think of a “rhetoric” of translation holistically as capturing the “inside contours” of words and phrases as understood by a native speaker. For this purpose, we present a rhetorical approach to translation that can help explain the translation standards of Chinese government documents marked for wide-scale distribution abroad. The approach and method can be applicable in the assessment of other translations when rhetoric or the overall effect is the major concern.


Author(s):  
Rosa Caroli

Since its establishment on the eve of the inauguration of the Suez Canal (1869) opening up the route for a privileged sea passage towards the Orient – as it was then called – the Royal Superior School of Commerce of Venice adopted the ambitious and farsighted policy of making it ‘unique in its genre’ by promoting the teaching of foreign languages, particularly the teaching of Oriental languages. The launching of a Japanese language course taught by a native speaker five years after the School’s creation inaugurated a season of relations between Ca’ Foscari and Japan. The year of the Venetian School’s foundation coincides with the beginning of the Meiji period in Japan (1868-1912), which saw its transformation into a modern and industrialised country. The Regia Scuola also entertained direct and indirect relations with similar schools in Japan, exchanging alumni bulletins and scientific publications with them. Many students of Japanese in Venice would spend periods of time in Japan, while native Japanese instructors in Venice, once back in Japan, would transmit knowledge acquired in Venice, sometimes even becoming teachers of Italian in Japan. Scholarships for commercial practice allowed some Venetian alumni to reach Japan, while others were hired by new Japanese educational institutions or attached to the Italian diplomatic and consular missions in Japan. Most of them maintained close ties with Ca’ Foscari by sending postcards, photographs, letters and often detailed reports on Japan to their alma mater, thus helping to increase knowledge of a far and still little-known country, in Venice as well as in the rest of Italy. Young Japanese scholars and prominent professors visited the Regia Scuola, often documenting memories of their Venetian experience in their writings. Following the traces left by some of these characters, the essay aims at reconstructing the many threads of the relationships between the Regia Scuola and Japan in the first six decades of its foundation.


2018 ◽  
Vol 52 (1) ◽  
pp. 177-211 ◽  
Author(s):  
Venera Suleymanova ◽  
Jack Hoeksema

Abstract Azerbaijani, like many other languages, has a class of negative polarity items denoting minimal measures (along dimensions such as size, length, duration, value, weight etc.), called minimizers. This paper presents an overview of this group of expressions, compares them to minimizers in the western European languages, in particular English and Dutch, identifies the various domains in which these minimizers may be used, and discusses their distribution across polarity-sensitive contexts such as negation, conditional clauses, questions, etc. The distribution we found, on the basis of both corpus data and native speaker judgments, is very similar to that of minimizers in English or Dutch, especially when differences are factored out which are due to the fact that Azerbaijani has strict negative concord, whereas English and Dutch do not. To this end, we distinguish two types of minimizers for Azerbaijani, negated minimizers preceded by heç bir ‘not one’, and minimizers preceded by bir only.


2018 ◽  
Vol 41 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wei Ji Ma

AbstractGiven the many types of suboptimality in perception, I ask how one should test for multiple forms of suboptimality at the same time – or, more generally, how one should compare process models that can differ in any or all of the multiple components. In analogy to factorial experimental design, I advocate for factorial model comparison.


2020 ◽  
Vol 43 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Spurrett

Abstract Comprehensive accounts of resource-rational attempts to maximise utility shouldn't ignore the demands of constructing utility representations. This can be onerous when, as in humans, there are many rewarding modalities. Another thing best not ignored is the processing demands of making functional activity out of the many degrees of freedom of a body. The target article is almost silent on both.


2020 ◽  
Vol 43 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Tomasello

Abstract My response to the commentaries focuses on four issues: (1) the diversity both within and between cultures of the many different faces of obligation; (2) the possible evolutionary roots of the sense of obligation, including possible sources that I did not consider; (3) the possible ontogenetic roots of the sense of obligation, including especially children's understanding of groups from a third-party perspective (rather than through participation, as in my account); and (4) the relation between philosophical accounts of normative phenomena in general – which are pitched as not totally empirical – and empirical accounts such as my own. I have tried to distinguish comments that argue for extensions of the theory from those that represent genuine disagreement.


1997 ◽  
Vol 161 ◽  
pp. 179-187
Author(s):  
Clifford N. Matthews ◽  
Rose A. Pesce-Rodriguez ◽  
Shirley A. Liebman

AbstractHydrogen cyanide polymers – heterogeneous solids ranging in color from yellow to orange to brown to black – may be among the organic macromolecules most readily formed within the Solar System. The non-volatile black crust of comet Halley, for example, as well as the extensive orangebrown streaks in the atmosphere of Jupiter, might consist largely of such polymers synthesized from HCN formed by photolysis of methane and ammonia, the color observed depending on the concentration of HCN involved. Laboratory studies of these ubiquitous compounds point to the presence of polyamidine structures synthesized directly from hydrogen cyanide. These would be converted by water to polypeptides which can be further hydrolyzed to α-amino acids. Black polymers and multimers with conjugated ladder structures derived from HCN could also be formed and might well be the source of the many nitrogen heterocycles, adenine included, observed after pyrolysis. The dark brown color arising from the impacts of comet P/Shoemaker-Levy 9 on Jupiter might therefore be mainly caused by the presence of HCN polymers, whether originally present, deposited by the impactor or synthesized directly from HCN. Spectroscopic detection of these predicted macromolecules and their hydrolytic and pyrolytic by-products would strengthen significantly the hypothesis that cyanide polymerization is a preferred pathway for prebiotic and extraterrestrial chemistry.


Author(s):  
Benjamin F. Trump ◽  
Irene K. Berezesky ◽  
Raymond T. Jones

The role of electron microscopy and associated techniques is assured in diagnostic pathology. At the present time, most of the progress has been made on tissues examined by transmission electron microscopy (TEM) and correlated with light microscopy (LM) and by cytochemistry using both plastic and paraffin-embedded materials. As mentioned elsewhere in this symposium, this has revolutionized many fields of pathology including diagnostic, anatomic and clinical pathology. It began with the kidney; however, it has now been extended to most other organ systems and to tumor diagnosis in general. The results of the past few years tend to indicate the future directions and needs of this expanding field. Now, in addition to routine EM, pathologists have access to the many newly developed methods and instruments mentioned below which should aid considerably not only in diagnostic pathology but in investigative pathology as well.


Author(s):  
D.T. Grubb

Diffraction studies in polymeric and other beam sensitive materials may bring to mind the many experiments where diffracted intensity has been used as a measure of the electron dose required to destroy fine structure in the TEM. But this paper is concerned with a range of cases where the diffraction pattern itself contains the important information.In the first case, electron diffraction from paraffins, degraded polyethylene and polyethylene single crystals, all the samples are highly ordered, and their crystallographic structure is well known. The diffraction patterns fade on irradiation and may also change considerably in a-spacing, increasing the unit cell volume on irradiation. The effect is large and continuous far C94H190 paraffin and for PE, while for shorter chains to C 28H58 the change is less, levelling off at high dose, Fig.l. It is also found that the change in a-spacing increases at higher dose rates and at higher irradiation temperatures.


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