An Operational Approach to Agroecology-Based Local Agri-Food Systems

In recent years, the transition to sustainability at a food systems’ scale has drawn major attention both from the scientific and political arenas. Agroecology has become central to such discussions, while impressive efforts have been made to conceptualize the agroecology scaling process. It has thus become necessary to apply the concept of agroecology transitions to the scale of food systems and in different “real-world” contexts. Scaling local agroecology experiences of production, distribution, and consumption, which are often disconnected and/or disorganized, also reveals emergent research gaps. A critical review was performed in order to establish a transdisciplinary dialogue between both political agroecology and the literature on sustainable food systems. The objective was to build insights into how to advance towards Agroecology-based Local Agri-food Systems (ALAS). Our review unveils emergent questions such as: how to overcome the metabolic rift related to segregated activities along the food chain, how to feed cities sustainably, and how they should relate to the surrounding territories, which social subjects should drive such transitions, and which governance arrangements would be needed. The paper argues in favor of the re-construction of food metabolisms, territorial flows, plural subjects and (bottom-up) governance assemblages, placing life at the center of the food system and going beyond the rural–urban divide.

Constraints on subject-verb agreement marking in Turkish-German bilingual speakers

Turkish 3rd person plural subjects normally appear with verbs that are unmarked for number. Following earlier findings which indicate that Turkish heritage speakers (HS) accept overt plural marking more readily compared to monolingually raised Turkish speakers, the present study investigates to what extent bilingual speakers are sensitive to grammatical, surface-level and semantic constraints on Turkish plural agreement marking. A scalar acceptability judgement task was carried out with non-bilingual Turkish speakers residing in Turkey and Turkish-German bilinguals residing in Germany. Our experimental design involved manipulating both subject animacy and subject position. Participants’ judgement patterns confirmed Turkish speakers’ general preference for unmarked verb forms, which was modulated both by subject animacy and by subject position. Significant differences were observed between lower proficiency HS on the one hand, and monolinguals and advanced proficiency HS on the other, suggesting that the relatively subtle interplay between different types of constraint on number agreement marking is affected by heritage language conditions. We found no evidence for simplification or optionality reduction in the lower proficiency HS’ judgements, however. We innovate on previous research by using Gradient Symbolic Computation modelling to capture between-group differences in the relative weightings of the constraints under investigation.

Can groups be genuine believers? The argument from interpretationism

In ordinary discourse we often attribute beliefs not just to individuals but also to groups. But can groups really have genuine beliefs? This paper considers but ultimately rejects one of the main arguments in support of the claim that groups can be genuine believers – the Argument From Interpretationism – and concludes that we have good reasons to be sceptical about the existence of group beliefs. According to the Argument From Interpretationism, roughly speaking, groups qualify as genuine believers because we can interpret (or predict) their behaviour in much the same way that we can interpret (or predict) the behaviour of individuals. While this argument may seem initially attractive, I argue that it is ultimately unsuccessful. In particular, I argue that the argument is unsuccessful even if one is generally sympathetic towards interpretationism. The reason for this, as we will see, is that a number of problems arise when we try to apply the interpretationist strategy – originally formulated with individual subjects in mind – to plural subjects or groups. In showing why the Argument From Interpretationism fails, the paper also brings into focus some more general constraints on the scope and applicability of interpretationism.

Pragmatic constraints on subject-oriented honorifics in Yaeyaman and Japanese

This paper explores cross-linguistic differences in the pragmatic con- straints governing the use of subject-oriented honorific verb forms in Japanese and in three varieties of Yaeyaman (Southern Ryukyuan). I show that plural subjects with mixed honorific status give rise to different felicity patterns in these language varieties, and argue that these differences arise from different rankings of competing pragmatic constraints.

(Non-)agreement of passive participles in South-Eastern Lithuanian

The phenomenon of non-agreement of passive participles (mostly t-participles) is discussed on the basis of the TriMCo corpus of South-Eastern Lithuanian dialects. A quantitative analysis of the examples shows that non-agreeing t-participles appear significantly more often in East Aukštaitian than in South Aukštaitian. It is also shown that plural subjects and position of the participle before the subject increase the probability of the non-agreeing form. At the same time we show that (non-)agreement of passive constructions in South-Eastern Lithuanian dialects does not correlate with the semantic type of passive. We also argue that the Lithuanian dialectal constructions with non-agreeing passive participles are most probably not related to the similar constructions in East Slavic (either areally, or diachronically). The non-agreeing passive constructions are also not areally related to non-agreeing active participle constructions, but probably illustrate the same tendency for the lack of agreement with plural subjects.

Verbal Anti-Agreement with Non-Human DPs

This paper examines the unexpected verbal anti-agreement with non-human plural subjects in Standard Arabic. In this language, when the plural subject denotes non-humans, the verb fails to establish plural agreement with that subject. Non-human DPs refer to nominals which denote any animate life-form other than humans as well as all inanimate entities. In this paper, I provide two competing analyses to account for this phenomenon. In the first analysis, I build on the assumption (Mohammad, 2000) that preverbal subjects in this language are Topics and argue that the singular number marker on the anti-agreeing verb is the result of establishing partial agreement with the non-human subject in its base-position before movement/dislocation to TopP. In the second account, I borrow Corbett’s (2004) notion of ‘individuated nominals’ where it is assumed that plural nominals can either refer to collective individuals or distinct individuals; subsequently the intended referent dictates agreement on the verb. Hence, I argue that non-human plural subjects are collective nominals that are not individuated, therefore they are inherently singular and the plural marker in this case carries morphosyntactic information that does not affect the inherently imposed singular feature.

Humans, Animals, Things and Animacy

Animacy influences the patterns of subject-verb agreement marking in many languages, including Persian and Inari Saami. In Persian, animate plural subjects trigger plural agreement on the verb, whereas inanimate subjects may or may not trigger agreement. The variation is governed by factors such as personification, agency and distributivity. In Inari Saami, verbs fully agree with human subjects and verbs partially agree with inanimate subjects. Verbs may or may not agree with subjects referring to animals. We argue that the intricate interaction between biological animacy and grammatical agreement in these two languages warrants careful consideration of the tripartite distinction between biological animacy in the world, our conceptualization of animacy and formal animacy features in the grammar.

Salience-weighted agreement feature hierarchy modulates language comprehension

The brain establishes relations between elements of an unfolding sentence in order to incrementally build a representation of who is doing what based on various linguistic cues. Many languages systematically mark the verb and/or its arguments to imply the manner in which they are related. A common mechanism to this end is subject-verb agreement, whereby the marking on the verb covaries with one or more of the features such as person, number and gender of the subject argument in a sentence. The cross-linguistic variability of these features would suggest that they may modulate language comprehension differentially based on their relative weightings in a given language. To test this, we investigated the processing of subject-verb agreement in simple intransitive Arabic sentences in a visual event-related brain potential (ERP) study. Specifically, we examined the differences, if any, that ensue in the processing of person, number and gender features during online comprehension, employing sentences in which the verb either showed full agreement with the subject noun (singular or plural) or did not agree in one of the features. ERP responses were measured at the post-nominal verb. Results showed a biphasic negativity−late-positivity effect when the verb did not agree with its subject noun in one of the features, in line with similar findings from other languages. Crucially however, the biphasic effect for agreement violations was systematically graded based on the feature that was violated, which is a novel finding in view of results from other languages. Furthermore, this graded effect was qualitatively different for singular and plural subjects based on the differing salience of the features for each subject-type. These results suggest that agreement features, varying in their salience due to their language-specific weightings, differentially modulate language comprehension. We postulate a Salience-weighted Feature Hierarchy based on our findings and argue that this parsimoniously accounts for the diversity of existing cross-linguistic neurophysiological results on verb agreement processing.

Thinking alone and thinking together

The central observation of this paper is that belief ascriptions with plural subjects can be interpreted non-distributively, so that beliefs can be truthfully attributed to a plurality that cannot be attributed to any of the individuals that it comprises. Moreover, the beliefs of a plurality appear to be predictable from the beliefs of its associated individuals. Two potential analyses are offered for the relationship between the beliefs of individuals and those of pluralities. Both of these analyses, which are meant to negotiate the agreements and disagreements between individual experiencers, run into issues differentiating between relevant and irrelevant disagreement. To resolve these issues I invoke a notion of "aboutness", which filters out contextually irrelevant beliefs.