Worlds apart? On Niklas Luhmann and the sociology of education

In an effort to address the relationship between globalisation, education and Niklas Luhmann’s branch of systems theory, we present his essay, published here for the first time in English translation, ‘Education: Forming the life course’, next to the nine contributions that compose this special issue and build on this and his other writings to take up the theme of education in world society. To conclude, we underline that systems theory’s emphasis on functional differentiation helps to address two lacunae in the today prevailing sociological practice. By positing the development of self-referential domains as modernity’s central mode of differentiation, it provides sociology with a comprehensive theory of world society. By the same token, it also allows one to observe education as a global affair with, so to speak, a life of its own.

Real-time grammar processing by native and non-native speakers: Constructions unique to the second language

We investigated second language (L2) comprehension of grammatical structures that are unique to the L2, and which are known to cause persistent difficulties in production. A visual-world eye-tracking experiment focused on online comprehension of English articles by speakers of the article-lacking Mandarin, and a control group of English native speakers. The results show that non-native speakers from article-lacking backgrounds can incrementally utilise the information signalled by L2 articles in real time to constrain referential domains and resolve reference more efficiently. The findings support the hypothesis that L2 processing does not always over-rely on pragmatic affordances, and that some morphosyntactic structures unique to the target language can be processed in a targetlike manner in comprehension – despite persistent difficulties with their production. A novel proposal, based on multiple meaning-to-form, but consistent form-to-meaning mappings, is developed to account for such comprehension–production asymmetries.

Quantifier position in Japanese and the domain of specificity and indefiniteness

It has been noted that the variation in syntactic positioning of quantity expressions in Japanese - the pre-nominal construction and the NP-external construction - reflects different referential domains of the quantified entities (Martin 1975, Inoue 1978, Okutsu 1986, Downing 1996). The distinction between definiteness/indefiniteness as well as the notion of specificity have been used to explain the behavioral patterns of quantity expressions. However, due to the lack of a clearly defined framework that illuminates the relationship between the two separate referential categories of definiteness/indefiniteness and specificity/non-specificity, previous studies could not offer a coherent account of why the two constructions sometimes yield contrasting definite and indefinite readings, sometimes become synonymous, and sometimes allow slight differences in nuance.Using a framework that illuminates the relationship between the two referential categories, this study re-analyzes the observations made in previous studies and ascertains the referential characteristics of the two quantifier constructions. It suggests that the pre-nominal construction and NP-external construction do not express opposing domains of one referential category, but instead express one of the domains of two independent categories of referentiality, i.e. the domains of specificity and indefiniteness respectively. This study also discerns the referential meanings expressed by the constructions themselves from contextually derived meanings.