Paradigm structure influences syntactic behaviour

In this chapter, Belyaev analyses several challenging facts of Ossetic nominal inflection that seem to challenge the traditional understanding of Lexical Sharing in LFG. In particular, case markers in Ossetic may attach to the final adjunct of coordinate phrases, even though the structure of the paradigm precludes their analyses as clitics. Moreover, the syntactic behaviour of Ossetic case forms seems to be influenced by paradigm structure: words where the genitive is suppletive and acts as an oblique stem use the genitive instead of the nominative in non-final conjuncts. Belyaev argues that these difficulties can be resolved if the architecture of LFG is extended by Lexical Sharing, which allows one word to occupy two or more syntactic heads. He proposes a formal mechanism of integrating Lexical Sharing with the morphology2013syntax interface of LFG, with Paradigm Function Morphology as the basis for the morphological component.

Strengthening Malaysian Parliamentary Democracy Through Private Member’s Bills

At present, the ability of the Malaysian Legislature – specifically the House of Representatives (Dewan Rakyat) – to effectively check and balance the powers of the Executive is impeded by the lack of a formal mechanism enabling the deliberation and debate of Private Member’s Bills. The Government or the Executive branch remains the primary agenda-setter in Parliamentary sittings, thus undermining the full extent of legislative independence and representative debate taking place in the August House. Drawing on local and international examples, this article argues in favour of allocating space to Private Member’s Bills within the parliamentary agenda and consequently returning legislators their rights and agencies towards strengthening Malaysia’s parliamentary democracy.

Logic and the Movement of Reasoning: Pierre Gassendi on the Three Acts of the Mind

The aim of this paper is to assess the central role the imagination acquires in Pierre Gassendi’s logic. I trace the structuring scheme of the three acts of the mind—common to a good number of late scholastic and early modern logics—to the Thomistic notion of the movement of reasoning in knowledge and argue that Gassendi revisits this notion in his logic. The three acts scheme is from the beginning a bridge between logic and the natural philosophical treatment of the soul. I show how Gassendi’s take on the three acts is similarly poised between his Logic and his Physics and I discuss the rationale, sources and consequences of his attribution of the three acts to the imagination. I argue for the following points: Gassendi’s conception of the logical role of the imagination answers to his empiricist epistemology, his naturalized view of the mind (which involves a defense of thinking in animals) and his notion of a natural logic; it is also operative in his pairing of the formal mechanism of logical operations with a progressive mechanism of the operations of the mind; and it serves as a counterpart to his experimental understanding of the progress of knowledge.1

Think Before You Act: Improving the Conservation Outcomes of CITES Listing Decisions

The CITES treaty is the major international instrument designed to safeguard wild plants and animals from overexploitation by international trade. CITES is now approaching 50 years old, and we contend that it is showing its age. In stark contrast to most environmental policy arenas, CITES does not require, encourage, or even allow for, consideration of the impacts of its key decisions—those around listing species in the CITES Appendices. Decisions to list species in CITES are based on a simplistic set of biological and trade criteria that do not relate to the impact of the decision, and have little systematic evidentiary support. We explain the conservation failures that flow from this weakness and propose three key changes to the CITES listing process: (1) development of a formal mechanism for consideration by Parties of the likely consequences of species listing decisions; (2) broadening of the range of criteria used to make listing decisions; and (3) amplification of the input of local communities living alongside wildlife in the listing process. Embracing these changes will help to ensure CITES decisions more effectively respond to the needs of wildlife in today’s highly complex and dynamic conservation context.

Language Law and Policy of the Federal Government of Ethiopia: Implications for Fair Trial and the Rights of Non-Amharic Language Speakers Accused

Ethiopia is a multilingual country with a federal form of state structure. The 1995 Constitution of the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia (FDRE Constitution) gave equal recognition for all Ethiopian languages, but has chosen Amharic to become the working language of the Federal Government. In order to accommodate the needs of non-Amharic speakers in the provision of public services, the Constitution and other laws such as the Criminal Procedure Code, require the use of interpreters. Particularly in criminal proceedings, non-Amharic speakers are entitled to be assisted with a ‘qualified’ interpreter to meaningfully participate in the cases. In practice, it is observed that accused people who do not speak the working language of the federal government are unable to effectively understand or get prompt and detailed information regarding the nature and effect of the case brought against them. Even if they know the case, they are not able to effectively explain their defences to the court or associated bodies, and thereby defend their rights. This study reveals that non-Amharic speakers are not effectively served according to the legal standards. This problem subsists mainly due to the absence or limited number of interpreters, as well as the use of untrained interpreters. Despite some efforts to address the problem, the federal government has not yet laid down any formal mechanism by which people with limited and/or no Amharic language proficiency are properly served in criminal proceedings both before and during trial. This study proposes the federal government to establish court interpreter training institutions and to standardise court interpretation by allocating the necessary budget; lay down a formal mechanism such as enacting detailed laws and working manuals for assigning interpreters; providing other local languages the status of working language; consulting interpretation technologies and working in collaboration with different stakeholders.

Bayesian Analyses of Political Decision Making

Bayes’ theorem is a relatively simple equation but one of the most important mathematical principles discovered. It is a formalization of a basic cognitive process: updating expectations as new information is obtained. It was derived from the laws of conditional probability by Reverend Thomas Bayes and published posthumously in 1763. In the 21st century, it is used in academic fields ranging from computer science to social science. The theorem’s most prominent use is in statistical inference. In this regard, there are three essential tenets of Bayesian thought that distinguish it from standard approaches. First, any quantity that is not known as an absolute fact is treated probabilistically, meaning that a numerical probability or a probability distribution is assigned. Second, research questions and designs are based on prior knowledge and expressed as prior distributions. Finally, these prior distributions are updated by conditioning on new data through the use of Bayes’ theorem to create a posterior distribution that is a compromise between prior and data knowledge. This approach has a number of advantages, especially in social science. First, it gives researchers the probability of observing the parameter given the data, which is the inverse of the results from frequentist inference and more appropriate for social scientific data and parameters. Second, Bayesian approaches excel at estimating parameters for complex data structures and functional forms, and provide more information about these parameters compared to standard approaches. This is possible due to stochastic simulation techniques called Markov Chain Monte Carlo. Third, Bayesian approaches allow for the explicit incorporation of previous estimates through the use of the prior distribution. This provides a formal mechanism for incorporating previous estimates and a means of comparing potential results. Bayes’ theorem is also used in machine learning, which is a subset of computer science that focuses on algorithms that learn from data to make predictions. One such algorithm is the Naive Bayes Classifier, which uses Bayes’ theorem to classify objects such as documents based on prior relationships. Bayesian networks can be seen as a complicated version of the Naive Classifier that maps, estimates, and predicts relationships in a network. It is useful for more complicated prediction problems. Lastly, the theorem has even been used by qualitative social scientists as a formal mechanism for stating and evaluating beliefs and updating knowledge.

Priming Reveals Similarities and Differences between Three Purported Cases of Implicature: Some, Number and Free Choice Disjunctions

implicature has been proposed as a single mechanism which can derive one reading from another in a systematic way. While a single formal mechanism for computing implicatures across disparate cases has an appealing parsimony, differences in behavioral and processing signatures between cases have created a debate about whether the same computation really is so widely shared. Building on previous work by Bott & Chemla (2016), three experiments use structural priming to test for shared computations across three purported cases of implicature: the quantifier "some", number words, and Free Choice disjunctions. While we find evidence of a shared computation between the enriched readings of "some" and number words, we find no evidence that Free Choice readings involve any shared computation with either "some" or number. Along with evidence of a shared mechanism between "some" and number implicatures, we also find substantial differences between these two cases. We propose a way to reconcile these findings, as well as seemingly contradictory prior evidence, by understanding implicature as a sequence of separable sub-computations. This implies a spectrum of possibilities for which sub-computations might be shared or distinct between cases, instead of a a single implicature mechanism that can only be either present or absent.

The temporal foundation of the principle of maximal entropy

The principle of maximal entropy (further abbreviated as “MaxEnt”) can be founded on the formal mechanism, in which future transforms into past by the mediation of present. This allows of MaxEnt to be investigated by the theory of quantum information.MaxEnt can be considered as an inductive analog or generalization of “Occam’s razor”. It depends crucially on choice and thus on information just as all inductive methods of reasoning. The essence shared by Occam’s razor and MaxEnt is for the relevant data known till now to be postulated as an enough fundament of conclusion. That axiom is the kind of choice grounding both principles. Popper’s falsifiability (1935) can be discussed as a complement to them: That axiom (or axiom scheme) is always sufficient but never necessary condition of conclusion therefore postulating the choice in the base of MaxEnt. Furthermore, the abstraction axiom (or axiom scheme) relevant to set theory (e.g. the axiom scheme of specification in ZFC) involves choice analogically.

The Curbing of Corruption by Formal and Informal Accountability at the Indonesian Local Governments

According to the compilation of Corruption Perception Index (CPI) by Transparency International Indonesia on 2006, 2008 and 2010, 85 percent of the Indonesia local governments got a score less than 5 with meaning highly corrupt. However, there are exceptions such as Yogyakarta City. Yogyakarta is one of the areas with relatively low levels of corruption in its local governments in 2006 (5.59), 2008 (6.33), and 2010 (5.81). So, what does Yogyakarta do differently? One of the reasons for the differences in corruption level might be that, where it is widely supposed that corruption is negatively related to accountability, increased accountability is mostly implemented by formal mechanism. Special for Yogyakarta is that it, next to such formal ways of accountability, makes extensive use of informal ways to improve accountability. As such, the success of Yogyakarta as one of the Indonesian regions with the lowest levels of corruption is interesting to study in that it might provide additional insight in existing theoretical perspectives on accountability.