Stanisław Moniuszko, Wiktor Każyński, and Adaptations of Lithuanian Folk Songs

The article analyses carefully selected and research-focused biographical facts and documents of two prominent musicians, Stanisław Moniuszko (1819–1872) and Wiktor Każyński (1812–1867), who lived and created in Vilnius in the middle of the nineteenth century. The research enables us to identify which one of them is the author of the manuscript titled “Material for Further Adaptations of Lithuanian Folk Songs” (Pol., “Materialy dalsze do obrabiania pieśni ludu litewskiego”). The publication highlights the importance of this document the title and content of which entail the activity of collecting Lithuanian folk songs that is so significant for the studies into the music history of Lithuania. New insights into the biographies, creative work, and correspondence of the two musicians provide an opportunity to verify the possibly erroneous statement established in historiography, according to which the authorship of this manuscript is attributed to Stanisław Moniuszko. Clarification of various circumstances associated with the origin of the above-mentioned document presented in the article leads to the conclusion that its authorship should be attributed to Wiktor Każyński, a composer and contemporary of Stanisław Moniuszko.

HEDGE APPROXIMATORS AS PROFESSIONAL TOOLS OF GERMAN MASS MEDIA DISCOURSE

The purpose of this paper is the analysis of German mass media texts to investigate into hedge approximators. Synonymous analytical constructions eine Art … (a kind of); so etwas wie …; (so) etwas Ähnliches wie … are used to achieve certain pragmatic purposes the discourse of mass media. The most frequent word combination is eine Art... . The structural organization of such combinations is regulated by specific rules. The majorities of nominal groups of the eine Art N type without an attribute preceding the main component (eine Art Glück) do not allow to determine the case of the second noun in modern German. Nouns of all three genders, including noun of the weak type of declination, do not have inflexions. The case form of the main word in the phrase is revealed by expanding the cluster with an attribute. The basic types of such constructions are constructions with the genitive case (eine Art gemeinsamen Traums), construction with the preposition von and a noun in the dative case (eine Art von gemeinsamem Traum) and constructions with the case agreement between the two parts of the nominal group (in einer Art gemeinsamem Traum). The distribution of these types of constructions in the contemporary German language is determined in essence by grammatical factors, namely by the oblique form of the “auxiliary” noun and also by the number and by the semantic class of the second noun. All three synonymous clusters are used both with concrete and abstract nouns. These hedge markers make possible for authors of articles to limit the degree of confidence or doubt about the authenticity of the described fact, since sometimes there is no information about the nominated object, the risks of an erroneous statement being significantly minimized. Hedge markers show that the author is detached, careful, diplomatic and aims at avoiding conflictual situations.

Reply to Andersen et al. (2016) “Assumptions behind size-based ecosystem models are realistic”

In a recent publication (Froese et al., ICES Journal of Marine Science; 73: 1640–1650), we presented a critique of the balanced harvesting (BH) approach to fishing. A short section dealt with the size-spectrum models used to justify BH, wherein we pointed out the lack of realism of these models, which mostly represented ecosystems as consisting of a single cannibalistic species. Andersen et al. (ICES Journal of Marine Science; 73: 1651–1655) commented on our paper and suggested that we criticized size-spectrum models in general and that we supposedly made several erroneous statements. We stress that we only referred to the size-spectrum models that we cited, and we respond to each supposedly erroneous statement. We still believe that the size-spectrum models used to justify BH were highly unrealistic and not suitable for evaluating real-world fishing strategies. We agree with Andersen et al. that BH is unlikely to be a useful guiding principle for ecosystem-based fisheries management, for many reasons. The use of unrealistic models is one of them.

Collisionless damping of plasma waves as a real physical phenomenon does not exist

Trivial logic of collisionless plasma waves is reduced to using complex exponentially damping/growing wave functions to obtain a complex dispersion equation for their wave number 1 k and the decrement/increment 2 k (for a given real frequency  and complex wave number k  k1  ik2 ), whose solutions are ghosts 1 2 k , k which do not have anything to do at 2 k  0 with the real solution of the dispersion equation for the initial exponentially damping/growing real plasma waves with the physically observable quantities 1 2 k , k , for which finding should be added, in this case, the second equation of the energy conservation law. Using a complex dispersion equation for the simultaneous determination of 1 k and 2 k violates the law of energy conservation, leads to a number of contradictions, is logical error, and finally also the mathematical error leading to both erroneous statement on the possible existence of exponentially damping/growing harmonic wave solutions and to erroneous values 1 k and 2 k . Mathematically correct conclusion about the damping/growing of virtual complex waves of collisionless plasma is wrongly attributed to the actual real plasma waves.

Morphisms of Mislin genera induced by finite normal subgroups

We correct an erroneous statement about induced morphisms of Mislin genera and give the correct statement, even under more general hypotheses.

Erratum

I would like to apologize to Robin Scarcella and Rebecca Oxford for an erroneous statement I made in my review of their book, The Tapestry of Language Learning. In the review I accused the authors of not referencing Vygotsky's seminal work, Thought and Language. Upon rereading the review, I suddenly realized that the authors do indeed cite the first volume of Vygotsky's collected works which includes his Thought and Language.

Re-appraisal of the Australian genus Eutermiphora Lea (Diptera: Phoridae)

The Australian genus Eutermiphora Lea is characterised by a forward cxtension of the anterior dorsal region of the abdomen, which obscures most of the thorax from view. This gave rise to the erroneous statement that both wings and halteres were missing in this genus. An amplified description of E. abdominalis is provided and its correct placement in Schmitz's (1929) key to world genera indicated.