Grammatical encoding of agency in Asturian middle constructions

Middle-passive constructions in Asturian –a Romance language spoken in the diglossic region of Asturias, in northern Spain– appear to optionally allow the occurrence of the reflexive pronoun se in them; this has been traditionally considered a pleonastic use of the reflexive due to the influence of Spanish, i.e. the dominant language in the territory (ALLA 2001). Here, I show that the presence of such pronoun is neither aspectual nor stylistic; instead, I argue that this clitic spells out a passivized Voice head encoding the participation of an implicit generic agent/experiencer in the event, i.e. a generic passive construction. The non-pronominal variant, on the contrary, is only possible with unaccusative verbs or those undergoing the causative alternation, i.e. in inchoative configurations, which can be generic. Evidence for this claim is that only the pronominal counterpart can control into a purpose clause but does not license the insertion of the PP por sí mesmu (‘by itself’), and vice versa. Additionally, these structures can host an additional dative argument which can only be interpreted as an unintentional causer of the event in absence of the reflexive, therefore supporting Suárez-Palma’s (2020) claim that there exists a mutual incompatibility between Voice and a high applicative head –both different realizations of i* (Wood & Marantz 2017)–, which compete for the position above the verbalizing head in generic passives. Finally, cases of linguistic transfer between Asturian and Asturian Spanish are discussed.

The facilitative middle in Baltic and North Slavonic

The article deals with the facilitative middle, a gram often simply referred to (especially in literature of the formal persuasion) as ‘the middle’ (e.g., The bread cuts easily). While in the Western European languages this gram is nearly exclusively generic or individual-level (kind-level) and has no explicit agent (these features are correspondingly often regarded as definitional for ‘middles’), the Baltic and Slavonic languages have constructions that arguably belong to the same gram-type but often represent stage-level predications, with a non-generic agent that is optionally expressed by an oblique noun phrase or prepositional phrase, or is contextually retrievable. The article gives an overview of the parameters of variation in the facilitative constructions of a number of Baltic and Slavonic languages (individual- or kind-level and stage-level readings, aspect, transitivity, expression of the agent, presence or absence of adverbial modifiers etc.). The semantics of the different varieties is discussed, as well as their lexical input. Attention is given to the grammaticalisation path and to what made the Balto-Slavonic type of facilitatives so markedly different from their counterparts in Western European languages.

The Emergence of Trust: Social Figuration in Supply Networks

Trust is an essential governance mechanism in present-day supply networks, where many independent parties have to coordinate their activities. It is often assumed that trustful behavior at least partly depends on the inner dispositions of actors. Other theories suggest that this behavior is an emergent property of the supply network, generated by the interactions between the actors in the network. Half a century ago, the social figuration theory of Norbert Elias was the first formulation of such a theory. This research tests this emergent property theory in a series of simulation-based thought experiments. A generic agent-based model of buyer-supplier interactions in a build-to-forecast supply chain is used as a dynamic hypothesis to test this theory. The inner dispositions of the actors towards trust and opportunistic behavior can be changed here. Current trust levels are influenced by these inner dispositions, but are also changed by the perceived behavior of the other party. Trust levels of the actors also determine their behavior. In the simulation this creates vicious or virtuous cycles of mutual trust and performance, so called relationship spirals. Model analysis shows that beyond a certain level of external volatility, the development of trust on both sides no longer bears any direct relation to the inner dispositions of the network parties. This confirms the dynamic hypothesis. It also again establishes the strength of Elias’s original social figuration theory.

A Framework to Improve the Disaster Response Through a Knowledge-Based Multi-Agent System

The disaster response still faces problems of collaboration due to lack of policies concerning the information exchange during the response. Moreover, plans are prepared to respond to a disaster, but drills to apply them are limited and do not allow to determine their efficiency and conflicts with other organizations. This paper presents a framework allowing for different organizations involving in the disaster response to assess their collaboration through its simulation using an explicit representation of their knowledge. This framework is based on a multi-agent system composed of three generic agent models to represent the organizational structure of disaster response. The decision-making about response actions is done through task decomposition and repartition. It is based reasoning on ontologies which provides an explicit trace of the response plans design and their execution. Such framework aims at identifying cooperation problems and testing strategies of information exchange to support the preparation of disaster response.