The North Star of Hype: How Detroit Charts a Course in a Neoliberal Framework

The city of Detroit is associated with the creation of and rise of industrialism in North America. Industrialism, specifically Fordism, within the municipality of Detroit maintained financial strength for decades until the mid-1980s when a new global capitalist era emerged in the Global North. Currently, the city of Detroit is in the process of rebuilding. In the academic literature on development, there is an apparent gap that explores how current ideologies shape development in social spaces. In this review, the ideological influences of sustainable development and neoliberalism are explored through analysis of the social, historical, political, and economic lenses that contribute to and shape development within the city of Detroit. Moreover, the ideological influences are analyzed to understand how explicit discourse for sustainable development either forms or breaks implicit systems of social control. The paper concludes by acknowledging that progressive notions of equality and growth are difficult to actualize due to the inequitable allocation of capital under our system of global capitalism. The paper closes with an exploration of the implicit and symbolic biases that appears inherent in development ideologies to contribute to a genuine and possible path to an equitable and sustainable future for places such as Detroit.

Diachronic Changes of Frequencies in Discourse Connectives in English: Evidence from COHA

Recent studies have claimed that the amount of discourse connectives or discourse markers has risen in multiple languages. However, the thesis has seldom been evaluated using comprehensive empirical data evidence. This study investigates the historical changes of frequencies in discourse connectives in the English language over the last two hundred years. We find that the frequencies of the majority of discourse connectives showed a marked decrease. An opposing trend can be seen with respect to only a few types of discourse connectives. These research results show that the frequencies of discourse markers in English have not in fact increased over the last two centuries. We analyze the possible reasons for this decline. And this result suggests that English language users tend to use explicit discourse connectives less frequently, which finding may challenge recent claims concerning the rise of discourse connectives (markers).

Traces of American English in Pakistani English: A Comparative Multi-dimensional Study of Press Editorials

This study explores the linguistic variation of periodized data of Pakistani press editorials in comparison with American press editorials. Most of the previous research studies conducted on Pakistani English, in general, and press editorial, in particular, compare Pakistani English with British English. No study compares Pakistani press editorials from a period to American press editorials. To trace the influence of American English on Pakistani English, this study explores the phases of Pakistani press editorials that resemble or differ from American press editorials. Biber’s (1988) multi-dimensional modal was used as a theoretical framework for this study. It exploited a diachronic corpus of Pakistani press editorials which was divided into three temporally distanced phases: 1947-1951, 1971-1975, and 2012- 2016. The Biber tagger was employed to annotate grammatical features. To draw a comparison, Nini’s (2015) MAT results of the American (Brown) corpus were utilized. The regression method was used for the computation of factor scores and analysis of variance (ANOVA) was used to draw a comparison between the diachronic data of Pakistani press editorials and American press editorials. The findings indicate that phase 3 of Pakistani press editorials is the closest to American press editorials in producing informational and explicit discourse. Phase 1 of Pakistani press editorials and American press editorials are quite close in non-narrative and abstract style in their discourse production. Moreover, phase 2 of Pakistani press editorials and American press editorials with a small difference in mean scores produce overt expression of persuasion.

Evaluating pragmatic competence

This paper presents an investigation into the impact of teaching pragmatic competence to translation students who translate from English (L2) to Persian (L1). For the experiment, the participants were requested to identify implicit discourse markers in a source text and to transfer them into the target text. This investigation used Think Aloud Protocols (TAP) to monitor students’ inferential translation processes. The results of this study pinpointed the challenging role of pragmatic competence for translation students. Translation performance in an experimental group of participants exposed to a period of pragmatic classroom instruction was compared to that of a control group which did not receive this training. Finally, the data analysis indicated that pragmatic teaching improved the translation students’ pragmatic competence in the experimental group through identifying both implicit and explicit discourse markers in the source text. This was clearly lacking in a number of students’ translations in the control group.

Culture Beneath Discourse: An Ontology of Cognitive Cultural Entities

Sociology has increasingly drawn on concepts from the cognitive sciences to better theorize and measure culture, particularly nondeclarative personal culture beneath the level of conscious awareness. Despite several advances, these “cognitive cultural” concepts are drawn on selectively, and limited work has attempted to assemble them into a coherent ontology, leading to conceptual murkiness and ambiguous use of terms. This article synthesizes literature on culture and cognition to theorize four interrelated but distinct levels of cultural knowledge beneath the level of explicit discourse. Using emergence theories from the philosophy of science, I theorize how these levels relate to each other, as well as to discourse and public culture. I then illustrate their value as units of analysis using the empirical case of American religious understandings. This ontology provides a necessary groundwork for improved discussions of how culture works, the relation of culture and cognition, and methods for studying nondeclarative personal culture.

Errors and mistakes in child protection in Switzerland: a missed opportunity of reflection?

Child protection in Switzerland was not a public welfare issue before the 20th century. After 1912, when the Swiss Civil Code took effect, state authorities were entitled to take children into custody or place them in foster families, on farms, or in residential homes. This chapter summarises how these coercive measures led to harm, injustice, and suffering for a vast number of children during the 20th century. The authors describe how a historical reappraisal of this practice fuelled a political debate that resulted in a revision in 2013 of the child and adult protection law in the Swiss Civil Code and a federal act entitling survivors to reparation payments in 2017. The amended legislation on measures to protect children from harm aimed at professionalising child protection procedures included a pivotal shift from lay to professional decision-making bodies. The current state of this process, which has led to criticism on the part of politicians, the public, and the media (particularly in fatal child protection cases) will be analysed and discussed. The chapter will provide an overview of current strategies and approaches, (or their absence) to identify and handle mistakes and errors in child protection and highlight the need for an explicit discourse on these topics in Switzerland.