The article anteeo, written by Wilhelm Bannier, was published in the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae (TLL) in 1901. This entry has been rewritten according to contemporary standards at the institute and edited at each step in the process by editors currently at TLL. In comparing the two versions, I discuss differences between anteeo 1901 and 2007 in matters such as methods of data retrieval, rates of composition, levels of accuracy, and editorial policies. The article evaluates both the pros and cons of (...) developments at Munich, while also serving as a primer on how to "read" a TLL article. (shrink)

The paper explores the origin and semantic derivation of Latin philosophic term “mōrālitās” (“morality”), keeping in mind its generalizing and object-giving function in modern moral philosophy, which is obvious in its derivates in European languages. The semantic derivation of “mōrālitās” is being examined by means of comparative analysis of lexicographical data in three dictionary groups: that of the Late Latin (when the word “mōrālitās” first occurs), of the Medieval Latin (when it enters philosophical lexicon) and that of Early Modern (...) Latin (when the term became widespread and got its modern meaning). To cover the lack of lexicographical information in the latter two groups of dictionaries the study uses Google Books full-text search, which statistically proves, that the term gained popularity only in the first half of 17th century and also gives important clues on the development of its meaning in late scholasticism. In conclusion, it is stated, that semantic derivation of the term in Late, Medieval and Early Modern Latin shares the same common guidelines, namely steady synonymic ties with emerging substantive forms of the adjective “mōrālis” (moral) and term phrases, formed with “mōrālis” and “mōs” (habit, custom). As a result of such a derivation “mōrālitās” came to be highly polysemic term, denoting the very quality of the free and conscious action, its moral worth and the rules to estimate the worth, and the philosophical discipline for doing that, and the subject of this discipline in the same time. (shrink)

Latinism is a form of _legalese_ often resorted to in many legal documents, such as contracts, statutes, and court decisions. Exponents of plain language have long encouraged the use of plain terminology in legal texts and the replacement of archaic terms (among which are Latin expressions) with more modern or common ones. This paper aims at exploring to what extent the UK Supreme Court used Law Latin in its decisions from 2012 to 2023. At the same time, it wishes to (...) unveil whether (some of) the plain English equivalents suggested in the literature took their place. For these purposes, six Latin formulae are focused on (i.e., _a fortiori_, _ab initio_,_ de jure_,_ inter alia_,_ mens rea_,_ mutatis mutandis_, and _sui generis_). By consulting the BAILII interface and the UK Case Law National Archives, this paper investigates whether such expressions (and their plain English equivalents) are mentioned in the Court judgments. The findings highlight an infrequent use of Latinisms in the Court decisions, with the exception of _inter alia_. Plain English equivalents, however, are not applied consistently, and they do not seem to have progressively and systematically replaced their more archaic counterparts. Plain expressions appear in the Court decisions, but either not thoroughly, or with lexical/syntactical discrepancies and differences in meanings or usages which would not qualify them as full “replacements”. (shrink)

Η εργασία αυτή θα αρχίσει με μια επισκόπηση των ποικίλων μορφών, συμπεριλαμβανομένων των σύνθετων και περιφραστικών μορφών του ελληνικού Παρακείμενου παράλληλα με το εύρος των χρήσεων τους όπως παρατηρούνται καθ’ όλη την ιστορία της γλώσσας, τοποθετώντας ταυτόχρονα αυτές τις μορφές και χρήσεις σε μία ιστορική πορεία. Η μορφολογία του Παρακείμενου θα συγκριθεί με εκείνη του Ενεστώτα και του Αορίστου, προκειμένου να καθοριστεί ότι το ποιόν του ρηματικού θέματός του είναι συνοπτικό ώστε να ταιριάζει με τον Αόριστο και να αντιτάσσεται στον (...) Ενεστώτα. Έπειτα, ο αναδιπλασιασμός του θέματος του σύνθετου Παρακείμενου θα καταδειχθεί ότι παραγάγει μη συνοπτικό ποιόν, αντίθετα με το ποιόν του λεξικού του θέματος. Αυτό το μη συνοπτικό ποιόν ταιριάζει με τον Ενεστώτα και αντιτίθεται στον Αόριστο. Στη συνέχεια θα παρασχεθεί μια επισκόπηση σχετικά με τον επαναδιπλασιασμό ως διαδικασία, τοποθετώντας τον αναδιπλασιασμό του ελληνικού σύνθετου Παρακείμενου μέσα σε αυτή τη διαδικασία. Θα δοθεί ιδιαίτερη προσοχή στις ιδιαιτερότητες του επαναδιπλασιασμού στην ελληνική γλώσσα. Εν τέλει, θα εξηγηθεί το σύνθετο ρηματικό ποιόν για τον ελληνικό Παρακείμενο, υποδεικνύοντας ότι η δράση που ανήκει στο λεξικό θέμα είναι συνοπτική, ενώ η μη συνοπτικότητα που παραγάγεται από τον αναδιπλασιασμό τού θέματος ανήκει στην κατάσταση που λογικά ακολουθεί τη δράση. Το σύνθετο λεξικό ποιόν που αναλύεται για το σύνθετο Παρακείμενο θα αντικατοπτρίζει αυτό του νεοελληνικού περιφραστικού Παρακειμένου. Το σύνθετο μοντέλο ρηματικού ποιόντος που περιγράφεται για τον ελληνικό Παρακείμενο προτείνεται για τη διαγλωσσική ανάλυση του Παρακείμενου. (shrink)

This article provides a diachronic analysis of how Europhobic discourses (with particular reference to Brexit) have emerged, consolidated and normalised in the British public sphere (media, institutions and the networked public). Identifying a discursive chain of legitimacy articulated in three interrelated phases (pre-legitimation, institutionalisation and normalisation) this article suggests that the legacy of Brexit can be found in a normalisation of exclusionary discourses which could have also become the rational basis for legitimising further discrimination in a self-reinforcing logic. (...) By taking a diachronic approach, this article makes the case for analysing discriminatory discourses from ‘chained’ and diachronic perspectives to capture social dynamics beyond the normative aspect. (shrink)

Argumentation has remained under-researched in studies analyzing academic journal publications despite its importance in academic writing. This paper reports a study in which we investigated stereotypical argumentative trends, lexico-grammatical features, and interactional metadiscourse markers in 354 research article free-standing discussion sections from the journal of ESP over forty years. The field of ESP was chosen because of its maturity, which has given substance to a dynamic ground for arguments. We drew on the pragma-dialectical approach to analyzing argumentations in the corpus. (...) Findings indicated that due to the argumentative nature of the discussion section, certain argumentative trends recurred more often. The analysis of the lexico-grammatical features and metadiscourse markers of the standpoints also showed patterns of variability over time. The study concludes that it is imperative to incorporate relevant facets from various argumentation models to construct a comprehensive argumentation theory and gain deeper insights into argumentation in academic writing. (shrink)

The aim of the paper is to present the diachronic changes taking place in legal languages and discuss whether the translators, who for some reason use as an equivalent an obsolete term, may produce a target text which is communicatively ineffective. The research methods applied encompass: the parametric approach to the interlingual comparison of legal terminology for translation purposes, the analysis of pertinent literature on translation and translation errors, the analysis of comparable texts for the purpose of (...) observing diachronic changes in terminology. The diachronic change in terminology most frequently is the result of the amendments of legislation or repealing one act and replacing it with a new one. The terminological changes are especially frequent when the change in the political system occurs and the need appears to adjust the legal system to the new political ideology and principles. For that reason, the authors have analysed in detail three Polish acts on copyright enacted under three different political regimes that is to say (i) after the First World War when Poland regained independence after 123 years of occupation (Act of 29 March 1926 on Copyrights [Ustawa z dnia 29 marca 1926 r. o prawie autorskiem]), (ii) under the communist rule in Poland that lasted from 1945 until 1989 (Act of 10 July 1952 on Copyrights [Ustawa z dnia 10 lipca 1952 r. o prawie autorskim]), and finally (iii) after the collapse of communism in Poland and the period of transition into the democratic and free market society (Act on Copyrights and Related Rights of 4 February 1994 [Ustawa o prawie autorskim i prawach pokrewnych z dnia 4 lutego 1994 roku]). Apart from the main Polish corpus of above-mentioned acts, the authors have also provided examples from some other languages to confirm that the diachronic changes take place everywhere and miscommunication problems resulting from using an obsolete term in translation may occur in any pair of languages. In the last part of the paper the problem of the scale of miscommunication resulting from the usage of obsolete terminology in the target text is discussed. (shrink)

Recent decades have witnessed an increase in lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and intersex visibility in the British media. Increased representation has not been equally distributed, however, as bisexuality remains an obscured sexual identity in discourses of sexuality. Through the use of diachronic corpus-based critical discourse analysis, this study seeks to uncover how bisexual people have been represented in the British press between 1957 and 2017. By specifically focusing on the discursive construction of bisexuality in The Times, the (...) results reveal how bisexual people are represented as existing primarily in discourses of the past or in fiction. The Times corpus also reveals significant variation in the lexical meaning of bisexual throughout the 60 years in question. These findings contribute to contemporary theories of bisexual erasure which posit that bisexual people are denied the same ontological status as monosexual identities, that is, homosexuality and heterosexuality. (shrink)

In this study, we use temporally aligned word embeddings and a large diachronic corpus of English to quantify language change in a data-driven, scalable way, which is grounded in language use. We show a unique and reliable relation between measures of language change and age of acquisition (AoA) while controlling for frequency, contextual diversity, concreteness, length, dominant part of speech, orthographic neighborhood density, and diachronic frequency variation. We analyze measures of language change tackling both the change in lexical (...) representations and the change in the relation between lexical representations and the words with the most similar usage patterns, showing that they capture different aspects of language change. Our results show a unique relation between language change and AoA, which is stronger when considering neighborhood-level measures of language change: Words with more coherent diachronic usage patterns tend to be acquired earlier. The results support theories positing a link between ontogenetic and ethnogenetic processes in language. (shrink)

Scholars of Arabic dialects have long noted the occurrence of a morpheme in a widespread number of dialects, realized -ən or -an, frequently suffixed to morphologically indefinite nouns, especially when followed by an adjective. Separately, another morpheme, realized -un or -u, is attested with a slightly different distribution in the dialects of western Yemen. Traditionally, scholars have interpreted both morphemes as reflexes of an etymological case vowel + tanwīn, traditionally labeled “dialectal tanwīn.” In this paper, I offer a new reconstruction (...) of the origin and diachronic development of this morpheme. Throughout I integrate data and insights from comparative Semitics, as well as recently studied pre-Islamic epigraphic and textual materials, in order to break the familiar Classical Arabic / dialectal Arabic dichotomy and reframe the way in which historiography of features in the dialects is conducted. (shrink)

This paper explores the diachronic development of the English adverb again. A compositional semantic analysis of its grammar at various stages is provided. It is argued that this analysis must consist of a staging of first a lexical and then a structural change, in order to adequately model the sequence of individual developmental steps observed in the historical corpus data, and that it provides an insight into pathways of semantic change in general.

In the thesis I offer an analysis of the metaphysical underpinnings of the extended cognition thesis via an examination of standard views of metaphysical building (or, dependence) relations. -/- In summary form, the extended cognition thesis is a view put forth in naturalistic philosophy of mind stating that the physical basis of cognitive processes and cognitive processing may, in the right circumstances, be distributed across neural, bodily, and environmental vehicles. As such, the extended cognition thesis breaks substantially with the (...) still widely held view in cognitive science and philosophy of mind, namely that cognitive processes and cognitive processing take place within the skin-and-skull of individual organisms. The standard view of metaphysical building relations can be expressed as the conjunction of two theses. First, that a metaphysical building relation – such as composition, constitution, realization, supervenience or emergence – is a relation of ontological dependence, because if a metaphysical building relation holds between X (or the Xs) and Y, then it is in virtue of X (or the Xs) that Y exists. Second, metaphysical building relations are synchronic (durationless) relations of ontological dependence. In the thesis, I propose an alternative diachronic framework by which to extend the standard synchronic accounts of metaphysical dependence relations, and by which to reformulate the metaphysical foundation of the extended cognition thesis. The project fills an important gap between analytical metaphysics (in particular, the metaphysics of dependence relations) and naturalistic philosophy of mind (especially the extended cognition thesis). To my knowledge there has been no attempt to establish a robust diachronic account of metaphysical building (or, dependence) relations such as, e.g., composition and constitution. However, this is precisely what I argue is required to properly advance and ground the metaphysics of extended cognition. Ultimately, my aim of reformulating the metaphysics of extended cognition consists in taking several steps toward a third-wave of extended cognition. (shrink)

In this short commentary, I will first show why Kiverstein & Kirchhoff's (this volume) analysis of the CC-fallacy is inadequate in an important way and show why their strategy for avoiding the CC-fallacy based on diachronic constitution is problematic. Second, I will reply to their criticism of the mechanistic account of constitution.

Critical Discourse Analysis, or more popularly known as CDA, reflects the trend on the investigation of ideology and power struggle that is implied in the text and sound of discourse and language. With Norman Fairclough and the group in Lancaster University as the leading theorists of this discipline, this paper deals on extracting the very foundation of its theoretical claims in hope of unearthing the rich philosophical ideations and nuances that may have contributed towards its creation and formation through (...) the years. In this way, this would not only expose its philosophical framework but also would provide its readers and its practitioners a theoretical base and scope of related disciplines for the furthering of their interests and practices. This diachronic sketch legitimizes the claims of CDA as it rests on the more popular and stable conceptual skeleton of the major prominent thinkers of critical theory, poststructuralism, and postmodernism. (shrink)

The debate on personal persistence has been characterized by a dichotomy which is due to its still Cartesian framwork: On the one side we find proponents of psychological continuity who connect, in Locke’s tradition, the persistence of the person with the constancy of the first-person perspective in retrospection. On the other side, proponents of a biological approach take diachronic identity to consist in the continuity of the organism as the carrier of personal existence from a third-person-perspective. Thus, what accounts (...) for someone’s persistence over time, is the continuity of his mind on the one hand, and the continuity of his body on the other. In contrast to those views, the paper intends to show that bodily existence represents the basis of selfhood across time, both as the continuity of the experiential self and as the continuity of the autopoietic organism. On the one hand, the lived body conveys a continuity of the self from a first-person perspective, namely a pre-reflective feeling of sameness or a felt constancy of subjectivity. Moreover, an analysis of awakening and sleep shows that there is a continuous transition from full wakefulness to periods of deep sleep which may thus not be regarded as a complete interruption of subjective experience. On the other hand, this constancy converges with the continuity of the organismic life process as conceived from a third-person perspective. Thus, the experiential self of bodily subjectivity and the autopoietic self of the living organism should be regarded as two aspects of one and the same life process. Finally, the lived body also exhibits a specific form of memory that results from the continual embodiment of existence: it consists of all the affinities, capacities and experiences, which a person has acquired throughout his life. Thus, it provides a continuity of self that must not be actively produced through remembering, but rather integrates the person’s entire past in his present being and potentiality. (shrink)

I offer a new criticism of the argument from vagueness to four-dimensionalism [Sider 2001. The argument is modelled after an older argument for mereological universalism [Lewis 1986 and may be looked upon as a tightened-up and extended version of the latter. While I agree with other critics [Koslicki 2003; Markosian 2004 that the argument from vagueness fails precisely because of this affinity, my recipe for dealing with it is different. I reject the assumption, shared by Sider with his opponents, that (...) synchronic composition and ‘minimal diachronic fusion’ are sufficiently similar to use considerations inspired by the analysis of the former to bear on the latter. My objection to a crucial premise of the argument from vagueness turns on the relevant aspect of dissimilarity between these two cases. (shrink)

This article provides a corpus-based analysis of formal structure and rapport orientation of evaluative speech acts in written Mandarin starting from the Qing Dynasty leading up to the present. It focuses on illocutional concurrences where the change of rapport management with the interlocutor significantly correlates with evaluative speech acts. The IC are holistic patterns that emerge at various levels of an utterance. They contribute both locally and peripherally to the encoding of contextually and temporally situated speech acts or pragmemes. (...) Mixed methods of hierarchical clustering and multiple correspondence analysis indicate that the recent history of evaluative speech acts in written Chinese is characterised by a shift from prevalently rapport-maintaining orientation to utterances more overtly marked for politeness. Evaluative language in written Mandarin became less mitigated at the structural level and increasingly oriented towards rapport enhancement and rapport challenge. This shift significantly intersects with a progressive replacement of clause-final particles during the 20th century, especially after the so-called ‘May the 4th Movement’. (shrink)

This book is the first collective volume specifically devoted to the multifaceted phenomenon of intensification, which has been traditionally regarded as related to the expression of degree, scaling a quality downwards or upwards. In spite of the large amount of studies on intensifiers, there is still a need for the characterization of intensification as a distinct functional category in the domain of modification. The eighteen papers of the volume contribute to this aim with a new approach (mainly corpus-based). They focus (...) on intensification from different perspectives (both synchronic and diachronic) and theoretical frameworks, concern ancient languages (Hittite, Greek, Latin) and modern languages (mainly Italian, German, English, Kiswahili), and involve different levels of analysis. They also identify and examine different types of intensifiers, applied to different forms and structures, such as adverbs, adjectives, evaluative affixes, discourse markers, reduplication, exclamative clauses, coordination, prosodic elements, and shed light on issues which have not been extensively studied so far. (shrink)

This book analyzes--in terms of branching--the pervasive reorganization of Latin syntactic and morphological structures: in the development from Latin to French, a shift can be observed from the archaic, left-branching structures (which Latin inherited from Proto-Indo-European) to modern right-branching equivalents. Brigitte Bauer presents a detailed analysis of this development based on the theoretical discussion and definition of "branching" and "head." Subsequently she relates the diachronic shift to psycholinguistic evidence, arguing that the difficuly of LB complex structures as reflected (...) in their painstaking and delayed acquisition accounts for the extensive typological shift from left to right branching that took place in Latin/French and the other Indo-European languages. (shrink)

In applied ethics, debates about responsibility have been relentlessly individualistic and synchronic, even as recognition has increased in both philosophy and psychology that agency is distributed across time and individuals. I therefore warmly welcome Brown and Savulescu’s analysis of the conditions under which responsibility can be shared and extended. By carefully delineating how diachronic and dyadic responsibility interact with the long-established control and epistemic conditions, they lay the groundwork needed for identifying how responsibility may be inter-individual and intra-individual. (...) Unsurprisingly, I don’t agree with every aspect of their rich account. I strongly suspect that the privileged place the individual continues to occupy in their taxonomy is a residue of the kind of internalist intuitions which dominate WEIRD thinking.1 2 However, I won’t pursue this line of thought here. Instead, I apply Brown and Savulescu’s analysis. Moving beyond the programmatic level at which they develop their account, I will show how it provides a basis for excusing many individuals, focusing not on the dyadic level but the diachronic. Most of the …. (shrink)

UK universities have gone through drastic changes driven by the marketization of higher education. From the perspective of critical discourse analysis, Fairclough hypothesizes that university discourse will be colonized by business discourse. While a number of studies have been conducted, to my knowledge no study has compared university discourse and business discourse both synchronically and diachronically. This article compares how employer organizations are discursively constructed synchronically and diachronically in 240 academic and business job advertisements. The analytical frameworks are transitivity (...) analysis and modality. The results indicate that academic job advertisements have changed from not mentioning organizations to discursively constructing organizations in a promotional manner like business job advertisements. In addition, universities reframe themselves as businesses, entrepreneurs and service providers. This article contends that universities should be selective in adopting business discourse and maintain their identity as educational institutions. (shrink)

Simple Reduction and Beyond Traditional and New Wave models of reduction in science have not lacked for ambition. Philosophers have presented single models to account for the full range of interesting intertheoretic relations, for scientific progress, and for the unity of science (Nagel, 1961; Oppenheim and Putnam, 1958). Early critics attacked the logical empiricists' proposals about the character of intertheoretic connections (Feyerabend, 1962; Kuhn, 1970). New Wave reductionists have similarly argued that various intertheoretic relations fall at different points on a (...) continuum of goodness-of-intertheoretic-mapping. Still, whatever their differences with the logical empiricists, New Wave reductionists have retained traditional aspirations for a single, comprehensive model of reduction that will make sense of the wide range of intertheoretic relations, of progressive scientific change, and of how the various sciences hang together (Hooker, 1981; Churchland and Churchland, 1990; Bickle, 1998). Both logical empiricists and their New Wave successors proffer such unified, multi-purpose models. Regardless of the field, multi-purpose tools typically sacrifice precision for versatility. Recent analyses of mechanistic explanation have helped to reveal that these models of scientific reduction are no exceptions to this rule, and the cost of sacrificing precision is one that the mechanists are unwilling to pay. Traditional and New Wave reductionists manifest allegiances (1) to the (virtually exclusive) analysis of theories and intertheoretic relations and (2) to conceptions of explanatory levels in science rooted in considerations pertaining to the size of and the mereological relations between the sciences' objects of study. (Discussions of both explanatory levels and mereological relations follow in subsequent sections.) By contrast, advocates of mechanistic analysis offer detailed accounts of particular systems' functioning that survey their components, their operations, and the larger systems to which they contribute (Bechtel and Richardson, 1993; Glennan, 1996; Machamer, Darden and Craver, 2000; Craver, 2001; Bechtel, 2006).. (shrink)

Although typically realized by free items, degree modification has a number of morphological exponents in Polish, including the neoclassical prefix arcy-, which, while originally attaching to profession-denoting nouns with a view to indicating a higher rank in a hierarchy, has come to perform the function of reinforcement in conjunction with adjectival bases. Since the scarce previous research concerned with the aforementioned prefixal reinforcer builds only on lexicographic material, this paper offers a quantitative, corpus-based account of the productivity of the formative (...) at issue by providing its TTR (type-token ratio) and HTR (hapax-token ratio) measures, calculated by dividing the number of, respectively, types of adjectival bases and hapax adjectives by that of all relevant tokens, in two periods in the history of Polish, namely in the Baroque epoch, when arcy- gained a strong foothold in language practice owing to the then prevalent rhetorical tendency toward a profuse employment of elements of foreign provenance, and in contemporary Polish. The results of the empirical analysis indicate a dramatic decrease in the level of the bound form’s productivity over time, to the point that the probability of an arcy-adjective encountered by a language user being unique fell from nearly 30% in the Baroque period to less than 1% at present time, which can be accounted for in terms of the formative having been superseded by more recent, functionally analogous prefixes, particularly super- and mega-. (shrink)

Recent philosophical discourse on emergence has developed with particular concern for the distinction between weak and strong emergence and with the primary focus on detailed analysis of the concept of supervenience. However, in the last decade and as a new departure, attention has been devoted to the distinction between synchronic and diachronic emergence. In this philosophical context, there is an ongoing general belief that these two concepts are so different that it is impossible to establish for them a (...) general unifying framework. It is the purpose of this paper to support an alternative view, i.e. that these concepts are different but not mutually exclusive, and that attending to appearance and persistence can, in this context, lead to an acceptable unifying framework for these two, differing concepts of emergence. (shrink)

This paper argues that John Fischer and Mark Ravizza's compatibilist theory of moral responsibility cannot justify reactive attitudes like blame and desert-based practices like retributive punishment. The problem with their account, I argue, is that their analysis of moderateness in regards to reasons-responsiveness has the wrong normative features. However, I propose an alternative account of what it means for a mechanism to be moderately reasons-responsive which addresses this deficiency. In a nut shell, while Fischer and Ravizza test for moderate (...) reasons-responsiveness by checking how a mechanism behaves in a given time slice across other possible worlds, on my account we should ask how that mechanism behaves in this world over a span of time – specifically, whether it responds to reasons sufficiently often. My diachronic account is intended as a drop-in replacement for Fischer and Ravizza's synchronic account. (shrink)

This paper explores how Charles Peirce’s habit-based epistemology leads him to theorise perception. I show how Peirce’s triadic semiotic analysis of perceptual judgment renders his theory of perception neither a representationalism nor a relationism /direct realism, but an interesting hybrid of the two. His view is also extremely interesting, I argue, in the way that by analysing symbols as habits it refuses the common assumption that perception is an affair best understood synchronically, as a ‘language-entry event’. Relatedly, I extend (...) previous work (Legg 2008) which argues that Peirce’s epistemology counts as a ‘hyperinferentialism’ in Robert Brandom’s terms, but this does not mean that Peirce’s theory of perception cannot accommodate unmediated contact with reality - what Peirce called ‘the outward clash’. (shrink)

ABSTRACTWhile the sonic logo for McDonald’s i’m lovin’ it campaign has been widely distributed and highly praised, little is known about the actual characteristics and meaning potentials of this pa...

This paper presents a local grammar based diachronic investigation of apology in spoken British English, aiming to offer an alternative approach for diachronic speech act analysis and to further explore what the changing patterns of apology would suggest about the social-cultural changes happened and/or happening in the British society. The paper shows that the proposed local grammar approach can contribute to a more delicate and finer-grained speech act annotation scheme, which in turn facilitates a more reliable quantification (...) of speech act realisations across contexts or time. The subsequent investigation shows that apologies in spoken British English are becoming more formulaic and less explicit, which suggests that either social distance has been reduced or that Britain might have become an even more stratified society. (shrink)

Recommender systems are recently developed computer-assisted tools that support social and informational needs of various communities and help users exploit huge amounts of data for making optimal decisions. In this study, we present a new recommender system for assessment and risk prediction in child welfare institutions in Israel. The system exploits a large diachronic repository of manually completed questionnaires on functioning of welfare institutions and proposes two different rule-based computational models. The system accepts users’ requests via a simple graphical (...) interface, calculates the institutions’ profiles according to user preferences, and presents assessment scores, trends and comparative analyses of the corresponding data using assorted visual aids. Based on the analysis, the system offers three different strategies for objective assessment of the institutions’ functioning and risks. Qualitative and quantitative evaluation of the system’s effectiveness and accuracy demonstrates that it substantially improves the assessment process of a welfare institution. Moreover, it provides an effective tool for objective large-scale analysis of the institution’s overall state and trends, which were previously based primarily on the institution supervisors’ subjective judgment and intuition. In addition, the proposed recommender system has great practical and social impact as it may help identify and avert potential problems, malfunctions, flaws, risks and even tragic incidents in child welfare institutions, as well as increase their overall functioning levels. As a result, as a long-term social implication, the system may also help reduce inequality and social gaps in the Israeli society. (shrink)

This article traces how students are represented in undergraduate prospectuses from 1998 to 2021 by employing a corpus-assisted approach to critical discourse analysis of a 1.9 million word corpus of prospectuses from a single Russell Group university in England. Recent decades have witnessed an increase in tuition fees and competition to attract students; hence, it is important to understand to what extent, if any, the representation of students has changed in the prospectuses. Our findings add to the literature by (...) showing for the first time that the representation of students in prospectuses has shifted in ways consistent with the impact of market-driven policy on the sector. Initially, students were positioned primarily as learners, partners to the university, and members of a community. Latterly, students are positioned primarily as consumers and future professionals. These findings are significant because they capture the extent to which a market-driven agenda has been normalised by institutions, and demonstrate how this process of normalisation occurs. Even before they reach campus, young people are conditioned and defined by the market, with the prospectus presenting university as an opportunity to enhance earning power rather than to benefit from life-changing education. (shrink)

This paper introduces Chinese synthetic verbs and analyses their contributions to debates in manner/result complementarity studies and cognitive typology studies. Chinese synthetic verbs simultaneously express manner information and path/result information, but encode them into separate root slots under Beavers and Koontz-Garboden’s (2012. Manner and result in the roots of verbal meaning. Linguistic Inquiry 43(3). 331–369) scopal modifier test, so they differ from English “manner+result verbs” and further challenge the manner/result complementarity hypothesis. Synthetic verbs followed by redundant path/result verbs constitute double-framing (...) structures that twice encode the framing information, and the non-motion case, i.e., the “synthetic verb+result verb” structure, supplements Croft et al.’s (2010. Revising Talmy’s typological classification of complex event constructions. In Hans C. Boas (ed.), Contrastive studies in construction grammar, vol. 10, 201–235. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company) classification that only includes the motion case, so that Chinese synthetic verbs complement the discussion on double-framing structures. This paper thereby further falsifies the manner/result complementarity hypothesis and provides an overall illustration of the double-framing structure in cognitive typology. This paper also illustrates the diachronic changes of manner, which might be universal and await further investigation. (shrink)

New definitions of theism and of faith are offered that are consistent with low degrees of belief in a god. Theism and atheism are as much differences of desire as of belief. The argument depends on a new conception of knowledge. I use decision theory to reconstruct the Kantian distinction between speculative reason and practical reason, but I make the distinction in a non-Kantian way. The former, which is knowledge, is characterized in terms of an effect in probability theory---what I (...) call diachronic bootstrapping---which distinguishes our knowledge from the corpus of beliefs that guide our actions. The latter can include theism, even when the former does not. (shrink)

This paper offers a renewed construction grammar analysis of linguistic constructions in a diachronic perspective. The present theory, termedAgentive Cognitive Construction Grammar(AgCCxG), is informed byactive inference(AIF), a process theory for the comprehension of intelligent agency. AgCCxG defends the idea that language bear traces of non-linguistic, bodily-acquired information that reflects sémiotico-biological processes of energy exchange and conservation. One of the major claims of the paper is that embodied cognition has evolved to facilitate ontogenic mental alignment among humans. This is (...) demonstrated by the results of a corpus study in which the patterns of association between verbs, the particle UP and argument structure in Old and Middle English have been studied. The conclusion is that, similar to biological systems, the linguistic sign system displays patterns of equilibrium and non-equilibrium. In other words, while in Old English usage near equilibrium was reached through the use of a conservative set of constructional semiotic templates (attachment patterns), associated with motor modalities, Middle English displays high rates of randomness resulting in a less stable, yet distinct, system of constructional attachment. (shrink)

In this article I argue that phenomenal intentionality fundamentally consists in a horizonality structure, rather than in a relation to a representational content or the determination of accuracy conditions. I provide a distinctive modal model of intentionality that conceives of phenomenal intentionality as the enjoyment of a plus ultra that points beyond what is actual. The directedness of intentionality on the world, thus, consists in “pointing ahead” to possibilities. The principal difficulty for the modal model is logical: the most obvious (...) way of implementing such a structure results in an analogue of Russell’s paradox. However, this paradox can be avoided by fine-tuning the modal logic deployed in this setting. This way of fine-tuning the logic ultimately amounts to intuitive benefits. For, it captures the intensional character of intentionality, since the way that our mental states refer to things is conception-dependent. Moreover, the way I interpret the modal model leads to a conception of intentionality as a feature of dynamic, diachronic patterns in the way that mental acts subjectively appear, rather than as a synchronic property. We ought to think of intentionality as fundamentally a temporal, subjective determination. In a generalization on Sellars’ approach to concepts, I hold that phenomenally intentional mental presentations involve modal laws and are inconceivable without them. (shrink)

This study explores society's attitudes towards medicine, as reflected in the language of Patient Information Leaflets, and attempts to explicate how they have changed over the last century. For this purpose, Halliday's transitivity model is employed as a method of discourse analysis in order to carry out a systematic, comparative investigation of the language of early 20th-century PILs and that of their modern equivalents. The study demonstrates how the transitivity choices in the respective samples cumulatively realize a particular `world-view', (...) and considers the implications this has for the construal of the wider social/cultural context and the projection of particular ideologies. The analyses show significant differences in transitivity patterns between the two samples, which reflect changes in the way medicine is viewed in Western culture. (shrink)

Pablo Gilabert and Holly Lawford-Smith have, both in collaboration and individually, provided a compelling account of feasibility, which states that feasibility is both ‘binary’ and ‘scalar’, and both ‘synchronic’ and ‘diachronic’. This two-dimensional analysis, however, has been the subject of four major criticisms: it has been argued that it rests upon a false distinction between ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ constraints, that it ignores the importance of intentional action, and that diachronic feasibility is incoherent and insensitive to the existence (...) of epistemic limitations. In this paper, I will argue that such objections do not undermine the persuasiveness of Gilabert and Lawford-Smith’s analysis. Nevertheless, I will contend that the latter is susceptible to two other challenges. First, it mistakenly appeals to morality, and, second, it lacks an analysis of ability. I will maintain, however, that such criticisms can be addressed and that a revised version of the account should be adopted. (shrink)

This paper describes a method for analyzing a corpus of descriptions collected through micro-phenomenological interviews. This analysis aims at identifying the structure of the singular experiences which have been described, and in particular their diachronic structure, while unfolding generic experiential structures through an iterative approach. After summarizing the principles of the micro-phenomenological interview, and then describing the process of preparation of the verbatim, the article presents on the one hand, the principles and conceptual devices of the analysis (...) method and on the other hand several dimensions of the analysis process: the modes of structural unfolding of generic structures, the mutual guidance of the processes of structural and experiential unfolding, the tracking of analysis processes, and finally the assessment of analysis results. (shrink)

The principal aim of this paper is to analyze the relationship between intersubjectivity and grammar. We argue that intersubjectivity represents, on the one hand, a prerequisite for the development of language as a symbolic system, and therefore also for the development of grammar. Furthermore, we attempt to show that language, and especially grammar, codify intersubjectivity. That is to say, grammatical constructions represent the intersubjective interactions that situated agents maintain in different pragmatic contects. We call this phenomenon the meta-representational capacity of (...) language. Our main object of analysis is the development of the ditransitive construction in the Spanish language. The evolution of this construction makes it clear that there is an important correlation between the degree of complexity of the codified intersubjective interaction and grammatically obligatory nature and the prominence of the grammatical construction that codifies it: the greater the complexity, the greater its obligatoriness, and vice versa. (shrink)

The present work discusses the complex nature of the term ‘gender’ in legal discourse, in the wake of the recent pushbacks that the 2011 Istanbul Convention has received from anti-feminist movements and nations that have not signed/ratified the document or have withdrawn from it. Though its original aim was to protect women’s rights, the debate has eventually surfaced deeply-rooted problems linked to gender-related vocabulary. For this reason, the study will analyse the use of the terms ‘gender’ and ‘sex’ in the (...) 1995 UN Beijing Declaration, the 1998 Rome Statute, and the 2011 Istanbul Convention, from a synchronic and diachronic perspective. It aims to provide a critical comparison of the definitions, translations, and interpretations of the term ‘gender’, in an attempt to overcome some of the issues involved in the harmonisation of EU documentation, which could certainly help guarantee fundamental rights and convince more states to sign/ratify the Convention, or at least, not allow them to use issues not related to women’s rights to not accept the document. The interpretation of gender-related violence is still ‘in progress’, and the lack of harmonisation could eventually hinder fundamental human rights instead of helping the Istanbul Convention save lives. (shrink)

This paper presents a new diachronic corpus of the Italian language, i.e., CODIT (COrpus Diacronico dell’ITaliano ‘Diachronic corpus of Italian’). After a description of the corpus design, the second part of the article is devoted to show possible applications of the corpus in the morphological field, specifically in the domain of evaluative morphology. We highlight the corpus’ strengths and limitations through the diachronic analysis of two affixes, i.e., sopra- and -oide. The study contributes to shed light (...) on the dynamism of evaluative morphology by focusing on the loss of the intensification function suffered by sopra- and the emergence of an approximating value that currently affects -oide. (shrink)

Evolutionary transitions in individuality (ETIs) are events during which individuals at a given level of organization (particles) interact to form higher-level entities (collectives) which are then recognized as new individuals at that level. ETIs are intimately related to levels of selection, which, following Okasha, can be approached from two different perspectives. One, referred to as ‘synchronic’, asks whether selection occurs at the collective level while the partitioning of particles into collectives is taken for granted. The other, referred to as ‘ (...) class='Hi'>diachronic’, asks about the origins of the partitioning of particles into collectives. After having presented the two perspectives and a classical formalism used to deal with the levels-of-selection question in the literature, namely the multilevel version of the Price equation, I show that because this formalism treats the levels-of-selection question from a synchronic perspective, it is inadequate to explain ETIs. This is because a fundamental aspect of ETIs is the origin of collectives. From there, I develop a framework for levels of selection compatible with the diachronic perspective. This framework relies on the distinction between what I call, on the one hand, a ‘functional aggregative collective trait’, and on the other hand, a ‘functional non-aggregative collective trait’. After having presented this distinction, I implement it in the Price equation, leading to a new statistical partitioning of this equation which, I argue, represents a causal decomposition more relevant for ETIs. Finally, I exploit this partitioning to explain the critical stages of an ETI. In addition to its explanatory power, a measure of the degree of functional non-aggregativity could be used as a proxy for the degree of individuality of a collective. (shrink)

This essay examines the quantitative aspects of Greco-Roman science, represented by a group of established disci¬plines, which since the fourth century BC were called mathēmata or mathē¬ma¬tikai epistē¬mai. In the group of mathēmata that in Antiquity normally comprised mathematics, mathematical astronomy, harmonics, mechanics and optics, we have also included geography. Using a dataset based on The Encyclopaedia of Ancient Natural Scientists, our essay considers a community of mathēmatikoi (as they called themselves), or ancient scientists (as they are defined for the (...) purposes of the present paper) from a sociological point of view, focusing on the size of the scientific population known to us and its disciplinary, temporal and geographical distribution. A diachronic comparison of neighboring and partly overlapping communities, ancient scientists and philosophers, allows the pattern of their interrelationship to be traced. An examination of centers of science throughout ancient history reveals that there were five major centers – Athens, Alexandria, Rhodes, Rome and Byzantium/Constantinople – that appear and replace one another in succession as leaders. These conclusions serve to reopen the issue of the place of mathēmata and mathēmatikoi in ancient society. (shrink)

No serious attempt to answer the question ‘What is hate speech?’ would be complete without an exploration of the outer limits of the concept(s). This book critically examines both the ordinary and legal concepts of hate speech, contrasting social media platform content policies with national and international laws. It also explores a range of controversial grey area examples of hate speech. Part I focuses on the ordinary concept and looks at hybrid attacks, selective attacks, reverse attacks, righteous attacks, indirect attacks, (...) identity attacks, existential denials, identity denials, identity miscategorisations, and identity appropriations. Part II concentrates on the legal concept. It considers how to distinguish between hate speech and hate crime and examines the precarious position of denialism laws in national and international law. Together the authors draw on conceptual analysis, doctrinal analysis, linguistic analysis, critical analysis, and diachronic analysis to map the new frontiers of the concepts of hate speech. (shrink)

In this article, we analyze the grammatical incorporation of demonstratives in a tactile language, emerging in communities of DeafBlind signers in the US who communicate via reciprocal, tactile channels—a practice known as “protactile.” In the first part of the paper, we report on a synchronic analysis of recent data, identifying four types of “taps,” which have taken on different functions in protacitle language and communication. In the second part of the paper, we report on a diachronic analysis (...) of data collected over the past 8 years. This analysis reveals the emergence of a new kind of “propriotactic” tap, which has been co-opted by the emerging phonological system of protactile language. We link the emergence of this unit to both demonstrative taps, and backchanneling taps, both of which emerged earlier. We show how these forms are all undergirded by an attention-modulation function, more or less backgrounded, and operating across different semiotic systems. In doing so, we contribute not only to what is known about demonstratives in tactile languages, but also to what is known about the role of demonstratives in the emergence of new languages. (shrink)

The book presents two fundamental theories that characterize the cultural-historical perspective in cognitive semantics: the Four-Level Theory of Cognitive Development (FLTCD) and the Sociocultural Theory of Lexical Complexes (STLC) as well as their application to the analysis of specific material. In particular, the book analyzes the sociocultural history of the machine metaphor, specifically its use in the texts of René Descartes and Francis Bacon. The practical embodiment of STLC is demonstrated through the analysis of lexical complexes such as (...) otkryvat' 'to open,' kamen' 'stone,' and intelligencija 'intelligentsia.' In the final chapter of the monograph, FLTCD and STLC are used for the diachronic analysis of semantic change. The monograph will be of interest to a wide range of linguists, psychologists, cultural anthropologists, and philosophers who consider language as a sociocultural phenomenon. (shrink)