The politics of Mayan linguistics in Guatemala

The everyday politics of urban transformational adaptation: Struggles for authority and the Barcelona superblock project

Cities’ increasing vulnerability to the effects of climate change calls for greater attention to urban transformational adaptation as a path towards environmental and social resilience. Through the initial Superblock project in the Poblenou neighbourhood of Barcelona – whereby traffic pacification is combined with new open space and transit network improvements – we analyse municipal efforts aligning transformational land use planning with climate adaptation objectives and the pushback again them. The initial opposition to the project embodied the everyday political struggle for municipal authority, that is, clashes over visions for the future Barcelona and who can define them and own them. Urban transformation – and the contestation around it – is thus not only about negotiating environmental and quality-of-life benefits that are ostensibly the target of interventions, but also competitive urbanism and related short-term political gains. Of particular importance is how civic and political contestation over the authority of climate champions can jeopardise not only transformational adaptation achievements, but also the political survival of those champions. Transformational adaptation can be slowed down not only by the fear for the material and political effects of transformation per se, but also because of how key stakeholders and the residents around them contest who has the authority to decide for the common good. This chapter is a modified and updated version of the Zografos et al (Cities 99:102613. Copyright (2020), with permission from Elsevier, 2020) article previously published in Cities, Elsevier.KeywordsTransformational adaptationCompetitive urbanismMobilityPublic spaceSuperblocks

Although learning scientific language is crucial for learning science, many primary school teachers lack the knowledge and skills to support this. The present case study reports on a primary school teacher who learned to use a repertoire of scaffolding strategies for stimulating pupils’ scientific language development in inquiry-based science lessons (14 pupils; grade 4). Teacher support included an instructional sequence, participation in interviews and writing reflective reports. The aim of this study is to identify how the teacher used the scaffolding strategies in a classroom with native speakers and which challenges she experienced during the process. Analysis of lesson transcripts showed that the teacher applied all scaffolding strategies suggested to her. Analysis of interview transcripts gave insight into five categories of challenges the teacher experienced while using scaffolding strategies, including her expectations regarding pupils’ scientific language level and dealing with differentiation in the classroom. The findings show that a teacher can learn to apply multiple scaffolding strategies for stimulating scientific language development. Patterns in the use of scaffolding strategies arose related to the aim of the strategy, the situation (i.e., phase of the empirical cycle and teaching approach) and the required pedagogical content knowledge (and skill) of the teacher.

This paper investigates the linguistic means used to express general scientific activity above the level of an individual word. The corpus approach and the contrastive method are used to analyze typical and characteristic, general scientific VERB + NOUN collocations of the Croatian language and compare them with collocations in the German general scientific language. The aim is to find out how VERB + NOUN collocations are positioned within euristic structures of scientific language, and finally to assign the collocations to the corresponding type of general scientific language activity. General scientific collocations are an important part of everyday scientific communication, primarily written. A bilingual list of isolated translation equivalents of transdisciplinary VERB + NOUN collocations in Croatian and German (e.g., use (scientific) sources ‘(wissenschaftliche) Quellen heranziehen’, use arguments ‘Argumente heranziehen’, apply the approach ‘einen wissenschaftlichen Ansatz’) has been compiled to meet the needs of Croatian authors in scientific writing. Furthermore, a contrastive approach is used to compile a list and provide a description of VERB + NOUN collocations through which eristic structures of scientific communication are realized, focusing on the most important interlingual differences and problems arising in the scientific writing of native Croatian speakers. The results of the research also have implications for native speakers of Croatian language who publish their scientific research in the Croatian language as they provide insight into the application of VERB + NOUN collocations in contemporary scientific language. The results of the analysis also show that there is a lack of contrastive research on the lexico–syntagmatic level and interlingual comparisons of individual aspects of the two scientific languages.

This article shows one specific object of study using Corpus Linguistics: adjectives from a corpus of academic texts from EFL students collected between 2017 and 2018 revealing a dissimilar variety compared to native speakers’ corpus in similar types of texts. This nearly half a million corpus comprises students’ academic writings from two English Teaching majors and one English BA from the School of Literature and Language Sciences in Universidad Nacional in Heredia, Costa Rica. What the lexical unit of the study displays and what it reveals is surprisingly interesting because, as EFL teachers, we expected a more diverse and profound use of adjectives as they are an important device in academic prose. Written texts seem to reflect a fault in the teaching and learning of this skill, calling for immediate attention to the matter. The use of the concordancer AntConc© as the linguistic analysis software selected to manage the lexical categories that the researchers picked as a starting point was truly significant in the methodological process. A corpus-driven approach was followed in this initial attempt to illustrate word choice in academic writings developed in the composition courses during the time period: English Integrated I, English Integrated II, Composition, and Essay. This study was longitudinal as it involved the same students’ writings during the two years of the corpus collection. General findings also show that lexical complexity is deficient and suggest that more didactic efforts should be made to encourage the learning and acquisition of vocabulary, being the use of native speakers’ corpus one example of such strategies.

We use Universal Dependencies (UD) for the study of cross-linguistic diachronic syntactic complexity reduction. Specifically, we look at whether and how scientific English and German minimize the length of syntactic dependency relations in the Late Modern period (ca. 1650–1900). Our linguistic analysis follows the assumption that over time, scientific discourse cross-linguistically develops towards an increasingly efficient syntactic code by minimizing Dependency Length (DL) as a factor of syntactic complexity. For each language, we analyse a large UD-annotated scientific and general language corpus for comparison. While on a macro level, our analysis suggests that there is an overall diachronic cross-linguistic and cross-register reduction in Average Dependency Length (ADL), on the micro level we find that only scientific language shows a sentence length independent reduction of ADL, while general language shows an overall decrease of ADL due to sentence length reduction. We further analyse the syntactic constructions responsible for this reduction in both languages, showing that both scientific English and German increasingly make use of short, intra-phrasal dependency relations while long dependency relations such as clausal embeddings become rather disfavoured over time.

In This Issue

The emergence of social media has immensely influenced how the younger generations participate and interact in the discussion of the different societal and governmental issues. Thus, it is imperative to formulate information-media literacy and digital citizenship guidelines that may help promote healthy and safe political engagements and participation in the virtual space. In this study, the impacts of social media to the adolescents’ political awareness, participation, and activism were assessed and analyzed. Using the descriptive-correlational-comparative design, 523 senior high school students, aged 17-19 years old, were asked to answer the 50-item researcher-made questionnaire, Social Media Use, Political Participation, Awareness, and Activism (SMPPAA) Survey. The data were analyzed using mean, standard deviation, Pearson’s coefficient of correlation, t-test, and ANOVA. The results revealed that the adolescents often use social media as a tool for presenting their political interests and to a great extent had relied on online information to get updates on political issues. The adolescents’ political participation, awareness, and activism did not significantly differ with respect to their age, sex, religious affiliation. There was differing level of political awareness among the adolescents as regards their socio-economic status. Moreover, the results affirmed the ideas propounded in the Cognitive Engagement Theory and Interest-Driven Theory regarding the influence of social media usage and reliance to online information with the development of the adolescents’ political awareness, participation, and activism.

Developing intercultural understanding is vital in language education; with this in mind, this project creates an online language-learning tool with the intention of increasing secondary students' intercultural communicative skills and practicing the Spanish language through scripted content that encourages social interactions. This virtual learning environment (VLE) features 360-degree video recordings of a native Spanish speaker acting as a significant historical figure. Students are encouraged to engage in one-on-one dialogues as part of digital selectable modules which are centred around the influential character’s main life events; these modules present vocabulary in different contexts. The footage is recorded in a green screen studio and features are added in post-production. Participants can opt to watch a video narrated by the historical character about past events to only develop listening skills. However, this resource intends to represent a real-life communicative experience through social interactions with a native speaker. Thus, the character prompts questions and users can opt type or select provided answers - voice recognition is a desirable feature that depends on finding suitable software. The actor is encouraged to offer non-verbal reactions such as facial expressions to encourage examinations of those responses. The goal is to promote intercultural communicative competence (ICC) via online interactions. By scaffolding learning, interactions will develop language skills to succeed in today's globalised world, stimulate reflective practices and inspire social action. 
 This project-based research will evaluate, review, and analyse literature regarding distance-learning approaches, student-centred theories and means by which ICC can be facilitated and promoted in digital education. A framework is devised considering pedagogical aspects for its effective use. Firstly, VLE supported by constructivism promote interaction between learners and content; student involvement in the construction of new knowledge is imperative (Whitlock, 2017). New knowledge is built on prior knowledge and influenced by social experiences as connections to the real-world increase engagement and make learning relevant (Reid-Martinez & Grooms, 2021). Similarly, heutagogy promotes active participation, autonomy and self-determination to learn (Blaschke, 2012). Online learning allows students to take ownership of their education, enhancing skills of self-direction. As a result, language students’ roles change from passive learners to confident speakers able to communicate with native speakers on digital platforms (Tolosa et al., 2021). Correspondingly, concepts of ICC and intercultural citizenship (IC) are integrated into the framework to enhance students' abilities to value their culture, to relate to others meaningfully and to promote active and collective social action (Byram, 2021). Subsequently, key elements will be categorised and implemented to create a platform that fosters Spanish language acquisition. During the process, a script is devised which includes cultural aspects of the language, prompts language practice and generates instances where interactions could occur. Video performances are recorded, edited, and revised. Additionally, a prototype is presented to a focus group consisting of language experts to provide feedback. To evaluate its usefulness, quantitative data will be collected via online surveys; close questions with ratings will be part of the questionnaire to investigate participants’ experiences. Pre and post surveys implementing questions from the intercultural sensitivity scale (Chen and Starosta, 2000) and ICC scale (Arasaratnam, 2012) are provided. The panellists' feedback about their experience with the prototype will be integrated for further modifications. Qualitative data will be gathered through observations, interviews and discussions with undergraduate students and/or specialist panellists. This data will be transcribed, organised and examined following naturalistic interpretive analysis (Aguayo, 2014) to measure changes in users’ awareness about ICC skills. This project promotes the development of skills necessary to become intercultural citizens through immersive, 360-degree footage of real-world scenarios that are not possible in traditional classroom settings.

We exploit the information theoretic measure of surprisal to analyze the formulaicity of lexical sequences. We first show the prevalence of individual lexical bundles, then we argue that abstracting to surprisal as an information-theoretic measure of lexical bundleness, formulaicity and non-creativity is an appropriate measure for the idiom principle, as it expresses reader expectations and text entropy. As strong and gradient formulaic, idiomatic and selectional preferences prevail on all levels, we argue for the abstraction step from individual bundles to measures of bundleness. We use surprisal to analyse differences between genres of native language use, and learner language at different levels: (a) spoken and written genres of native language (L1); (b) spoken and written learner language (L2), across selected written genres; (c) learner language as compared with native language (L1). We thus test Pawley and Syder (1983)’s hypothesis that native speakers know best how to play the tug-of-war between formulaicity (Sinclair’s idiom principle) and expressiveness (Sinclair’s open-choice principle), which can be measured with Levy and Jaeger (2007)’s uniform information density (UID) which is a principle of minimizing comprehension difficulty. Our goal to abstract away from word sequences also leads us to language models as models of processing, first in the form of a part-of-speech tagger, then in the form of a syntactic parser. While our hypotheses are largely confirmed, we also observe that advanced learners bundle most, and that scientific language may show lower surprisal than spoken language.

We present experimental evidence suggesting that frequency and literacy predict online processing and comprehension of subject-verb agreement constructions by adult native speakers of English. We measured participants’ eye fixations, reaction times, and response accuracy in a forced-choice task using audio-visual eye-tracking paradigm. Participants completed a battery of tasks, inc. the Literacy Rating Scale (Tarone et al., Literacy and Second Language Oracy-Oxford Applied Linguistics, Oxford University Press, 2013), Agreement Judgement Task (e.g., Veenstra et al., Frontiers in Psychology 5:783, 2014). The AJT involved matching an auditorily presented subject phrase to one of two images of easily distinguishable colours presented on a computer screen (e.g., stars, circles). Participants heard 42 test sentences, counterbalanced across the three types: Type 1 (e.g., ‘The stars with the circles are blue’), Type 2 (e.g., ‘The star with the circles is blue’) and Type 3 (e.g., ‘The star with the circles are blue’*. Type 1 and Type 2 constructions are considerably more frequent in writing than in speech (Miller et al., Spontaneous spoken language: Syntax and discourse, Oxford University Press on Demand, 1998) with Type 2 producing more attraction errors (Bock et al., Cognitive Psychology 43:83–128, 2001; Becker, L., & Dąbrowska, E. (2020). Does experience with written language influence grammaticality intuitions? UK Cognitive Linguistics Conference: University of Birmingham [conference presentation].). Data were analysed with linear mixed effects models and generalised additive models. Results show lower literacy participants took longer to process sentential cues and made more attraction errors. These findings support usage-based research showing frequency and experience effects on online comprehension of canonical and non-canonical constructions (Farmer, T. A., Misyak, J. B., & Christiansen, M. H. (2012). Individual differences in sentence processing. In Cambridge handbook of psycholinguistics (pp. 353-364)., Street, Language Sciences 59:192–203, 2017), detection and production of agreement attraction errors (Becker, L., & Dąbrowska, E. (2020). Does experience with written language influence grammaticality intuitions? UK Cognitive Linguistics Conference: University of Birmingham [conference presentation].) and demonstrate how linguistic and attentional processes interact (Tomlin and Myachykov, Attention and salience, Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics, 2015). They also complement corpus-based studies by providing evidence that native speakers are sensitive to observed distributions (Miller et al., Spontaneous spoken language: Syntax and discourse, Oxford University Press on Demand, 1998).

The article is devoted to the analysis of Salafi islamism. Conservative Salafi Islamism during the events of the Arab spring received a new development. In particular, the fall of authoritarian regimes and the beginning of the democratic process in the Middle East and North Africa led to the creation of Salafi political parties. Salafi Islamism used to reject the idea of creation of political parties to fight for power. It is known for its doctrinal intransigence and strong condemnation of any Islamist groups and movements that do not share its religious views. Salafists saw politics as a tool for splitting Muslims. However, in a favorable political environment, the Salafists believed that they would be able to defend their legal status and gain some privileges by participating in parliamentary elections. United with moderate Islamists, the Salafists managed to achieve the desired results at first. However, financial and diplomatic pressure from Saudi Arabia forced Salafi parties to withdraw support from moderate Islamists, which led to a weakening of Islamist movements in general. Moreover, the creation of parties has deepened internal divisions within the Salafi movements. In particular, there were supporters among the Salafists who defended the combination of student and political activities against those who considered participation in the political struggle as a temporary tactical action. The result of the disagreement was the emergence of young reformists, which began to see participation in politics as a tool for strengthening the position of the Salafi movement.

The article is devoted to the analysis of Salafi Islamism. Conservative Salafi Islamism during the events of the Arab spring received a new development. In particular, the fall of authoritarian regimes and the beginning of the democratic process in the Middle East and North Africa led to the creation of Salafi political parties. The Salafi sts believed, that in a favorable political environment, they would be able to defend their legal status and gain some privileges through participating in parliamentary elections. However, the creation of parties has deepened internal divisions within the Salafi movements. In particular, there were supporters among the Salafi sts, who defended the combination of student and political activities against those who considered participation in the political struggle as a temporary tactical action. The result of the disagreement was the emergence of a reformist movement, that began to see participation in politics as a tool for strengthening the position of the Salafi st movement.

The main historical outlines and trends in the struggle for women's human rights in Uganda from precolonial times to the immediate postcolonial period are brought forth and treated with deep intellectual passion by Maria Nassali (Chapter 3). Steps taken by the National Revolutionary Movement (which came to power in 1986) to restore constitutional order are discussed in the context of important reforms that women are demanding from society to ensure their emancipation; more importantly, gender provisions in the 1995 Ugandan constitution are presented as guidelines on how women can map effective plans and programs that are consistent with their immediate needs and can help them realise their long-term objectives. The author explains why emergence of President Museveni's government was accompanied by a significant rise in participation of women in politics; Ugandan women fought side by side as guerrillas with their male counterparts in the physical combat and political struggles that brought Museveni to power. In performing their wartime tasks, Ugandan women did not present themselves as vulnerable objects to be protected, patronised or subordinated; they were visible persons earning the respect of male combatants via the quality of their commitment to the task at hand—nation building. They acquired leadership skills on the field and gained new organisational experience that seems to be serving the women well as they travel the landscape of competitive and participatory politics in Uganda. An important inference flowing from this way of explaining the matter is this: Improvement in women's participation in postwar Ugandan politics is linked to their sense of citizenship and a willingness to directly share responsibilities toward the construction of a new nation. The gain Nassali speaks about came from political struggles by women themselves. It did not emanate from the act of a benevolent male-dominant government that was consciously seeking to mitigate marginalisation.

Category: 1.01 Original scientific paper Language: Original in English (Abstract in English and Slovenian, Summary in Slovenian) Key words: political participation, determinants, youth, Slovenia, regional inequalities, democracy, civic participation, democratization, democratic consolidation, post-communism Abstract: The main purpose of our study was 1) to analyse previously unexamined regional inequalities in four dimensions of political participation among Slovenian youth (self-reported voter turnout, non-electoral conventional participation, protest participation and civic participation); 2) to examine macro-determinants of regional inequalities in political participation; and 3) to examine regional variation in individual-level determinants of political participation. We found several substantial regional inequalities in youth political participation, although the extent of inequalities differed depending on examined participation dimension. Regional inequalities exist particularly in voter turnout and civic participation, while at the same time, regions that score higher on one dimension in some cases score lower on other dimensions.