Sense Of Causation Research Articles

Zero morphology and change-of-state verbs

Abstract This paper discusses a theory of conversion (zero derivation) in terms of phrasal spellout. In this approach, there are no zero morphemes. Instead, the ‘silent’ meaning components are pronounced cumulatively within overt morphemes. As an empirical case, we discuss adjective/verb ambiguity as in narrow. As verbs, these roots have both an inchoative and a causative sense. Following Ramchand (2008), we assume that such deadjectival causatives contain three parts: the adjective denoting a state, a change-of-state component proc, and a causative component init. Adopting a Nanosyntax approach, we propose that verbs like narrow spell out a complex node with all these abstract heads. The ambiguity between the inchoative, causative and adjective falls out as a consequence of the Superset Principle (Starke 2009), which states that a lexical entry can spell out any subtree it contains. Since both the inchoative sense and the adjective sense correspond to proper parts of the causative one, we derive these readings without the need to postulate zeroes. We show how these assumptions allow us to capture a broad range of patterns, focussing mainly on English and Czech.

When knowing a grammar rule makes L2 users non-native-like

In this work, we investigate the effects of transfer of training in late Brazilian Portuguese-English bilinguals, compared to natives, in relation to their processing of the English causative-have construction. Two experiments were conducted: one focused on the comprehension of the pattern, and the other focused on its production. The results of both experiments point to the fact that the grammatical rule learned by bilinguals is only 'transferred' when there is time to implement it. In the first experiment, we found no effect of training, on the contrary, bilinguals might have been affected by the SVO distribution of the corresponding construction in their L1. In the second experiment, however, we found that bilinguals had high rates of usage of the canonical causative-have form, SAuxOV. This behavior indicates that bilinguals do not implement the rule automatically. Rather, its implementation is seen in more controlled tasks. Thus, explicitly given grammatical rules seem not to be implicitly learned, as they are not automatized to be easily retrieved in real life usage. Moreover, concerning the causative-have rule, bilinguals' linguistic behavior was more similar to that of natives' when they did not implement the rule and used the SVO form with a causative sense.

A Comprehensive Islamic Management Theory Theory (I)

“A good head and a good heart are always a formidable combination”When discussing management, we have to start with a historical perspective that enables us to understand its evolution as:1)     It clarifies our view of the present,2)     It allows us to explain the way things are,3)     It instils a sense of causation, and,4)     It underlines the importance of interpretation in social science.The history of management thought starts from a search for a universal theory that fits all purposes, all societies, all cultures and all fields. Yet we see no single theory is accepted today. Instead we have theories devised and developed at different times with applications to different aspects of the management role.In the East, there are theories that have roots to Ancient Egypt or China; while the participation of Arab and Islamic scholars was very limited, due to the fact that their civilization was targeted by others, especially the Crusaders or the Mongols, who destroyed their Cultures in their cradles (Baghdad or Damascus), when they invaded their homelands and killed their scholars.Consequently, their priorities were mixed up and they became retroactive instead of being proactive; except for three recent endeavours:1)                  Dr. Tariq Al-Sweidan in Kuwait, 2)                  Prof. Abdul Aziz Abu Nab’a, in Palestine, and3)                  Dr Abdul Muti M. Assaf in JordanAgain those theorists undermined the Ethical, Belief and Cultural/Behavioral straightness, but in some way tackled the surrounding environments that shape the organizational culture and the leaders as well.None of them could be categorized as to serve andface challenged for all the recent purposes.I presume, that my theory, The Comprehensive Islamic Management Theory (I) will fit. Let us try it.

Wicked problems: turning strategic management upside down

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to critique the existing decision-making models of organizational theory and the ability of strategic managers to address unconventional problems using these models. Strategic management models presume reasonable stability in the task environment and the organizational design features. However, complex problems, or wicked problems, are prolific in a global world. They change profoundly the nature of strategic management, where management faces a deep paradox – an environment of unprecedented interdependence, yet unpredictable forces of chaos and volatility, a landscape of wicked problems. In this paper, the authors address wicked problems within the context of strategic management. Design/methodology/approach – The authors review and critique the organizational theory literature, namely, microeconomics, bounded rationality, organizational failure and the theory of creative destruction within the context of wicked problems. Findings – The authors find that the contemporary models of strategic management are incapable of assisting managers in addressing the reality of wicked problems. They argue that organizational pathologies rest in executive action: pursuit of goals and objectives with a false sense of causation, feedback filters that exaggerate good news and restrict bad news and actions that give only token measures to correct faulty design decisions and faulty decision processes, including more emphasis on vertical channels than horizontal task interdependencies. Originality/value – The authors conclude that wicked problem-solving is by temperament and time horizon, a multilayered, multitasked, organizational challenge, and requires fundamentally different mindsets for design and performance systems for senior executives. The study of wicked problems requires a new corporate mindset, new collaborative models to address them and new corporate processes and executive training tools who increasingly have to address them. This research is a first step toward extending our understanding of how to address the world of wicked problems.

Put your plan into action: The influence of action plans on agency and responsibility.

While action plans and intentions have been considered to be important factors contributing to the personal sense of causation known as agency, the present research is the first to empirically investigate how action plans influence agency. Participants in multiple studies were required to plan or not to plan ahead their actions. Results consistently show that on trials in which participants were required to plan their actions, participants experienced reduced agency compared to trials in which participants were not required to plan their actions. These results were found for both explicit agency paradigms in which participants were asked for their experiences of causation (Studies 1 and 2), as well as in an implicit agency paradigm in which participants were asked to estimate the time between their actions and the consequences of their actions (Study 3). In addition, it was shown that the reduction in agency was smaller when plans and actions were temporally closer together (Study 4). In a final line of experiments we discovered that prior planning similarly reduced both the emotional experience of acting and feelings of responsibility in agents (Studies 5-7). However, the direction of this effect was reversed in observers, for whom cues related to planning by others increased attributions of responsibility toward those others (Study 8).

Absence Causation and a Liberal Theory of Causal Explanation

For the framework of event causation—i.e. the framework according to which causation is a relation between events—absences or omissions pose a problem. Absences, it is generally agreed, are not events; so, under the framework of event causation, they cannot be causally related. But, as a matter of fact, absences are often taken to be causes or effects. The problem of absence causation is thus how to make sense of causation that apparently involves absences as causes or effects. In an influential paper, Helen Beebee offers a partial solution to the problem by giving an account of causation by absence (i.e. causation in which absences are supposed to be causes). I argue that Beebee's account can be extended to cover causation of absence (i.e. causation in which absences are supposed to be effects) as well. More importantly, I argue that the extended Beebeeian account calls for a major modification to David Lewis's theory of causal explanation, usually taken as standard. Compared to the standard theory, the result of this modification, which I shall call ‘the liberal theory of causal explanation’, has, among other things, the advantage of being able to accommodate causal explanations in which the explananda are not given in terms of events.

The Fungible Audio-Visual Mapping and its Experience

This article draws a perceptual approach to audio- visual mapping. Clearly perceivable cause and effect relationships can be problematic if one desires the audience to experience the music. Indeed perception would bias those sonic qualities that fit previous concepts of causation, subordinating other sonic qualities, which may form the relations between the sounds themselves. The question is, how can an audio-visual mapping produce a sense of causation, and simultaneously confound the actual cause-effect relationships. We call this a fungible audio-visual mapping. Our aim here is to glean its constitution and aspect. We will report a study, which draws upon methods from experimental psychology to inform audio-visual instrument design and composition. The participants are shown several audio-visual mapping prototypes, after which we pose quantitative and qualitative questions regarding their sense of causation, and their sense of understanding the cause-effect relationships. The study shows that a fungible mapping requires both synchronized and seemingly non-related components - sufficient complexity to be confusing. As the specific cause- effect concepts remain inconclusive, the sense of causation embraces the whole.

Cinna’s Trouser Snake – or the Biter Bit? Alternative Interpretations of Cinna fr. 12FRP

AbstractThe only extant choliambic line by Cinna, comparing some action to a Psyllus doing something to an asp, is preserved by Aulus Gellius to illustrate that the adjectivesomniculosuscan have the causative sense ‘sleep-inducing’ as well as the active one of ‘sleepy’. If Gellius is correct, then the simile’s missing verb is likely to have one of the Psylli, famed for their ability to lull snakes to sleep, doing just that to a ‘sleep-inducing asp’. The situation which would be compared to this must be that of someone receiving a taste of their own medicine. This would also account for the Psyllus’ imprecise epithetPoenus, which would pun onpoena. If Gellius is wrong, andsomniculosusmeans ‘sleepy’ as in almost all other instances in Latin, the combination of snake and sleep imagery, which can be paralleled separately in other texts, with the abusive choliambic metre might suggest that what is being compared to the asp is the flaccid penis of an impotent man.

History and the question of causation: North Atlantic lessons on environmental and social change

Dealing with processes of environmental change in an anthropological perspective inevitably implicates people. With people come notions of society and history, complicating matters of causation. In this article, I shall present two empirical cases from Icelandic history and current Greenlandic society. These cases shed light on the natural–social entanglements in a long-term historical perspective and in a highly charged present, respectively. My ambition is to open up for a renewed sense of causation in the social domain in view of the manifest complexities with which we are faced in the present era of globalization and rapid social changes. The reasoning is ethnographic rather than conceptual, if not exactly letting the cases speak for themselves, then at least avoiding both linear explanation and other normative stands on causation.

Force Augmentation, Polysemy, and the Semantics of Form Il Verbs in Arabic

This study investigates the conceptual interrelatedness between grammatical forms and their associated meanings in human language. In contrast to traditional accounts, we provide evidence for the non-arbitrary relation between the Form II verb morphology pattern in modern standard Arabic (MSA) and the varied meanings evoked by this form (including causativity, intensitivity, frequentivity, and estimativity), which we argue are related to each other via coherent, demonstrable patterns of semantic extension from a prototypical causative sense. We also show that these particular senses comprising the family resemblance polysemy category evoked by Form II morphology are all instantiations of a conceptual schema that represents the abstract cognitive unity of the semantic pole of this morphology, a finding which poses interesting ramifications for semantic theory in general. The basic Form II morphological template in MSA is C1aC2C2aC3a, with each C a consonant of the corresponding triliteral root (C1-C2-C3) and /a/ the associated vowels. Traditionally, the meaning associated with this pattern has been classified as causative. E.g., Form II kattaba 'he made someone write' corresponds to the root k-t-b and evokes a prototypical causative reading in comparison to Form I kataba 'he wrote'. Other representative Form II causative examples (and their corresponding Form I forms) include jallasa 'he made someone sit' (jalasa 'he sat'), sarraba 'he made someone drink' (sariba 'he drank something'), and fahhama 'he made someone understand something' (fahima 'he understood'), which evokes causativity in a more abstract mental domain. The Form II causative senses evoke the notion of an extra force/energy (force augmentation) imposed upon a core event from outside that event. Examples of more obscure causative senses which still evoke aspects of force augmentation in Form II (vs. Form I) forms will also be discussed and semantically motivated. Intensives and frequentives evoked by Form II morphology include such forms as kassara 'he smashed' (kasara 'he broke something') and qattala 'he massacred' (qatala 'he killed'), respectively. We argue that such meanings are related to prototypical Form II causatives via the imposition of additional force/energy onto the core event evoked by the corresponding parenthesized Form I forms, but that they are semantic extensions from prototypical causativity, because this additional force emanates from the instigator of the original core action rather than from a source external to that core event. Specifically, addition of extra force onto a breaking event by the agent of that event results in the notion of smashing something; analogously, the addition of extra force onto a killing event results in multiple (frequentive) iterations of killing, hence a massacre. Finally, the notion of estimativity associated with some Form II verbs evokes an evaluative meaning, as illustrated in sarraqa 'he called someone a thief' (saraqa 'he stole') and kaððaba 'he called someone a liar' (kaðaba 'he lied'). We argue that estimatives represent a different semantic extension from causativity, whereby the additional force augmentation onto the core event is now construed as a kind of evaluative mental energy directed toward the core event from outside that event. This mental evaluation directed toward the core event is distinct from the more concrete notion of a causative force, but shares with it the abstract idea of being augmented onto the original event. We conclude that the semantics of MSA Form II morphology supports the claim of a non-arbitrary relationship between the Form II pattern and the meaning(s) evoked by that form, and that the Arabic data provide evidence for the conceptual relationship between the semantic notions of causativity, intensitivity, frequentivity, and estimativity.

Pre-Implantation Genetic Diagnosis, Tissue Typing and Beyond: The Legal Implications of the Hashmi Case

The legality of pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) has recently been confirmed by the Court of Appeal in the Hashmi case, based on a purposive construction of the statute. The court went on to declare tissue typing lawful and strained the wording of the statute in order to do so. The Hashmi case confirms that it would be lawful for the HFEA to license tissue typing in the absence of PGD. However, the HFEA only licenses tissue typing where PGD is also indicated, on the basis of a blanket application of the welfare of the child test set out in S 13 (5). This policy can be criticised. Firstly, a blanket approach to S 13 (5) is not appropriate. Secondly, the HFEA is applying the test too strictly when compared to the 'best interests' test which would govern the situation were an existing child to be a potential donor. Thirdly, by licensing tissue typing in the Hashmi case, where it was the primary reason for testing, the HFEA has undermined the argument that it can be justified only in cases where it is ancillary to PGD. These arguments, coupled with human rights arguments, based on Art 8 and Art 12, could be used to challenge the legitimacy of the HFEA's policy. The restriction on tissue typing to cases where PGD is also indicated is not ethically justified. It offers the same direct benefit to the embryo as PGD, namely selection for implantation. PGD does not cure the relevant condition so offers no additional benefit in a causative sense. Moreover, the Kantian injunction against treating people solely as means is not breached where the child will be wanted for its own sake, as well as for its potential as a cord blood donor.

Alien motor phenomena: A window on to agency

Introduction. Alien motor phenomena arise in neurological and psychiatric contexts and are likely to implicate several distributed brain systems. Method. A selective literature review, focusing on cognitive neurobiological accounts of alien/anarchic limb, somatoparaphrenia, and delusions of alien control (passivity phenomena); supplemented by an account of the cognitive neuroanatomy of action and agency (subjective sense of causation) in the normal state. Results. Alien motor phenomena reflect impairments of agency through at least two mechanisms. (1) A disinhibition of “lower” motor centres giving rise to relatively stereotypic and contextually inappropriate motor routines (as emerge following medial frontal and corpus callosal lesions). (2) A disturbance of the perception of self-initiated movement, so that control of movement (causation) is attributed to an alien entity (phenomena associated with right parietal lobe lesions, focal epilepsy, and hyperactivity in acute schizophrenia). Conclusion. Whereas alien/anarchic limb dysfunction may be relatively easily explained in cognitive neurobiological terms, a comprehensive account of alien control will require further empirical ingenuity. Current models invoke disturbed feed-forward mechanisms, imitation, and the sense of another's agency (“nonself attribution”).

Studies in Contemporary Phrase Structure Grammar (review)

Reviewed by: Studies in contemporary phrase structure grammar ed. by Robert D. Levine, Georgia M. Green Michael A. Covington Studies in contemporary phrase structure grammar. Ed. by Robert D. Levine and Georgia M. Green. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Pp. iv, 335. This book contains seven papers on aspects of head-driven phrase structure grammar (HPSG) preceded by a fast-paced introduction by the editors to the current version of HPSG (1–38) in which a number of quite different-looking notations are reconciled. A bit more explicitness would be welcome in places, e.g. examples 2 and 3 on pp. 3–4 actually encode different, small parts of example 1, and the connection among the three is not obvious. Likewise, it was not quite obvious to me how example 13 on p. 11 encodes the whole of tree 15, as the authors seem to indicate, rather than just the root of it. The account of equi and raising on p. 14 would have benefited from a couple of example sentences. However, perhaps this introduction was not meant for newcomers. On pp. 28–35 the editors give a good overview of the rest of the volume. Two of the papers analyze Japanese causatives and reach opposite conclusions. The question is whether causatives (such as tabesase ‘cause to eat’ from tabe ‘eat’) are syntactically complex structures or single words generated in the lexicon. In favor of the lexical account are the facts that the form of -(s)ase is morphologically conditioned; verb reduplication, honorification, and other processes treat tabesase (etc.) as a unit; and some causatives have undergone semantic drift. In favor of a nonlexical analysis: Adverbs can have scope over just the inner verb in a causative; a causative verb can be used with a noncausative gerundive, which takes on a causative sense, as if one -(s)ase were modifying two verbs; and there are some signs that binding and quantifier scope can ‘see into’ causatives. Christopher D. Manning, Ivan Sag, and Masayo Iida (39–79) argue that the lexicalist hypothesis is correct and that the resulting HPSG structure is rich enough to account for the putative counterevidence. Their key tactic is to move the two-level structure of a causative into its argument list, which is visible to quantifier scope and binding. Takao Gunji (119–60) takes the opposite tack, giving causatives a two-level structure in the syntax though not in the morphology or phonology. His crucial move is to make morphology a separate structural level from syntax. The other five papers are ‘A syntax and semantics for purposive adjuncts in HPSG’ (Michael J. R. Johnston, 80–118); ‘Modal flip and partial verb phrase fronting in German’ (Kathryn L. Baker, 161–98); ‘A lexical comment on a syntactic topic’ (i.e. topicalization, Kazuhiko Fukushima, 199–222); ‘Agreement and the syntax-morphology interface in HPSG’ (Andreas Kathol, 223–74); and ‘Partial VP and split NP topicalization in German’ (Erhard W. Hinrichs and Tsuneko Nakazawa, 275–332). All of them attack linguistic problems whose significance is not confined to HPSG. Michael A. Covington University of Georgia Copyright © 2001 Linguistic Society of America