Degrees Of Subtlety Research Articles

Around the world in three alternations

We sketch a project that marries probabilistic grammar research to scholarship on World Englishes, thus synthesizing two previously rather disjoint lines of research into one unifying project with a coherent focus. This synthesis is hoped to advance usage-based theoretical linguistics by adopting a large-scale comparative and sociolinguistically responsible perspective on grammatical variation. To highlight the descriptive and theoretical benefits of the approach, we present case studies of three syntactic alternations (the particle placement, genitive, and dative alternations) in four varieties of English (British, Canadian, Indian, and Singapore), as represented in the International Corpus of English. We report that the varieties studied share a core probabilistic grammar which is, however, subject to indigenization at various degrees of subtlety, depending on the abstractness of the syntactic patterns studied.

Amplifying the Text: Paratext in Popular Musicians' Autobiographies

In popular musicians' autobiographies, the paratext supplements the dialogue between subjects and readers with a second discourse parallel to the text proper. Introductions, forewords, and blurbs often interpellate readers directly, instructing them on how to contextualize and read the text that follows, while discographies and sessionographies complement more subjective narratives of career accomplishments. Photographs can reinforce the authenticity of a narrative, illustrate a subject's rise to notoriety, or aggrandize a performance persona. With varying degrees of subtlety, paratext recasts listeners into readers and disciplines their reading accordingly.

Intimate partner sexual aggression against Chinese women: a mixed methods study.

BackgroundAlthough intimate partner sexual aggression has been shown to be associated with adverse mental health outcomes, there is scant information about sexual aggression in Chinese intimate relationships in general and about its mental health impact in particular. This article aimed to investigate sexual aggression in Chinese intimate relationships, including the use of force or threat of force and non-physical coercive tactics in unwanted sex.MethodsThe quantitative and qualitative data used in this paper were drawn from a prospective cohort study conducted in Hong Kong between September 2010 and September 2012. A total of 745 Chinese women aged 18 or older who had been in an intimate relationship in the preceding 12 months were recruited from sites in all districts of Hong Kong. Multiple logistic regression analysis, ordinary linear regression, and t-tests were used in quantitative analysis. Directed content analysis was used to analyze the transcripts of 59 women who revealed experiences of intimate partner sexual aggression in individual in-depth interviews.ResultsOf the 745 Chinese women in the study, 348 (46.7%) had experienced intimate partner physical violence in the past year, and 179 (24%) had experienced intimate partner physical violence and sexual aggression in the past year. Intimate partner sexual aggression significantly predicted PTSD and depressive symptoms after controlling for intimate partner physical violence. Among the 179 women reporting intimate partner physical violence and sexual coercion in the past year, 75 indicated that their partners used force or threat of force to make them have sex, and 104 of them reported that they gave in to sex because of non-physical coercive tactics used by their partners. Qualitative data revealed a variety of non-physical coercive tactics with different degrees of subtlety used to coerce women into unwanted sex with their partners. Chinese women experiencing physically forced sex had significantly more depressive symptoms and PTSD symptoms.ConclusionsOur findings indicate that sexual aggression in Chinese intimate relationships has specific mental health consequences over and above those associated with physical violence. Assessment of partner violence in Chinese relationships should include screening for sexual aggression in order to provide appropriate interventions.Trial registrationClinicalTrials gov NCT01206192

Hume after Three Hundred Years

Among the great western philosophers, David Hume enjoys at present as high and honoured a position as any, especially with the attention he has drawn in 2011, which marked the three-hundredth anniversary of his birth. The general drift of the accounts of Hume’s philosophical ideas has tended over the past few dozen years and more to be extremely positive and typically celebratory. Admirers of the man—widely regarded as the very model of the philosophical life—and of his philosophical views, are legion. Hume’s works are pored over endlessly, and his interpreters generally vie with one another for the degrees of subtlety and acuity which they elaborate from those texts. At earlier times, Hume was often read and assessed much more negatively. In his own day, primary focus was on his scepticism and irreligion. Several nineteenth-century critics, including John Stuart Mill, T. H. Green, and L. A. Selby-Bigge, saw a brilliant, yet massively inconsistent, Hume. I this essay I review and discuss their criticism of Hume, from which he emerges, nonetheless, a philosophical giant.

Visualising expertise: towards an authentic pedagogy for higher education

The development of expertise is seen as a crucial element in higher education, but the nature of expertise has been clouded by assumptions of the centrality of intuition and tacit knowledge. In this paper the authors contend that much knowledge that has been described as tacit can be surfaced for examination through the application of concept mapping techniques. This approach allows experts to articulate their practice in a way that is transparent, making it available for scrutiny by students. Expertise is described here as connecting the chains of practice that denote competence with the underlying networks of understanding that are required to support academic development. This occurs across the academic disciplines with various degrees of subtlety. It is described in the context of clinical teaching as it is in this context that the separation of chains of practice from underlying networks of understanding is most pronounced.

Monetary thought and the analysis of price stability in early twentieth century New Zealand

We consider the state of monetary thought in New Zealand and the international transmission of monetary ideas to New Zealand with reference to the report and minutes of evidence of the Royal Commission on the Cost of Living in New Zealand (1912). The paper recovers several New Zealanders as genuine theorists of political economy and of monetary thought in particular. In their disquisitions the political economists expounded, with varying degrees of subtlety, older classical and contemporary neoclassical ideas. Right, Segar and McIlraith held monetary theories of the price level and proceeded beyond the classical cost of production theory of the natural value of money by exploring how and why a change in the price level follows a change in the quantity of money and credit. They did not understand all the intricacies of the Australasian sterling exchange standard, but what they had to say on price level adjustments in an open economy was perfectly coherent and defensible.

Some Hilbert spaces of analytic functions. I

The spaces of analytic functions studied arise from the problem of finding invariant subspaces for bounded linear transformations in Hilbert space. Two fundamental problems are (1) to determine the invariant subspaces of any bounded transformation, (2) to reconstruct a transformation from its invariant subspaces. Satisfactory answers are known for self-adjoint transformations, for unitary transformations, and more generally for normal transformations, but for all other kinds of transformations the known results are less complete. Beurling [2] illustrates how to find invariant subspaces for isometric transformations which are not unitary, and in so doing uncovers an important connection with analytic function theory. Aronszajn and Smith [1] are able to show the existence of invariant subspaces for completely continuous transformations, a result which they ascribe to von Neumann in the Hilbert space case with which we are now concerned. A general study of transformations T with TT* completely continuous is started by Livsic [11] and continued by Brodskil and Livsic [9]. The Livsic approach forms an interesting link between the methods of analytic function theory and those which depend on compactness in linear spaces. When the spectrum of the transformation is a point, Gohberg and Krein [10] give an integral representation of the transformation in terms of invariant subspaces. This construction makes an interesting contrast with the spectral representation of a self-adjoint operator. Relations between the existence of invariant subspaces and the factorization of related operator valued entire functions are obtained by Brodskil' [7; 8]. Our purpose now is to give an exposition of the function theoretic background to this interesting observation. Recall that we have previously [3-6] made a study of Hilbert spaces, whose elements are entire functions and which have these properties: (H1) Whenever F(z) is in the space and has a nonreal zero w, the function F(z)(z w)/(z w) is in the space and has the same norm as F(z). (H2) For every complex number w, the linear functional defined on the space by F(z) -+ F(w) is continuous. (H3) Whenever F(z) is in the space, the function F*(z)=F(i) is in the space and has the same norm as F(z). The axiom (H2) which appears here is conjectured to be a consequence of (Hi). Several apparently weaker conditions, of various degrees of subtlety, are known to imply (H2), and one of these is quoted