British Counterparts Research Articles

An Australia`s Quest For Own Political Diversity: An Inside View (late the XIX-th – early the XX-th Centuries)

The publication consists of the two parts. The first one has the characteristic features of the premier Constitution of Australia, which at that historical period, had to be considered as an intervening stage to obtain targeting independence and sovereignty so urgently strived for by that country. The key purpose for the country forming matter of the foregoing basic statute book was to ensure a juridical versatility of the machinery of the new state. The main plot of this principal legal document seemed to point out the presence of a certain dilemma along with its subjectly indexed initially forming constituents.
 Their first part was of an juridical content. The Constitution of Switzerland was chosen as an optional example and exposed it in the form of a full-scaled replica for the basic principal law of the above-mentioned country. The second part of it was lavishly marked with its clear-cut specific and historical character and called upon to faithfully reproduce a certain «safety cushion» to ensure successfully achieved harmony in operating the whole mechanism of the State government.
 The second part of the publication is dedicated to the historical activity of forming and developing of a certain rationally consistent formal and informal institutions as well as their impact on specific and historical determining elements to construct a new country in the Southern continent.
 So, as it is known, politics as a fundamental stuff of art gatherings inside all possible potentials define primarily means and resources of an entire compromise. And due to that its basic political model preferred by authoritative commanding establishment appeared to be as a perfect tool for veritable consensus. So, the mentioned pattern had been originated and settled with “a political treasure house” as well as being received by the Australian liberals as an inheritage from their British counterparts. And starting from that historical period and onwards among other rhetorical earnings of the local authoritative officers there had been occurring a firm political credo: “We’re always ready to make a compromise!”.
 And therefore the whole number of parties as well as the entire Australian political milieu, over the first decade of the XX-th century, inspite of all rather sharp confrontations among liberals, laborites, conservatives, social reformers, socialists and others, had also been keeping on to follow almost half of a century long historically lasted tour. And all that was performed to the key official political course responsive to the State’s national interests.

Italy and the Little Divergence in Wages and Prices: New Data, New Results

We present new wage indices for skilled and unskilled construction workers in Italy. Our data avoid multiple issues pestering earlier wages, making our new indices the first consistent ones for early-modern Italy. Our improved wages, obtained from the St. Peter’s Church in Rome, consolidate the view that urban Italy began a prolonged downturn during the seventeenth century. They also offer sustenance to the idea that epidemics instigated the decline. Comparison with new construction wages for London shows that Roman workers outearned their early-modern English counterparts. This suggests that high wages alone were not enough to trigger industrialization.

Pater Knows Best: Withdrawal of Medical Treatment from Infants in Scotland.

The cases of Charlie Gard and Alfie Evans placed the withdrawal of treatment from terminally ill infants at the forefront of medical law and ethics. In the medico-legal context, Scottish court procedures materially differ from those in England. This article considers these differences in light of the possibility that a similar case might soon be called before the Scottish courts. The Court of Session would then be required to consider whether to utilise its parens patriae jurisdiction to consent to the withdrawal of treatment as if it were the parent of the infant. The operation of this jurisdiction is such that the outcome of any Scottish case cannot be said to be certain, as the Scottish courts are bound to pay more heed to parental autonomy than their English counterparts do.

Cross-linguistic syntactic priming in Korean learners of English

AbstractThis study investigates whether L2 learners develop and share an abstract syntactic representation between an L1 and L2 with different word orders and, if so, whether one language’s unique syntactic features affect the shared representation. Korean (SOV) and English (SVO) have equivalent dative alternations; however, because Korean allows word-order scrambling, several dative structures are available in Korean that do not have English counterparts. In this study’s cross-linguistic syntactic priming experiment, intermediate and advanced Korean learners of English described pictures in English after reading various types of Korean dative sentences. The study found evidence of cross-linguistic syntactic priming between Korean and English, regardless of L2 proficiency, but only when prime and target structures shared identical functional assignments, information structures, and order of thematic roles. These results suggest that, within limits created by language-specific features, L2 learners can develop and share abstract representations between two languages with different word orders.

Bilingual adults practicing multiplication tables – looking into bilingual arithmetic learning

ABSTRACT The importance of language in mathematics education becomes increasingly obvious, as multilingual learners are not an exception nowadays. But how can language dominance and the language of first or later instruction affect arithmetic training in adults? 101 bilingual adults whose first and dominant language was German (LM+ and L1) and who spoke English as their second language (L2) were tested. Participants were assigned to three different training groups and either practiced basic multiplications in German, English or both languages. In a verification paradigm, reaction times on solving multiplication problems in German and English respectively were recorded before and after the training. Results showed a strong influence of the language adult bilinguals initially acquired arithmetic knowledge in (German). German items were overall solved more quickly than English counterparts, irrespective of the language items were specifically trained in. English were affected by differing training conditions with respect to training effects. This leads to the consideration of various factors including language proficiency levels, the language of first mathematics instruction in early school years as well as the language of mathematics instruction in later learning contexts, in understanding bilingual arithmetic learning.

An empirical examination of the moderating role of age and gender in consumer mobile banking use: a cross-national, quantitative study

PurposeDespite the benefits of mobile banking services in an increasingly digitised world, adoption rates remain unsatisfactory. The present cross-national study examines age- and gender-dependent variations of consumer intentions and use of mobile banking services.Design/methodology/approachThe study analyses consumer mobile banking use by integrating factors such as with trust, security and privacy and it examines the effects of these factors among two demographic factors including age and gender. 897 Lebanese and British mobile banking users completed a survey. Data was analysed by partial least squares-structural equations modelling.FindingsConsumer behavioural intention was significantly moderated by age through its relationship with facilitating conditions and trust among Lebanese respondents, and performance expectancy, effort expectancy, hedonic motivation, price value and habit among their British counterparts. As for gender, a significant moderating effect was evidenced in the Lebanese, but not the British sample, on the level of performance expectancy, effort expectancy, facilitating conditions, price value and perceived security.Originality/valueThe findings provide evidence of the applicability of the new factors proposed in this research. The reflection of the influence of these demographic factors in a cross-national context provides insights into mobile banking adoption variation between different countries.

Neural mobilization as a therapeutic option in the treatment of stroke.

Introduction: The neural mobilization is a technique aimed at functional recovery of the nervous system and structures innervated by it. However, little is known about its effects in patients affected by stroke (CVA). Objective: To review and integrate studies that investigated the effects of neural mobilization (NM) in the treatment of patients with stroke. Method: an integrative review of scientific studies with primary and secondary data, both addressing the NM in the treatment of spasticity, flexibility and functionality of stroke patients. The review was carried out by independent authors from July to October 2014. databases were consulted: LILACS, PEDRO, PUBMED and SCIELO. For the selection of manuscripts, we used the following key words: Neural Mobilization, Neurodynamics Mobilization, neurodynamic tests, stroke, spasticity Muscle, joint range of motion, flexibility and their counterparts in English. Studies were screened by reading the titles and objectives. Then deleted resumes in duplicate and performed the reading of articles to verify that met the inclusion criteria. Results: Six studies were selected, one being reviewed. In general, all the research has investigated the effects of NM in stroke patients. Four of the six articles were published in English. Only one study used a control group. As for treatment, there was divergence in relation to the NM application protocol. Conclusion: The reviewed studies indicate beneficial effects of neural mobilization in the control of muscle tone, range of motion and functionality of patients affected by stroke.

Synergistic effects of instruction and affect factors on high- and low-ability disparities in elementary students’ reading literacy

This study examined the combined effects of teachers’ instructional practices and students’ reading-related affective engagement on predicting the high and low levels of elementary reading literacy from a linguistically and culturally comparative perspective. Data were based on 9748 students from 4 English-speaking and 3 Chinese-speaking education systems participating in the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study 2016. A mixed theory-based and data-driven approach was adopted. Four machine learning algorithms, specifically logistic regression, support vector machine, decision tree, and extreme gradient boosting, were simultaneously used to classify and predict high- and low-proficiency readers and to identify the most important factors for the ability separation. The findings showed that for both system groups, those factors together were sufficiently powerful to discriminate the readers and that the affective constructs, particularly students’ self-concepts, played a predominant role. The Chinese-speaking systems, compared with their English counterparts, applied more effective pedagogies to nurture sophisticated readers.

On the morphosyntax of synthetic compounds with proper names: A case study on the diachrony of Greek

This paper discusses the formation of synthetic compounds with proper names. While these are possible in English, Greek disallows such formations. However, earlier stages of the language allowed such compounds, and in the modern language formations of this type are possible as long as they contain heads that are either bound roots or root- derived nominals of Classical Greek origin. The paper builds on the following ingredients: a) proper names are phrases; b) synthetic compounding in Modern Greek involves incorporation, and thus proper names cannot incorporate; c) by contrast, English synthetic compounds involve phrasal movement, and thus proper names can appear within compounds in this language. It is shown that in earlier Greek, proper names had the same status as their English counterparts, hence the possibility of synthetic compounds with proper names. It is further argued that the formations that involve bound/archaic roots are actually cases of either root compounding or root affixation and not synthetic compounds.

The Costs of Caregiving: Exploring the Perceived Burden of Dementia among Bangladeshi Caregivers in Britain

There are currently 700,000 carers caregiving for 850,000 people with dementia in Britain, with Bangladeshi caregivers three times more likely to provide family care compared with their White British counterparts. However, few studies have been conducted to explore how caregiving for a loved one with dementia affects caregivers in Britain. The purpose of this study was to highlight the impacts of dementia on Bangladeshi caregivers. The roles of the caregivers were physically, psychologically, and socioeconomically demanding, particularly when their relative’s condition gradually worsened. This study will also help improve the advice, care, and support available for other ethnic minority caregivers.

KALIMAT TERBELAH BAHASA INDONESIA: KEKHASAN STRUKTUR DAN KEBERMAKNAANNYA

This article aims to reveal the various patterns of cleft clause in Bahasa Indonesia and their meaning. The research data were taken from Indonesian translation of the Quran. The data here included all the cleft sentences in the source. They were then sorted and analyzed based on theories of cleft sentences of Indonesian and English. The results of the analysis show that the cleft sentences in Bahasa Indonesia are constructed in Predicate (P) – Subject (S), P-S-Adjunct (A), and P-A-S. In these patterns, the cleft sentences are the true cleft sentences. Besides, there are other constructions found, namely: S-P, S-P-A, A-S-P, and S-A-P. However, the sentences in the patterns make pseudo cleft. Both group are similar in terms of the elements and the presuposition they imply. The difference is only in the order in which the pseudo cleft put the focus at the back, or on the right side of the copula, which means the focused and its priority are slightly reduced. In Bahasa Indonesia, cleft sentence is not constituted by two clauses because its clefted constituent can stand by itself as a cleft noun/phrase (for example, “mereka”, “merekalah” or “adalah mereka”), without having to be put as a complement of a clause such as that of its English counterpart (“it is they”).

Cross-Linguistic Influence at Lexical Level: An Exploratory Study of How Arabic Speakers Acquire Chinese Onomatopoeias

Empirical evidence suggests that the first language (L1) has a fundamental role in the second language (L2) development, especially at the lexical level. Studies of L2 development have reported a relationship between negative L1 transfer and L2 poor comprehension. It is evident that cross-linguistic transfer might also take place during the course of third language (L3) development and that the impact may be from L1. At the lexico-semantic level, this study examines onomatopoeia as a property of L3 acquisition that requires Arabic learners of Chinese to identify some new lexicons with meanings and functions that might not exist in their L1. Given that onomatopoeia, in general, is often not taught sufficiently and explicitly in many language classroom contexts across the world, the purpose of the current study is to determine the extent to which transfer from L1 influence L3 comprehension and to establish the conditions in which L1 was the prevailing impact. A total of 45 Arabic native speakers were asked to translate a number of Mandarin Chinese onomatopoeic expressions (n = 20) into Arabic. The findings suggest that Arabic learners find Mandarin Chinese onomatopoeic expressions, that neither have Arabic nor English direct counterparts, significantly challenging. The study concludes that enhancing awareness of lexical transfer through a focused consideration of the common difficulties seems crucial for L3 learners to attain comprehensive mastery.

The Acquisition of Mandarin Consonants by English Learners: The Relationship between Perception and Production

This study investigates native English CFL (Chinese as a Foreign Language) learners’ difficulties with Mandarin consonants at the initial stage of learning and explores the relationship between second language (L2) speech perception and production. Twenty-five native English CFL learners read the eight Mandarin consonants (j/tɕ/, q /tɕʰ/, x /ɕ/, zh /tʂ/, ch /tʂʰ/, sh /ʂ/, z /ts/, and c /tsʰ/) in sentences and identified the target sounds in a forced-choice identification task. Native Mandarin listeners identified the consonants produced by the learners and rated the quality of each sound they identified along a scale of 1 (poor) to 7 (good). The learners’ mean percentage accuracy scores ranged from 29% to 80% for perception and 25% to 88% for production. Moderate correlations between the perception and production scores were found for two of the eight target sounds. The Mandarin retroflex, palatal, and dental fricatives and affricates, though all lack counterparts in English, pose different problems to the English CFL learners. The misperceived retroflex and palatal sounds were substituted with each other in perception but mis-produced palatal sounds were substituted with each other, not with retroflex sounds. The relationship between perception and production of L2 consonants is not straightforward. The findings are discussed in terms of current speech learning models.

SensEmBERT: Context-Enhanced Sense Embeddings for Multilingual Word Sense Disambiguation

Contextual representations of words derived by neural language models have proven to effectively encode the subtle distinctions that might occur between different meanings of the same word. However, these representations are not tied to a semantic network, hence they leave the word meanings implicit and thereby neglect the information that can be derived from the knowledge base itself. In this paper, we propose SensEmBERT, a knowledge-based approach that brings together the expressive power of language modelling and the vast amount of knowledge contained in a semantic network to produce high-quality latent semantic representations of word meanings in multiple languages. Our vectors lie in a space comparable with that of contextualized word embeddings, thus allowing a word occurrence to be easily linked to its meaning by applying a simple nearest neighbour approach.We show that, whilst not relying on manual semantic annotations, SensEmBERT is able to either achieve or surpass state-of-the-art results attained by most of the supervised neural approaches on the English Word Sense Disambiguation task. When scaling to other languages, our representations prove to be equally effective as their English counterpart and outperform the existing state of the art on all the Word Sense Disambiguation multilingual datasets. The embeddings are released in five different languages at http://sensembert.org.

Competitive Cooperation and Public Health: VD Control in the British Colony of Trinidad and Tobago During WWII

ABSTRACT The landscape of scientific and medical help for the Global South in the late colonial period was a complex one in which technical assistance provided by nations such as America, and the work of new agencies such as the WHO, sat alongside European colonial interventions. This paper explores the tensions that could exist between British and American experts working together in Britain’s colonies after 1940. It shows how a venereal disease control programme in the British colony of Trinidad and Tobago was a space in which competition between Britain and the US was enacted. This public health programme aimed to address the high rates of venereal disease amongst members of the American armed forces stationed on the island of Trinidad by reducing the incidence of syphilis in the wider population. It was jointly funded by Britain and America through the newly formed Anglo-American Caribbean Commission (AACC) with American personnel undertaking most of the work of the programme in its initial years. This paper shows how a spirit of ‘competitive cooperation’ informed the relationship between American medical personnel and their British counterparts. It explores the function of medical expertise in the bigger struggle over which nation had the greater claim to determine the political and economic future of the Caribbean region.

Revisiting the duality of convention and ritual: A contrastive pragmatic inquiry

AbstractThe aim of this paper is to provide a pragmalinguistically inspired framework for analysing the relationship between linguistic forms and conventional and ritual behaviour. To date, no body of pragmalinguistic research has been dedicated to the relationship between conventional and ritual phenomena, which play a fundamental role in language use. Even more importantly, the examination of this phenomenon provides insight into a longstanding issue in pragmatics, namely, how the relationship between form and language use can be pinned down. We will pursue this question on the basis of an English and Chinese corpus-based examination of expressions, which we define as ‘ritual frame indicating expressions’ (RFIEs). As a case study, we examine the Chinese RFIE ‘duibuqi’ and its English counterpart ‘sorry’. The results indicate that while ‘sorry’ is largely used in a conventional way throughout the contexts in our English corpus, ‘duibuqi’ is predominantly anchored in ritual. This, in turn, reveals how these forms are related to convention v. ritual as far as our data is concerned.

On interpretation of resultatives with locative alternation verbs

Resultative phrases in Japanese are generally believed to be predicated of the object of transitive verbs just like English counterparts (e.g., I painted the car yellow). However, some exceptions are also known in which resultatives describe an oblique argument (e.g., otoko-wa kabe-ni penki-o akaku nutta ‘the man smeared paint on the wall (so that the wall became) red)'. Using BCCWJ-NT corpus data, this paper shows that resultatives with locative alternation verbs in Japanese are generally interpreted as description of the argument that is lexically specified to undergo a change of state, rather than of the direct object.

A Syntactic Analysis of Cognate Accusative in Arabic with Reference to English

This study aims at clarifying the construction of Arabic cognate Accusative and its realization in English in order to be clearer for the learners who try to understand the structure of the Arabic clause. The study attempts to investigate the verbs that take cognate accusative. It is hypothesized that Arabic learners are not aware of this phenomenon, thus they face difficulties in translating them into English because of the complex forms of cognate accusative. To investigate the hypothesis of this research, different Arabic examples were taken from the authentic books and compare these data with their counterpart in English in order to show the differences and similarities between the two different languages and analyze these data from a syntactic point of view which adopts Langacker’s (1991) framework of cognitive grammar. The study is to be empirical, analytical, and comparative. The researchers use Arabic data from different books and look for the equivalent structures of English so that they give a clear idea about this syntactic phenomenon. The results of the study show that Arabic construction has more uses of cognitive Accusative than English.

Against British Influences: Home Rule and the Autonomy of Irish Popular Culture in Ireland’s Juvenile Periodicals

This paper aims to analyse a largely uncharted topic, i.e. the representation of Ireland’s struggle for political and cultural self-determination in the nationalist press for Irish youth. In particular, I will examine four papers (Our Boys, Fianna, Young Ireland, and St. Enda’s), which represented the various nuances within the ranks of Irish nationalism. Combining literary and historical interests, I will devote my attention to the editorials and literary contributions published in the 1910s and 1920s to illustrate how these juvenile periodicals engaged their readership in a discussion on the necessity of Home Rule and Ireland’s cultural independence. Textual attention to the rhetorical and literary strategies adopted by the contributors helps to expose the nuances and shifts in the Irish nationalists’ view on the issue, and how nationalist ideas were repackaged for a youthful audience. Moreover, since the four papers were meant as home-grown substitutes for the examples of British popular culture such as the Boys’ Own Paper, their analysis will cast light on the nationalists’ yearning for the development and success of truly Irish popular culture among the youngsters. The Irish periodicals waged a battle against their British counterparts — a battle which Ireland’s youth was incited to fight.

Navigating Disciplinary Boundaries: Two Stories of Collaborative Teaching in English and Social Studies

ABSTRACT This narrative inquiry shares the stories of two teachers’ collaborative experiences with their counterparts in social studies and English. The primary objective was to learn about how these teachers, within separate teaching dyads, understand and attempt to accomplish the goals of both colleagues’ disciplines while planning instruction. Field texts were collected over two years and consist of stories derived from five recorded conversations, observations, e-mail exchanges, student work samples, teaching materials, PowerPoint slides, and reflective notes. Data were analyzed through the three-dimensional space approach. Findings suggest that a) collaborative tensions arise due to “grammar of schooling,” including the structure and the culture of teaching the subject matters in middle and high schools; b) cross-disciplinary collaboration serves as a space for teacher learning; and c) despite their intentions and willingness, the two teachers tend to implement a hybrid of disciplinary literacy practices coupled with their old notion of literacy when collaborating.