Overt Link Research Articles

Null subject acquisition in L2 Chinese speakers: a case study on English L1 speakers

AbstractThis article investigates the acquisition of null subjects (henceforth NSs) in (radical pro-drop) Chinese by learners whose native language is (non-pro-drop) English – henceforth ELs – working within the ‘topic chain’ information-structural approach. Our main goal is to verify whether a learner’s proficiency level can have an impact on the interpretation and acceptability of embedded NSs when more than one head is proposed for the relevant topic chain in different structural contexts (i.e., complements of bridge and factive verbs). The results of a pilot experimental test suggest that the requirement for a minimal overt link (MOLC) in the relevant chain plays an important role for ELs with a lower proficiency level. Conversely, MOLC restrictions do not affect ELs with a higher proficiency. Furthermore, the results show that ELs can correctly distinguish between complements of bridge and factive verbs already at an HSK 3 level. As for interpretation, results suggest that contextual information cannot supersede structural constraints for ELs. However, since a clash with contextual information seems to not affect acceptability for ELs, contrary to Chinese Native Speakers, we propose that even HSK 5 students have not fully acquired the competence for managing NSs in a radical language such as Chinese.

Translation as inclusion?

Abstract International NGOs (INGOs) are important agents in delivering the UN’s sustainable development agenda, but their linguistic practices have received little attention in the field of language policy and planning. This article aims to add new insights to the field by exploring the link between INGOs’ organisational value of inclusiveness and their institutional approaches to translation. It does so through a case study of Oxfam GB’s and Tearfund’s translation policy documents. The analysis reveals that the policy documents focus on written translation into a handful of lingua francas. In other words, they largely overlook the need for interpreting and translation from and into local languages. In addition, the policy documents do not make any overt links between principles of (linguistic) inclusiveness and the need for translation. The article summarises the advantages and drawbacks of creating a translation policy, and provides guidance on linking translation policy more overtly to values of inclusiveness.

Discovery of a possible Well-being Turning Point within energy footprint accounts which may support the degrowth theory

The former consensus on a link between energy consumption and improved well-being of a country has been scrutinized by scholars for decades and is, succinctly, for the time being a contested thesis. Until the 1970s the relation of energy to well-being was defined as linearly proportional, and in a later period still as an increasing logarithmic function. Recent empirical research falsified the assumption of an overt link between well-being and increased energy consumption in countries with high per-capita energy usage.Going forward, our research shows for the first time a possible proof for a negative correlation between energy consumption and well-being after a Well-being Turning Point (WTP). We used a world data set, not limited to high-income countries but including 176 nations with available data sets. Our findings could support both the logarithmic growth of well-being together with energy, as well as the contradicting saturation theses supporting degrowth, and thus opens the discussion in all directions. In this paper Energy Footprint data within Eora database and Global Multi Regional Input Output methodology have been calculated, which includes also the energy embodied in imported/exported products and services (also known as consumption-based energy accounts). The use of footprint accounts has been demonstrated in our previous research to be necessary when analysing global energy consumption trends; as it records the energy consumption reality better than the usually used Total Primary Energy Supply which is provided by the International Energy Agency. In this paper, we provide in a novel way, some statistical support for an Energy WTP, i.e. a high-energy threshold after which a further consumption increase results in a reduced Human Development Index. We tested our results for possible biases (e.g. excluding outlier countries and including a factor for considering the weight of high population countries) and concluded that a WTP is one possible interpretation of the data. Thus, we would like to open a discussion about how energy consumption could end up having a negative effect on well-being, considering its indirect impacts in citizens of a country.

The Interpretation of Null Subjects in a Radical Pro-drop Language: Topic Chains and Discourse-semantic Requirements in Chinese

Abstract Based on original data collected through an online experiment, evidence is provided in this paper that the interpretation of null subjects in a radical pro-drop language like Chinese relies on the topic criterion proposed for consistent and partial pro-drop languages (Frascarelli 2007 and Frascarelli 2018), thereby supporting the theory that the null subject parameter implies an information-structural strategy for interpretation. Nevertheless, radical Chinese shows specificities that must be integrated in this theory for a comprehensive account. In particular, even though silent topic can start chains (consistent with the topic criterion), data show a significant preference for overt and local topics as antecedents. This locality requirement thus integrates phonological visibility in a general syntactic condition (minimal overt link condition), proposing an interesting parallel with the properties shown by partial pro-drop languages (Frascarelli and Jimenez-Fernandez in press). The present investigation also contributes to outline the structural differences existing between adverbial clauses in Chinese, supporting a distinction between central and peripheral adverbial clauses (Haegeman 2012). Specifically, while temporal and conditional clauses show the properties of nonrestrictive relative clauses, this is not the case for concessive clauses, which merged as subordinate clauses in either the C-domain or the high split-TP area. Differences between temporal and conditional clauses are attributed to the presence of an overt operator in the latter, and the pre-matrix position of adverbial clauses is explained in the light of their discourse role as frame-setters (Krifka 2007).

Topic chains and the interpretation of null subjects. The acquisition of discourse-related strategies in Italian children

AbstractBased on the theory proposed in Frascarelli (2007), according to which the interpretation of null subjects depends on an Agree relation betweenproand a specific type of Topic (i.e. the A-Topic, cf. Frascarelli & Hinterhölzl 2007), the first objective of this paper is to evaluate this theory from an acquisitional perspective on children from 3 to 9 years old. Furthermore, since the A-Topic is argued to be systematically associated to specific discourse, prosodic and syntactic properties, a second objective of this paper is to check whether the relevant acquisition correlates with information-structural and interface-related competences. Based on an original experiment designed to examine Topic chains in children’s narrative, evidence is provided that this productive ability is not fully acquired at the age of 9 and that its progress proceeds in three steps, involving different levels of grammar. Specifically, in a first phase children tend to assume their personal experience and discourse intentions as familiar to their interlocutors. Hence, they start their narration linking null subjects to silent A-Topics, without overt links for their interpretation (‘Emperor Strategy’). Then, at the age of 6 the creation of Topic chains seems to be part of children’s competence at a discourse-syntactic level and overt copies are progressively produced in the chains. Nevertheless, since children still assume their ‘hero’ to be a familiar entity, G[iven]-Topics are frequently realised as first link for null subjects. Finally, at around 7–7.11 the adult-like association between discourse-syntactic and prosodic properties is attested.

All is not Vanity: William James versus Ernest Renan

Na obra de James, há uma reação explícita contra a falsidade e a vaidade como o tom moral dominante. O modo como James julga Renan em particular, e o espírito latino em geral, está relacionado a uma identificação inicial com o espírito germânico através de um contexto protestante. Dentro dessa estrutura, nós veremos que por meio da figura de Carlyle, James opõe-se à moral objetiva da obra para com a sensibilidade gnóstica interior de Renan. Visto que há uma conexão óbvia entre Carlyle e o Calvinismo, o componente da ética protestante na proposta de James torna-se manifesta. Consequentemente, o propósito deste artigo é mostrar que o humor extenuante, como uma característica de coragem e virilidade, possui um tom protestante.

Future Sounds: The Temporality of Noise by Stephen Kennedy

Reviewed by: Future Sounds: The Temporality of Noise by Stephen Kennedy Peter Krapp (bio) Future Sounds: The Temporality of Noise. By Stephen Kennedy. London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2018. Pp. 176. Hardback £79.92. According to its introduction, Kennedy's volume sets out to speculate about an "atemporal realm" collapsing critical distance, which is expected to produce the "ability to reliably predict what is yet to come." What would be the academic value of such trendspotting or futurism if it came at the price of oblivion or ignorance about what preceded it? Who decides (and how) whether such predictions are reliable if there is no critical distance or precedent in this atemporal realm? In a few pages, we encounter Foucault and Lefebvre, Attali and Whitehead, plus glancing references to Shaviro, Nancy, Virilio, Fukuyama, Thrift, Harman, Heidegger, Derrida, and a loop via Bergson and Bachelard back to Attali. Yet with the exception of Attali, none of the works invoked address sound or music or noise, and there is no acknowledgement of the fact that many of the names dropped are incompatible. This is noise of a different sort: the dissonance of suppressed, unexplored disagreements between systems of thought, intoning radically different political, aesthetic, conceptual, and methodical positions. It might have interested the intended readers of this volume in a Sound Studies series to consider these thinkers' sense of the acoustic register, but that kind of mapping of the theoretical terrain never happens here. In addition, the book takes a rather long time, considering its titular promise of sounds and noise, to come around to discussing anything sonic or noisy. After Rihanna is mentioned twice in the introduction (albeit misspelled), the reader needs to cross a desert of fifty-odd pages of grinding and drifting theory sands to come across the next reference to music or sound (p. 53). Instead, we get to contend with Adorno—but not the Adorno who thought and argued about music (not to mention wrote and played music): instead, we get a cardboard Adorno propped up as a foil to Quine, Wittgenstein, Deleuze, and Sellars. But how do their philosophical works illuminate future sounds? Never mind: on to quotations from Delanda, Kroker, and Merleau-Ponty. Did they engage with the core concerns of [End Page 926] sound studies, or with "future sounds"? We may never know if we rely on Kennedy, because the next chapter, in its entirety, instead offers an annotated reading of Attali. It is odd to see Attali merit an entire chapter here, since in Sound Studies his work on noise had been discredited ever since Douglas Kahn mocked Attali as a Luddite who made the phonograph the wicked steam engine of the undesirable epoch of repetition, banishing it from the desirable epoch of composition. Finally, on page 96 (out of a slim 153) we get to sounds after 1977—from Sex Pistols to Patti Smith, from Ornette Coleman to Iggy Pop, and from Krautrock to Donna Summer. Yet when Kennedy mentions these acts, there is no framework for listening to them or contextualizing their performances in a way that somehow arises from the preceding 100 pages. Instead, we get tidbits about Cabaret Voltaire or Human League. The result of all the supposedly groundbreaking theoretical musings is that when it comes to understanding something about Sonic Youth, New Order, Throbbing Gristle, or Einstürzende Neubauten, they all seem to be the same to Kennedy. The four chapters here do not have much of an overt link to one another; there is no conceptual, let alone historical exploration of what noise is, or what noise means, in certain contexts, and what those contexts are or mean to the valorization of noise. Kennedy offers nothing on aesthetic or technical distinctions between signal and noise (as introduced into sonic discourse by the information theory of John Pierce and others), no media history of recording or amplification, no account of the role of filtering versus the creative recuperation of unpredictable, or unwanted, or unscripted sonic events. There is also no reference to the fluctuating appeals to futurity, futurism, or any movement in music or sound art, etc., that foregrounds what Kennedy's book title held out as a...

Sumoylation and phosphorylation: hidden and overt links.

Post-translational modifications are essential mediators between stimuli from development or the environment and adaptive transcriptional patterns. Recent data allow a first glimpse at how two modifications, phosphorylation and sumoylation, act interdependently to modulate stress responses. In particular, many components of the SUMO conjugation system are phosphoproteins, and some regulators and enzymes of protein phosphorylation can be sumoylated. Equally important, however, a number of proteins can be subject to both modifications. These substrates also have the capacity to connect stimuli transmitted via sumoylation with those transmitted via phosphorylation. As a prime example, we review data suggesting that nitrate reductase is a hub that integrates cues from these two modifications. Powerful proteomics approaches allowed the identification of additional common substrates, paving the way for studies to understand, on a broader basis, the cross-talk of phosphorylation with sumoylation and how it contributes to plant growth.

Co-Creating Neighbourhoods for Health: An Inverted Socio-Ecological Approach

The Active Neighbourhoods Canada (ANC) project employs a participatory urban planning process to aid communities in articulating local strengths, weaknesses and future desires for streets and public spaces. Each project results in a community-driven plan for increasing active transportation and community vibrancy by intervening in the public realm. Funded by the Public Health Agency of Canada’s Innovation Strategy, ANC recognizes the unequal distribution of both power and public realm investment between communities with high or medium incomes, compared to those experiencing poverty and a higher burden of chronic illness. ANC provides a framework for supporting low-income communities by partnering with local organizations and developing resident engagement methods to assess qualitatively how people experience their community and quantitatively how they travel. Throughout, emphasis is placed on providing opportunities for engaged residents to develop their understanding of public participation, active transportation and urban planning and empower them as local advocates through engaged project governance. Much attention has been brought to the issue of implementing public health interventions that successfully engage different levels of the socio-ecological model to facilitate healthy behaviour; particularly the neglected and complex higher levels of this nested hierarchy (the institutional, community and policy/environment levels). Through our three-phased participatory process, ANC intervenes at the individual and interpersonal levels by empowering local residents and engaging marginalized voices to build a consolidated report on local knowledge, community assets, issue areas and future goals; at the community level by supporting a collaborative inter-sector project governance structure that links diverse organizations and people; and finally at the policy or environmental level through professional engagement with municipal staff in planning, engineering and local city councilors to implement elements of community-driven neighbourhood plans. A highlight of the ANC process is how this multi-pronged intervention attends to the interaction that exists between levels of this model. Specifically how our process builds momentum at lower levels of the hierarchy to create capacity in intervening at the more distal levels of local environments and policy. This presentation will link practice with theory by describing our process and outcomes in varied municipal contexts while making overt links to the theoretical knowledge base of an inverted social ecological model. Through these links we will provide real world examples of the role community action research can play when negotiating the challenging goal of attending to individual/interpersonal, community, environment and policy impacts within a single public health intervention to increase active transportation.

�Visionaries � psychiatric wards are full of them�: Religious terms in management literature

Contemporary management literature often makes use of strong religious vocabulary. This article will provide a critical analysis of this practice. It especially analyses the usage of three religious terms in management circles: �vision� � a term omnipresent in leadership literature, �metanoic organisations� � a notion found in books about change management, and �evangelists� � a job title mentioned in job advertisements by companies such as Apple and Microsoft. This phenomenon goes hand in hand with the megatrend �workplace spirituality�, which started in the 1990s. In addition, it can be observed that religious vocabulary has found its way into ordinary current management literature, even if this literature does not show any overt link to spirituality. The article lists some negative side effects of this use, such as confusion of terms, manipulation of people and inappropriate pathos.Intradisciplinary and/or interdisciplinary implications: It is important for both Theology and Management Theory to be critical of the use of religious terms in non-religious contexts.

Diaries by Eva Hesse

Reviewed by: Diaries by Eva Hesse Charles Reeve (bio) Eva Hesse. Diaries. Edited by Barry Rosen with assistance from Tamara Bloomberg, Yale UP in association with Hauser & Wirth, 2016, 904 pp. ISBN 978-0300185508, $25.95. When a brain tumor ended her life in 1970, the artist Eva Hesse was just thirty-four years old. But, as this book's promotional materials state, Hesse was (and remains) one of the greatest American artists of the 1960s, on par with the other artists these diaries name as part of her social and professional circle, including Dan Graham, Sol Lewitt, Mel Bochner, and Robert Smithson (who also died young, in a plane crash). This contrast between her life's fleetingness and her reputation's durability mirrors the disparity between her art's ephemerality and this book's sturdiness. Works like her well-known Hang Up (1966)—a wall piece comprising steel tube, cord, cloth, and wood that pokes fun at the solipsism of many 1960s paintings—seem ready to fall apart. Yet this compendium of Hesse's complete dairies, with its squat format and thick spine, looks solid as a brick—an impression highlighted by its cover's sandpapery feel and dark rust color. [End Page 512] But does the book's painstaking editing by Barry Rosen (her estate's artistic advisor) and attractive production enrich our understanding of Hesse's life, work, or epoch? This query is especially pointed given that Yale University Press already, in 2007, published a facsimile edition of her date books from 1964 and 1965 and that throughout this volume's 900 pages, Hesse says little about her art, concentrating instead on her illnesses, her experiences with psychotherapy, and, most prominently, her stormy marriage to sculptor Tom Doyle. Are we better off for having this material? Do we profit from reading Hesse's innermost thoughts, insecurities, and anxieties? Arguing for the prosecution, we might say that we don't. For instance, her repeated references to Doyle's mistress as "0" (that is, zero) only diminish Hesse—as in, while recounting a dream from July 1966: "T + 0 are still together, plan to marry" (648). Similarly, is anything advanced by knowing that, having lost her mother to divorce and then suicide while a young girl, Hesse is hit hard when her father dies in August 1966, essentially orphaning her at thirty years old (697)? And even such discussions of her art as do appear here are intermittent and perfunctory: lists of materials, possible titles of works, brief comments about sales or upcoming shows. But that's it. To be fair, we do see her gradual transition from painter to sculptor—though we learn nothing about the shift's motivations. Rather, we see this change at one remove, as her occasional notes about her artistic practice morph from comments on painting. For example, on October 28, 1964, Hesse states, "I will paint against every rule I or others have invisible [sic] placed" (285).1 Later, in fall 1966, she writes a note about sculpture: "*New piece / black / 4 x 4 board / holes / rubber hose papier mâché" (715). The reasons for exchanging two dimensions for three remain obscure, and one might wonder if whatever we're left with just encourages what art historian T. J. Clark calls "idiot X-equals-Y biography" in the opening pages of Picasso and Truth (4). Perhaps it does, which prompts a further question: shouldn't some archival material stay in the archives (in this instance, at Oberlin College)? Again, perhaps. But poring through materials with no overt link to Hesse's art may yet have value. The defense may not have a slam-dunk case, but that doesn't mean it has no case at all. For instance, insight into her frustration and pain around the situation with Doyle might well matter. Despite the picture we have of the 1960s as a time when struggles for gender equality, including sexual experience, gathered steam, the truth is different. Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique, articulating the vexation and unhappiness that many women felt as housewives, was only published in 1963. William H. Masters and Virginia E. Johnson's Human Sexual Response didn't appear...

An investigation of response competition in retrieval-induced forgetting

AbstractIt has been demonstrated that retrieval practice on a subset of studied items can cause forgetting of different related studied items. This retrieval-induced forgetting (the RIF effect) has been demonstrated in a variety of recall studies and has been attributed to an inhibitory mechanism activated during retrieval practice by competition for a shared retrieval cue. The current study generalizes the RIF effect to recognition memory and investigates this competition assumption. Experiment 1 demonstrated an effect of RIF effect in item recognition with incidental encoding of category-exemplar association during the study phase. Experiment 2 demonstrated evidence of RIF with use of an independent retrieval cue during retrieval practice. Results from this study indicate that response competition may occur outside of the retrieval-practice phase, or may not be limited to situations where there is an overt link to a shared category cue.

JEWISH-CONSPIRACY THEORIES IN SOUTHEAST ASIA

This article examines how seriously we should take Indonesian (and Malaysian) anti-Jewish rhetoric as a ‘safe’ surrogate for racial hostility towards Chinese, who occupy many of the same middleman and financial roles that made Jews a target in Europe. By tracking the analogies between Southeast Asian Chinese and European Jews, it becomes clear that this was an exclusively European racial conceit from the 17th to the 19th century. Southeast Asian demonisations of Jews in the 20th century are late and derivative first from Europe, then from other parts of the Muslim world. Since the 1980s there has been a wave of conspiracy theories about Jewish world domination on the part of Islamists in Malaysia and Indonesia. Overall, however, the phenomenon is limited to small but vociferous groups, who only occasionally make the overt link between Jews and Chinese. The evidence I could gather is somewhat less alarming than I had feared.

Language Acquisition Theory and AAC Intervention

Abstract This article presents a reflection on the relationship between language acquisition theories and augmentative and alternative (AAC) intervention, particularly related to grammar. Aspects of the language-learning situation for children needing AAC and of production of language using an AAC system that may pose challenges for acquisition of grammar are discussed. The implications for AAC intervention that can be drawn from several language acquisition theories are explored. It is suggested that establishing clearer or more overt links between theories and intervention is important in order to make underlying assumptions more explicit and to be aware of the theoretical underpinnings of AAC intervention.

Why link personal research and teaching?

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to highlight issues concerning the linking of research to teaching.Design/methodology/approachThe paper engages with two assumptions which appear to be taken for granted: there should be an overt and strong link between one's own research and one's teaching; and one's active involvement in the research process should, at the very least, underpin, the quality of one's teaching, and at best, improve it.FindingsThere is a link between research and teaching (though the strength of the link is problematic). The link is not only a matter of intellectual or disciplinary import, but is complicated by political and vested interests. The two extremes of research and teaching can be bridged by scholarship or learning, or both together. It is unnecessary and counter‐productive to demand of academics that they should be simultaneously good researchers and good teachers, although this requirement is unlikely to be realised in practice. There is no obligation whatever for academics to overtly link their own personal research to their teaching in order to be considered good teachers.Originality/valueThe paper queries both these assumptions which appear to be influencing how policy concerning research and teaching is dealt with in higher education institutions, and investigates the implications of feeling obliged to teach students using personal research.

OCCULT LINKING IN ENGLISH

The paper explores the possibility that English syntax includes a particular sort of non-overt (occult) element, corresponding to the overt links that have been identified as very general elements in the languages of the world, serving the function of connecting elements to the head of the phrase in which they appear. Evidence is presented that occult links are ubiquitous, occurring in all the major phrase types of English, including at least NP, VP, AP, AdvP, PP, and QP, and exerting a strong influence on the form of these phrases. The effects consist of constraints on the types of phrases that can appear in pre-head positions, the frequent need for certain components of pre-head phrases to be extraposed, and the impossibility of extracting items from pre-head positions. These phenomena can be explained if one hypothesizes occult links in the types of positions in which overt links occur, with properties that overt links are known to have.

‘From badness to sickness’:1 the role of ethnopsychology in shaping ethnic hierarchies in Israel

This article explores the role of the psychological sciences in depoliticising processes of ethnic demarcation and marginalisation within the Jewish population in Israel. It shows how the psychological sciences have provided the scientific foundation by which cultural domination and subordination have been essentialised. The study traces the ways in which ethnopsychological discourse has changed its contours over time. Early ethnopsychological discourse provided an overt link between the ‘cultural backwardness’ and ‘psychological impairment’ of the Mizrahi Jew. In light of broad social and political transformations, in the more recent model the overt ethnic signifier was silenced, and the Mizrahi ‘impaired mind’ appeared to be detached from its ethnic roots while being attributed to the same ethnic population. Both ethnopsychological forms have focused on the individual's ‘special needs’ and ‘inherent psychological impairment’, obscuring the role of social and political forces in shaping social gaps in Israeli society and reinforcing the hegemonic discourse of nurture. The latter has provided a negative mirror image of the modern Ashkenazi secular Israeli Jew following Western cultural models of self‐control as the universal index of health and progress. This study is based on both primary and secondary sources as well as on my in situ observations.