This chapter brings to light how urban planning serves the interests of the most powerful groups in society. Urban planning seems to be a major concern of local and national governments also for ideological reasons. The discussion shows how state ideologies influence city plans and how, conversely, cities reflect these ideologies. These ideologies make it clear who is in power. Similarly, political changes are reflected in new urban plans. The case of Indonesian cities illustrates this rhetoric of power. In pre-colonial (...) towns, the rulers formed the symbolic heart of the city. In Dutch colonial towns, planning was based on the segregation of people from different ethnic backgrounds. After independence, ethnic boundaries were blurred, stressing that all people ideally should form one nation. Thus, planning ideals have changed with the emergence of new political leaders, reflecting the political climate of the time. (shrink)

This article employs descriptive and explorative methods concerning father absence and missional parenting. It identifies numerous ramifications caused by father absence and the failing role of men. Father absence has been a serious social issue in South Africa, which has become more tenacious in post-colonial South Africa because of economic reasons, untold fatherhood, refused fatherhood, fatherhood accountability, divorce and dissolution of households. This social issue influenced and affected both family and society dysfunction and created a vicious cycle of poverty in (...) many South African homes. This article aimed to lessen the predicament of fatherlessness by considering the role of missional parenting where the father and mother form a partnership and collaborate for the family’s progress and actualise God’s pre-eminent plan for families in South Africa. The literature review and methodology provided rich insights and considerable knowledge to help support families who do not have a father figure and men in their fatherly role. Missional parenting is gospel-centred and can be a detriment to father absence. Parents follow the example of Jesus Christ as saviour in missional parenting. Contribution: This article employed a descriptive and explorative modus operandi and explored a respective method to effectuate family disharmony in the context of South Africa. It endorses the journal’s focus on church and family in the field of Missiology and Practical Theology. A fatherless South Africa because of the social ill of father absence is a concerning issue. (shrink)

An evolutionary approach to historical linguistics can be enlightening when not only the mechanisms, but also the statistical methods are considered from neighboring disciplines. In this short paper, we apply survival analysis to investigate what factors determine the lifespan of words. Our case study is on post-classical Greek from the 4th century bc to the beginning of the 8th century ad. We find that lower frequency and phonetically longer lexemes suffer earlier deaths. Furthermore, verbs turn out to have higher survival (...) rates than adjectives and nouns. (shrink)

Snake venoms are recognized here as a grossly under‐explored resource in pharmacological prospecting. Discoveries in snake systematics demonstrate that former taxonomic bias in research has led to the neglect of thousands of species of potential medical use. Recent discoveries reveal an unexpectedly vast degree of variation in venom composition among snakes, from different species down to litter mates. The molecular mechanisms underlying this diversity are only beginning to be understood. However, the enormous potential that this resource represents for pharmacological prospecting (...) is clear. New high‐throughput screening systems offer greatly increased speed and efficiency in identifying and extracting therapeutically useful molecules. At the same time a global biodiversity crisis is threatening the very snake populations on which hopes for new venom‐derived medications depend. Biomedical researchers, pharmacologists, clinicians, herpetologists, and conservation biologists must combine their efforts if the full potential of snake venom‐derived medications is to be realized. (shrink)

War is an appalling crisis and destructive force on human dignity and life. War was permitted in biblical times at the hand of God, with disastrous consequences for the nations of the Ancient World. The current war between Ukraine and Russia is fast becoming a global catastrophe, with the threat of World War III looming. Warfare destroys families, and families are vital units God instituted in society. The critical issue addressed in this article is the ruining effects of gender-based violence (...) (GBV) on family life. Therefore, this article responds to GBV as a social ill and destructive form of warfare against women and aims to propose feasible, viable, and practical theological ways to curb this ruinous issue. Gender-based violence, as a form of warfare against women and children, is one of the most destructive forces regarding family life and the key reason for unstable, disrupted, and fractured families. Because this article is grounded on a practical theological response, its pastoral role is explored. Practical theology builds a theological framework for critical evaluation. It also takes a more direct role on the moral debates of society on issues such as GBV, father absence, and family violence that occurs in Church, family, and society. Contribution: This article employed a descriptive modus operandi on GBV against women and endorses the journal’s focus on family and society who is experiencing a violation of human rights and a life-threatening issue in the field of Practical Theology. (shrink)

Stereotypes of ‘coloured’ men from marginalised communities in the Western Cape, South Africa, portray these men as violent, lazy, alcoholics, domestic and substance abusers and absent in the lives of their children. Although extensive research has been conducted on fathers and fatherhood, there is still a lack of positive constructions and representations of fatherhood. In narrative interviews with 11 fathers who reside in the Cape Flats, faith-based values were understood as possible restorative avenues for fathers. This article explores how faith-based (...) values are used to redefine what it means to be a man and father but also to (re)negotiate their identity, role and responsibility as men and fathers. From a narrative thematic analysis, the findings present alternative narratives on ‘coloured’ masculinity and fatherhood that show ‘coloured’ fathers to be present and active in their children’s lives. Contribution: This article employed a descriptive modus operandi on masculinity and fatherhood. It focuses on (re)shaping fathers in South Africa to impede father absenteeism in families and communities. (shrink)

This article presents findings from an interview study of human rights practitioners who assist relatives of the disappeared from Chechnya with their complaints before the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR). These practitioners work for nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). The study contributes to the scant literature on NGO litigation before the ECtHR and to the social scientific literature on how human rights are actively practiced. It investigates the NGOs’ intermediary position between the ECtHR and the relatives of the disappeared in Chechnya. (...) Consequently, this article asserts that a significant aspect of this position lies in the practitioner’s capacity to mediate between an ambition to externalize local grievances to the ECtHR and the relatives’ hopes that the ECtHR can bring certainty to the uncertain loss of their disappeared relatives. From this position, several dilemmas emerge as to how international legal mechanisms can provide remedies following disappearances. (shrink)

Dutch, like other Germanic languages, disposes of two strategies to express past tense: the strong inflection (e.g., rijden – reed ‘drive – drove’) and the weak inflection (spelen – speelde ‘play – played’). This distinction is for the most part lexically determined in that each verb occurs in one of the two inflections. Diachronically the system is in flux though, with the resilience of some verbs being mainly driven by frequency. Synchronically this might result in variable verbs (e.g., schuilen – (...) schuilde/school ‘hide – hid’ or raden – raadde/ried ‘guess – guessed’). This diachronic (1300–2000) corpus study shows that this variation is not haphazard, but that semantic factors are at play. We see two such effects. First of all, synchronically, the variation is exapted in an iconic manner to express aspect: durative meanings tend to be expressed by longer verb forms and punctual meanings tend to be expressed by shorter verb forms. Secondly, we see that metaphorical meanings come to be associated within obsolescent inflectional forms, as predicted by Kuryłowicz’s “fourth law of analogy”. (shrink)

Games associated with congestion situations à la Rosenthal have pure Nash equilibria. This result implicitly relies on the existence of a potential function. In this paper we provide a characterization of potential games in terms of coordination games and dummy games. Second, we extend Rosenthal's congestion model to an incomplete information setting, and show that the related Bayesian games are potential games and therefore have pure Bayesian equilibria.

Part of the generalizability issues that haunt controlled lab experiment designs in psychology, and more particularly in psycholinguistics, can be alleviated by adopting corpus linguistic methods. These work with natural data. This advantage comes at a cost: in corpus studies, lexemes and language users can show different kinds of skew. We discuss a number of solutions to bolster the control.

Construction grammar organizes its basic elements of description, its constructions, into networks that range from concrete, lexically-filled constructions to fully schematic ones, with several levels of partially schematic constructions in between. However, only few corpus studies with a constructionist background take this multi-level nature fully into account. In this paper, we argue that understanding language variation can be advanced considerably by systematically formulating and testing hypotheses at various levels in the constructional network. To illustrate the approach, we present a corpus (...) study of the Dutch naar-alternation. It is found that this alternation primarily functions at an intermediate level in the constructional network. (shrink)

On the basis of synchronic English language material, Bolinger (Degree Words, Mouton, 1972) has put forward the hypothesis that intensifying meanings or “degree words” often develop from identifying expressions. This paper will empirically test Bolinger's hypothesis by means of in-depth diachronic study of the development of such—one of Bolinger's central examples—and of its Dutch cognate zulk in historical text corpora. To this aim, a detailed cognitive-functional account will first be provided of the (differences between the) identifying and intensifying uses of (...) such and zulk, with attention for diachronic changes affecting the syntax and semantics of these uses, cross-linguistically as well as language-specifically. It will be shown that, as predicted by Bolinger (Degree Words, Mouton, 1972), the proportion of identifying uses decreases over time in favor of the intensifying uses both in English and Dutch. The comparison between such and zulk will, however, show that, despite the close relation between these two languages, the development does not run strictly parallel in English and Dutch, thus endorsing a view that language change does not necessarily follow predetermined pathways. We will argue that minute differences in the syntax of such and zulk steer the diachronic course these elements follow. Finally, Bolinger's shift from identification to intensification will be discussed in terms of its relation to existing (inter)subjectification hypotheses. (shrink)

We investigate empirically whether framing in general, and the use of Simplifying Models as a framing tool in particular, has an effect on the way topics are cognitively construed. Existing studies on framing in linguistics have either been theoretical or descriptive. Going beyond such methodologically simple approaches, we use a more rigid test design involving the use of a control group, the construction of test conditions in which different Simplifying Models constitute the major source of variation, the inclusion of independent (...) variables like age and prior knowledge of the subjects, and the use of linear and logistic regression analysis. Our results show that our more rigid methodological approach yields a more reliable image of the effect of Simplifying Models on the way in which people deal with information on a complex topic like sustainable food production. Fleshing out these effects further may in time lead to a better informed construction of communication on complex social topics. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Cognitive Linguistics Jahrgang: 27 Heft: 1 Seiten: 137-145.

Cet essai a été présenté à l’atelier sur La démocratie de l’espace et l’espace de la démocratie, qui a eu lieu à Newcastle, en Angleterre, le 11 janvier 2008. Une version antérieure a été présentée à l’Université de Tokyo le 13 novembre 2007. Il sera publié en néerlandais, traduit par Freek Jansens, sous le titre “het plannen van ruimtes van (on)mogelijkheid” dans une collection éditée par Maarten Hajer et Jantine Grijzen sur les questions de politique contemporaine. Il a été (...) traduit de l’anglais par Martin Blanchard et révisé par Daniel Weinstock. (shrink)