This paper examines early syntactic development from a usage-based perspective, using transcripts of the spontaneous speech of two Englishspeaking children recorded at relatively dense intervals at ages 2;0 and 3;0. We focus primarily on the children’s question constructions, in an effort to determine (i) what kinds of units they initially extract from the input (their size and degree of specificity / abstractness); (ii) what operations they must perform in order to construct novel utterances using these units; and (iii) how the (...) units and the operations change between the ages of two and three. In contrast to nativist theories of language development which suggest that children are working with abstract syntactic categories from an early point in development, we suggest that the data are better accounted for by the proposal that children begin with lexically specific phrases and gradually build up a repertoire of increasingly abstract constructions. (shrink)

Cognitive Linguistics is an approach to language study based on three central premises: that the function of language is to convey meaning, that linguistic description must rely on constructs that are psychologically real, and that grammar emerges from usage. Over the last 40 years, this approach to studying language has made enormous strides in virtually every aspect of linguistic inquiry, achieving major insights as well as bringing about a conceptual unification of the language sciences. However, it has also faced problems, (...) which, I argue, must be addressed if the approach is to continue to flourish. Some of these are shared with generative linguistics, while some are peculiar to the cognitive approach. The former include excessive reliance on introspective evidence; paying only lip service to the Cognitive Commitment; too much focus on hypothesis formulation (and not enough on hypothesis testing); ignoring individual differences; and neglecting the social aspects of language. The latter include assuming that we can deduce mental representations from patterns of use and equating distribution with meaning. I conclude by sketching out how these pitfalls could be avoided. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Cognitive Linguistics Jahrgang: 27 Heft: 4 Seiten: 479-491.

While many linguists view language as either a cognitive or a social phenomenon, it is clearly both: a language can live only in individual minds, but it is learned from examples of utterances produced by speakers engaged in communicative interaction. In other words, language is what (Keller 1994. On language change: The invisible hand in language. London: Taylor & Francis) calls a “phenomenon of the third kind”, emerging from the interaction of a micro-level and a macro-level. Such a dual perspective (...) helps us understand some otherwise puzzling phenomena, including “non-psychological” generalizations, or situations where a pattern which is arguably present in a language is not explicitly represented in most speakers’ minds. This paper discusses two very different examples of such generalizations, genitive marking on masculine nouns in Polish and some restrictions on questions with long-distance dependencies in English. It is argued that such situations are possible because speakers may represent “the same” knowledge at different levels of abstraction: while a few may have extracted an abstract generalization, others approximate their behaviour by relying on memorised exemplars or lexically specific patterns. Thus, a cognitively realistic usage-based construction grammar needs to distinguish between patterns in the usage of a particular speech community (a social phenomenon) and patterns in speakers’ minds (a cognitive phenomenon). (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Cognitive Linguistics Jahrgang: 25 Heft: 4 Seiten: 617-653.

Name der Zeitschrift: Cognitive Linguistics Jahrgang: 27 Heft: 1 Seiten: 1-33.

The present paper examines the relationship between explicit and implicit memory and ultimate attainment in the native language. Two groups of native speakers of English with different levels of academic attainment (i.e., high vs. low) took part in three language tasks which assessed grammar, vocabulary and collocational knowledge, as well as phonological short-term memory (assessed using a forward digit-span task), explicit associative memory (assessed using a paired-associates task) and implicit memory (assessed using a deterministic serial reaction time task). Results revealed (...) strong relationships between phonological short-term memory and explicit associative memory on the one hand and the three language tasks on the other hand, and no relation between linguistic performance and implicit memory. Taken together, these results cast doubts on the common assumption that L1 grammar learning depends almost entirely on implicit memory and align with the claims of usage-based models of language acquisition that grammatical and lexical knowledge depend on the same cognitive mechanisms. (shrink)

This is a study of the relationship between EAS temperament traits, age and gender, and religious fundamentalism in an adult Polish sample. Participants were sampled from among people who tended towards secularisation. A total of 902 participants, including 551 women and 351 men, aged 18 to 58 were studied. Participants were students in a variety of university faculties and adults with higher education representing a variety of professions. They all lived in the Warsaw area. Temperament was assessed with Buss and (...) Plomin’s EAS Temperament Survey. Religious fundamentalism was assessed using Altemeyer and Hunsberger’s Religious Fundamentalism Scale. The level of religious fundamentalism was found to be associated with the temperament traits of sociability and anger. All three variables decrease in intensity with age. Women have higher levels of religious fundamentalism than men. (shrink)

This essay situates Kristeva's theory of semiotics in the context of the controversial debate about the status of the maternal body in her work. I argue that, if we rethink the opposition between the semiotic and the symbolic as the relation between the trace and the sign, it becomes clear that the maternal semiotic is irreducible either to the prelinguistic plenitude or to the alternative symbolic position. The second part of the essay develops the connection between Kristeva's linguistic theory and (...) the alterity of the maternal body, articulated here as the in-fold of the other and the same. (shrink)

'This book makes a significant and needed contribution to post-structural philosophy and literary theory.

Experimental emotion inductions provide the strongest causal evidence of the effects of emotions on psychological and physiological outcomes. In the present qualitative review, we evaluated five common experimental emotion induction techniques: visual stimuli, music, autobiographical recall, situational procedures, and imagery. For each technique, we discuss the extent to which they induce six basic emotions: anger, disgust, surprise, happiness, fear, and sadness. For each emotion, we discuss the relative influences of the induction methods on subjective emotional experience and physiological responses. Based (...) on the literature reviewed, we make emotion-specific recommendations for induction methods to use in experiments. (shrink)

Antoni Kępiński, one of the most famous Polish psychiatrists, points to man as an ethical being. The philosopher is aware that particular moral norms have their different origins. According to his concept, their primary source is natural law. From it stem basic human decisions. In addition to this most important source, Kępiński also lists other sources that may also have an impact on human decisions. As one of the few professors, he points to genetic predispositions as one of the possible (...) sources of human morality. Social influences are also important to him. (shrink)

What kind of challenge does sexual and racial difference pose for postmodern ethics? What is the relation between ethical obligation and feminist interpretations of embodiment, passion, and eros? How can we negotiate between ethical responsibility for the Other and democratic struggles against domination, injustice, and equality, on the one hand, and internal conflicts within the subject, on the other? We cannot address such questions, Ziarek argues, without putting into dialogue discourses that have hitherto been segregated: postmodern ethics, feminism, race theory, (...) and the idea of radical democracy. Addressing a constellation of diverse thinkers - including Emmanuel Levinas, Patricia Williams, Jean-François Lyotard, Michel Foucault, Frantz Fanon, Julia Kristeva, and Luce Irigaray - the author proposes a new conception of ethics, an ethics of dissensus that rethinks the relation between freedom and obligation in a double context of embodiment and antagonism. (shrink)

Ewa Ziarek fully articulates a feminist aesthetics, focusing on the struggle for freedom in women's literary and political modernism and the devastating impact of racist violence and sexism. She examines the contradiction between women's transformative literary and political practices and the oppressive realities of racist violence and sexism, and she situates these tensions within the entrenched opposition between revolt and melancholia in studies of modernity and within the friction between material injuries and experimental aesthetic forms. Ziarek's political and aesthetic investigations (...) concern the exclusion and destruction of women in politics and literary production and the transformation of this oppression into the inaugural possibilities of writing and action. Her study is one of the first to combine an in-depth engagement with philosophical aesthetics, especially the work of Theodor W. Adorno, with women's literary modernism, particularly the writing of Virginia Woolf and Nella Larsen, along with feminist theories on the politics of race and gender. By bringing seemingly apolitical, gender-neutral debates about modernism's experimental forms together with an analysis of violence and destroyed materialities, Ziarek challenges both the anti-aesthetic subordination of modern literature to its political uses and the appreciation of art's emancipatory potential at the expense of feminist and anti-racist political struggles. (shrink)

How Tocqueville’s ideas can help us build resilient liberal democracies in a divided world How can today’s liberal democracies withstand the illiberal wave sweeping the globe? What can revive our waning faith in constitutional democracy? Tocqueville’s Dilemmas, and Ours argues that Alexis de Tocqueville, one of democracy’s greatest champions and most incisive critics, can guide us forward. Drawing on Tocqueville’s major works and lesser-known policy writings, Ewa Atanassow shines a bright light on the foundations of liberal democracy. She argues that (...) its prospects depend on how we tackle three dilemmas that were as urgent in Tocqueville’s day as they are in ours: how to institutionalize popular sovereignty, how to define nationhood, and how to grasp the possibility and limits of global governance. These are pivotal but often neglected dimensions of Tocqueville’s work, and this fresh look at his writings provides a powerful framework for addressing the tensions between liberalism and democracy in the twenty-first century. Recovering a richer liberalism capable of weathering today’s political storms, Tocqueville’s Dilemmas, and Ours explains how we can reclaim nationalism as a liberal force and reimagine sovereignty in a global age—and do so with one of democracy’s most discerning thinkers as our guide. (shrink)

Tekst podejmuje temat kondycji i tożsamości etyki środowiskowej XXI wieku w oparciu o analizę wybranych narracji występujących w debacie na temat antropocenu. Czy zwrot w stronę antropocenu odmienia nasze dotychczasowe myślenie dotyczące troski o przyrodę? Artykuł pokazuje, że nauka o systemie Ziemi i ograniczeniach planetarnych umożliwia nam identyfikację zupełnie nowych problemów etycznych. Są to m.in. problem nieodwracalnych strat, utraty kontroli i sterowalności a także kluczowa kwestia irracjonalnej krótkowzroczności wpisanej w ludzkie horyzonty moralne. Tekst szuka odpowiedzi na dwa dodatkowe pytania: 1) (...) Czy troska o postprzyrodę okaże się wyłącznie zarządzaniem stratą? 2) Czy etyka postprzyrody jest antropocentryczna? (shrink)

This paper discusses the politics of remembering and the representation of the Holocaust in Polish contemporary art referring to the Lego Concentration Camp by Zbigniew Libera. The paper presents the ways in which Libera’s work challenges the traditional ways of representing the Holocaust and how it engages with issues such as the relation between atrocity and aesthetics. The associations brought to this mode of representation by the notions of game and toys and whether theatricality and play are in dialogue with (...) or violate the historical experience of the Holocaust is also discussed. The paper investigates the specificity of the Polish context in the way the Holocaust is approached and the reactions these artistic attempts raise in the public. Do the unconventional and shocking representations help understand the Holocaust or do they create the opposite effect of misguided and trivialised reading of history? (shrink)

The penetration process of structures traditionally assigned to civil law into administrative law, especially administrative law aiming environmental protection, has been more noticeable through recent years. This process resulted in deepening the absence of a clear separation of private law norms from public law norms. It led to the existence of so-called quasi civil solutions, which can be found for example in the Act on prevention from damages in environment and its repair. Their specificity consists in the fact that they (...) cannot be regarded as civil law structures due to the differences between them and the civil law structures. This legal status sets new challenges for legal theorists as well as practition- ers. They concentrate on interpretation of administrative law provisions which were penetrated by civil law structures, taking into account differences between interpretation of administrative and civil law provisions. We should not reject specific character of the civil law provisions’ interpretation and interpret these provisions only by taking into account specificity of administrative law inter- pretation. Civil law institutions are characterized by a larger field for action, which is left for parties or performers, in comparison to the institutions of ad- ministrative law. This specificity of civil law structures should be considered as its advantage that should not be removed in the activities of public authorities. (shrink)

Graduates of the management major at the University of Pittsburgh at Greensburg find employment in a variety of organizations. As future managers with employees from different professions, students expressed an interest in discussing ethics cases in the operations management class. The semester starts with students familiarizing themselves with various professional and corporate codes of ethics. Throughout the semester a number of short ethics’ cases in operations’ areas such as inventory management, scheduling, facility location, and product design are introduced to illustrate (...) ethical issues that a manager and his/her employees might face. Students prepare individual responses before the in-class discussions. The semester ends with a long group ethics case discussion and formal case presentations. In the end-of-semester survey, students responded very favorably to an ethics component in the operations management class. (shrink)

This article deals with the material presence of the past and the recent call in the human sciences for a " things." This renewed interest in things signals a rejection of constructivism and textualism and the longing for what is "real," where "regaining" the object is conceived as a means for re-establishing contact with reality. In the context of this turn, we might wish to reconsider the status of relics of the past and their function in mediating relations between the (...) organic and the inorganic, between people and things, and among various kinds of things themselves for reconceptualizing the study of the past. I argue that the future will depend on whether and how various scholars interested in the past manage to modify their understanding of the material remnants of the past, that is, things as well as human, animal, and plant remains. In discussing this problem I will refer to Martin Heidegger's distinction between an object and a thing, to Bruno Latour's idea of the agency of things and object-oriented democracy, and to Don Ihde's material hermeneutics. To illustrate my argument I will focus on some examples of the ambivalent status of the disappeared person in Argentina, which resists the oppositional structure of present versus absent. In this context, the disappeared body is a paradigm of the past itself, which is both continuous with the present and discontinuous from it, which simultaneously is and is not. Since there are no adequate terms to analyze the "contradictory" or anomalous status of the present-absent dichotomy, I look for them outside the binary oppositions conventionally used to conceptualize the present-absent relationship in our thinking about the past. for this purpose I employ Algirdas Julien Greimas's semiotic square. (shrink)

The Middle Ages have their great love stories. We owe one of them to Peter I Lusignan, King of Cyprus. Married to Eleanor of Aragon, who bore him a son and a successor, he had a mistress pregnant with his child. The queen decided to eliminate this rival by inducing a premature delivery. The incident was recorded by Leontios Makhairas, a Cypriot chronicler, who described the cruelty of Eleanor and mourned the fate of the baby. But it is not his (...) account which keeps this tragedy alive in Cyprus even today. There is a folk song about beautiful Arodaphnousa, who suffered because of the bad queen. The song is deprived of historical context, but it is a historical source nevertheless. Its remote counterpart is the Catalan story of Eleanor, who was expelled from Cyprus and lived in Aragon for a long time. This story creates an image of a benign, calm lady who was venerated after death by her subjects. The clash between these images makes one think about the black and white PR created in every epoch. But this is not the point of this story. The point is the fate of an innocent child, both the flower and the victim of love. This is a rare motif in medieval literature; children are seldom present on the pages of its manuscripts. The emotion connected with this story deserves the reader’s attention. (shrink)

Qui est étranger pour un Byzantin du XIe siècle? Pour répondre à cette question, Jacek BONAREK (B.) a analysé la chronique de Jean Skylitzes dans le désir de définir ceux qui sont pour le chroniqueur Romaioi, c'est-à-dire «les nôtres» et ceux qu'il considère comme les étrangers, bien que la notion xenos n'apparaisse pas dans le texte. B. fait souvent référence aux divergences sémantiques des mots. Xenos en est l'un des exemples. Ce mot signifie un visiteur, voire un allié, mais aussi (...) un nouveau venu, un mercenaire. Cette différence se réflète dans la typologie de B. qui distingue les étrangers dans les limites de l'Empire et en dehors de celui-ci. Cette problématique est traîtée dans le dernier chapître de l'ouvrage, le plus intéressant, paraît-il (111–171). Avant d'expliquer qui est étranger pour Skylitzes, ce qui est une tâche difficile, il essaie de définir à qui pense le chroniqueur en utilisant le mot «Romaioi» et il le fait dans le troisième chapître de son livre (50–110). (shrink)

Sense of coherence and coping with stress in fathers of children with developmental disabilities** The aim of the study is to analyse the sense of coherence and strategies of coping with stress in fathers of disabled children. The research involved 128 fathers of children with Down syndrome, autism, cerebral palsy and children with normal development. Two questionnaires were used: The Sense of Coherence Questionnaire measuring SOC level and Ways of Coping Questionnaire measuring strategies of coping with stress. The research revealed (...) that there is a relationship between the type of child's developmental disability and SOC in fathers. The fathers with a low level of SOC more frequently used strategies of avoidance while the fathers with a high level of SOC more frequently used confrontation, positive reappraisal and planful problem solving. The results of the research indicate that looking after a disabled child may lower SOC and in turn may cause difficulties in coping with stress. (shrink)

A Byzantinist specializing in the history of the Empire of Trebizond, the author presents four books of different genres written in English and devoted to the medieval state on the south coast of the Black Sea. The most spectacular of them is a novel by Rose Macaulay, Towers of Trebizond. Dąbrowska wonders whether it is adequate to the Trebizondian past or whether it is a projection of the writer. She compares Macaulay’s novel with William Butler Yeats’s poems on Byzantium (...) which excited the imagination of readers but were not meant to draw their attention to the Byzantine past. This is, obviously, the privilege of literature. As a historian, Dąbrowska juxtaposes Macaulay’s narration with the historical novel by Nicolas J. Holmes, the travelogue written by Michael Pereira and the reports of the last British Consul in Trabzon, Vorley Harris. The author of the article draws the reader’s attention to the history of a rather unknown and exotic region. The Empire of Trebizond ceased to exist in 1461, conquered by Mehmed II. At the same time the Sultan’s army attacked Wallachia and got a bitter lesson from its ruler Vlad Dracula. But this Romanian hero is remembered not because of his prowess on the battlefield but due to his cruelty which dominated literary fiction and separated historical facts from narrative reality. The contemporary reader is impressed by the image of a dreadful vampire, Dracula. The same goes for Byzantium perceived through the magic stanzas by Yeats, who never visited Istanbul. Rose Macaulay went to Trabzon but her vision of Trebizond is very close to Yeats’s images of Byzantium. In her story imagination is stronger than historical reality and it is imagination that seduces the reader. (shrink)