The contributions in this grammar-theoretical volume examine current developmental trends in German under the aspect of changing coding techniques. These tendencies include morpho-syntactical changes in the realization of aspect, tense and mode as well as tendencies to omit the article and the processes resulting from this and also purely syntactic changes like the distance position of pronominal adverbs.

In Cold War Freud Dagmar Herzog uncovers the astonishing array of concepts of human selfhood which circulated across the globe in the aftermath of World War II. Against the backdrop of Nazism and the Holocaust, the sexual revolution, feminism, gay rights, and anticolonial and antiwar activism, she charts the heated battles which raged over Freud's legacy. From the postwar US to Europe and Latin America, she reveals how competing theories of desire, anxiety, aggression, guilt, trauma and pleasure emerged and (...) were then transformed to serve both conservative and subversive ends in a fundamental rethinking of the very nature of the human self and its motivations. Her findings shed new light on psychoanalysis' enduring contribution to the enigma of the relationship between nature and culture, and the ways in which social contexts enter into and shape the innermost recesses of individual psyches. (shrink)

Rüdiger Bittner argues that the aim of thinking about what to do, of practical reason, is to find, not what we ought to do, but what it is good to do under the circumstances. Neither under prudence nor under morality are there things we ought to do. There is no warrant for the idea of our being required, by natural law or by our rationality, to do either what helps us attain our ends or what is right for moral (...) reasons. While common moral understanding is committed to there being things we ought to do and to our being guilty and deserving blame if we fail to do them, we can lay aside these notions without loss, indeed with benefit. The volume also explains what it is for something to be good to do under the circumstances and argues for understanding practical reason in these terms. What is good to do we find by experience: what we go through teaches us what helps and what hinders, and helps us figure out what is prudentially useful and what is morally right to do-although ultimately this difference itself gives way, and morality turns out to be a part of prudence. (shrink)

While the effects of pattern learning on language processing are well known, the way in which pattern learning shapes exploratory behavior has long gone unnoticed. We report on the way in which individual differences in statistical pattern learning affect performance in the domain of language along multiple dimensions. Analyzing data from healthy monolingual adults' performance on a serial reaction time task and a self‐paced reading task, we show how individual differences in statistical pattern learning are reflected in readers' knowledge of (...) linguistic co‐occurrence patterns and in their exploration and exploitation of content‐specific and task‐general information. First, we investigated the extent to which an individual's pattern learning correlates with his or her sensitivity to systematic morphological and syntactic co‐occurrences, as evidenced while reading authentic sentences. We found that the stream of morphological and syntactic information has a more pronounced effect on the reading speed of, as we will label them, content‐sensitive learners in that the more probable the co‐occurrence pattern, the faster their reading of that pattern will be. Next, we investigated how differences in pattern learning are reflected in the ways in which individuals approach the reading task itself and adapt to it. Casting this relation in terms of exploration/exploitation strategies, known from Reinforcement Learning, we conclude that content‐sensitive learners are also more likely to initially probe (explore) a wider range of directly relevant patterns, which they can later use (exploit) to optimize their reading performance further. By affecting exploratory behavior, pattern learning influences the information that is gathered and becomes available for exploitation, thereby increasing the effect pattern learning has on language cognition. (shrink)

This paper provides an axiomatic formalization of a theory of foundational relations between three categories of entities: individuals, universals, and collections. We deal with a variety of relations between entities in these categories, including the is-a relation among universals and the part-of relation among individuals as well as cross-category relations such as instance-of, member-of, and partition-of. We show that an adequate understanding of the formal properties of such relations – in particular their behavior with respect to time – is critical (...) for formal ontology. We provide examples to support this thesis from the domain of biomedicine. (shrink)

The development of explicit theories of dynamic context change has led to a fundamentally new perspective on the interpretation of discourse. In this paper I show that this development also opens up the possibility of approaching subclausal composition along similar lines. More specifically, I argue that a dynamic theory where type-driven rules apply directly to overt surface structures and fill in missing information by building anaphoric bridges is more faithful to natural language semantics than the classical Montagovian approach.

In a clinic-wide approach to establish liberal policies, a closed psychiatric ward was planned to be opened. The leaders of the multi-professional team of this ward requested continuous ethics support during the first few months after the transition from their previously closed ward into an open one. During the process of accompanying the team through this ethically sensitive period of institutional change, several variations of ethics consultation were developed: the ‘context-adjusted’ clinical ethics support. Some ethics consultations focused on a retrospective (...) evaluation of a patient case, in other ethics consultations consolidation of a previous case discussion was worked out, and/or reflections on fundamental ethical issues were included. Based on our experiences and the feedback of the team, we consider this context-adjusted clinical ethics support as feasible and effective. (shrink)

A number of studies report that frequency is a poor predictor of acceptability, in particular at the lower end of the frequency spectrum. Because acceptability judgments provide a substantial part of the empirical foundation of dominant linguistic traditions, understanding how acceptability relates to frequency, one of the most robust predictors of human performance, is crucial. The relation between low frequency and acceptability is investigated using corpus- and behavioral data on the distribution of infinitival and finite that-complements in Polish. Polish verbs (...) exhibit substantial subordination variation and for the majority of verbs taking an infinitival complement, the that-complement occurs with low frequency. These low-frequency that-clauses, in turn, exhibit large differences in how acceptable they are to native speakers. It is argued that acceptability judgments are based on configurations of internally structured exemplars, the acceptability of which cannot reliably be assessed until sufficient evidence about the core component has accumulated. (shrink)

A number of studies report that frequency is a poor predictor of acceptability, in particular at the lower end of the frequency spectrum. Because acceptability judgments provide a substantial part of the empirical foundation of dominant linguistic traditions, understanding how acceptability relates to frequency, one of the most robust predictors of human performance, is crucial. The relation between low frequency and acceptability is investigated using corpus‐ and behavioral data on the distribution of infinitival and finite that‐complements in Polish. Polish verbs (...) exhibit substantial subordination variation and for the majority of verbs taking an infinitival complement, the that‐complement occurs with low frequency (<0.66 ipm). These low‐frequency that‐clauses, in turn, exhibit large differences in how acceptable they are to native speakers. It is argued that acceptability judgments are based on configurations of internally structured exemplars, the acceptability of which cannot reliably be assessed until sufficient evidence about the core component has accumulated. (shrink)

In this paper we propose a formal theory of partitions (ways of dividing up or sorting or mapping reality) and we show how the theory can be applied in the geospatial domain. We characterize partitions at two levels: as systems of cells (theory A), and in terms of their projective relation to reality (theory B). We lay down conditions of well-formedness for partitions and we define what it means for partitions to project truly onto reality. We continue by classifying well-formed (...) partitions along three axes: (a) degree of correspondence between partition cells and objects in reality; (b) degree to which a partition represents the mereological structure of the domain it is projected onto; and (c) degree of completeness and exhaustiveness with which a partition represents reality. This classification is used to characterize three types of partitions that play an important role in spatial information science: cadastral partitions, categorical coverages, and the partitions involved in folk categorizations of the geospatial domain. (shrink)

Modern science provides the philosophy of religion with new perspectives and bodies of evidence for researching religion. Anthropology, for example, is helpful when we consider the relation of language and religion, and recent research in the philosophy of religion has been occupied with problems created by the distinctively religious uses of language. Language and action based on the assumptions of Western culture could, however, be obstacles to grasping the essence of the faith in other contexts. I argue that methodological pluralism (...) should be employed by philosophers, theologians, and writers, because human and religious experience is irremediably pluralistic. (shrink)

We provide a short review on the recent and near-future developments of computational processing of emotion in the voice, highlighting self-learning of representations moving continuously away from traditional expert-crafted or brute-forced feature representations to end-to-end learning, a movement towards the coupling of analysis and synthesis of emotional voices to foster better mutual understanding, weakly supervised learning at a large scale, transfer learning from related domains such as speech recognition or cross-modal transfer learning, and reinforced learning through interactive applications at a (...) large scale. For each of these trends, we shortly explain their implications and potential use such as for interpretation in psychological studies and usage in digital health and digital psychology applications. We also discuss further potential development. (shrink)

Článek ukazuje pohled na utváření novověké koncepce pokroku v dílech Bernarda Le Boviera de Fontenelle. Idea pokroku byla poprvé přesně zformulována právě ve Fontenellových pracích. Podnětem pro Fontenellovy úvahy byla intelektuální debata querelle des anciens et des modernes. Tato diskuze měla rozhodnout o nadřazenosti novověku nad antikou nebo naopak. Fontenelle se debaty účastnil a závěry, k nimž došel, dovršily jeho teorii pokroku, jíž se věnoval nejen téměř ve všech pracích, ale též ve chvalořečích.

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

We examined how language supports the expression of temporality within sentence boundaries in English, which has a rich inventory of grammatical means to express temporality. Using a computational model that mimics how humans learn from exposure we explored what the use of different tense and aspect combinations reveals about the interaction between our experience of time and the cognitive demands that talking about time puts on the language user. Our model was trained on n-grams extracted from the BNC to select (...) the TA combination that fits the context best. It revealed the existence of two different sub-systems within the set of TA combinations, a “simplex” one that is supported lexically and is easy to learn, and a “complex” one that is supported contextually and is hard to learn. The finding that some TA combinations are essentially lexical in nature necessitates a rethink of tense and aspect as grammatical categories that form the axes of the temporal system. We argue that the system of temporal reference may be more fruitfully thought of as the result of learning a system that is steeped in experience and organised along a number of functional principles. (shrink)

This book offers a critical assessment of Axel Honneth’s complex and growing opus in social and political philosophy. It examines this in the context of the history and future of the Frankfurt School and in its relation to contemporary analytic approaches to social and political philosophy as well as postmodernist critics.

In this article I will show how the goal-directed proof procedure for the propositional fragment of the 'inconsistency-adaptive' logic CLuN(r)from Batens (2005, J. Appl. Logic, 3, 221-250) called pCLuN(r) allows for generating sensible abductive explanations from finite inconsistent theories. Before this is shown, I give a more general account on how goal-directed proof procedures contribute to the study of abduction as backward reasoning. Between these two parts, I describe the goal-directed proof procedure for the propositional fragment of the 'inconsistency-adaptive' logic (...) CLuNr from Batens (2005, J. Appl. Logic, 3, 221-250). (shrink)

Résumé La réception des Lumières en République démocratique allemande (RDA) était particulière. D’une part, la tradition marxiste a découvert la pensée matérialiste dans l’histoire des idées allemande et a reproché à juste titre à la « bourgeoisie idéaliste » de l’avoir marginalisée. D’autre part, l’usage dogmatique de l’ouvrage de Lénine concernant l’épistémologie de Ernst Mach, Matérialisme et empiriocriticisme, empêcha d’apprécier convenablement des penseurs importants comme Jean Le Rond D’Alembert. De plus, la structure répressive de la vie académique en RDA a (...) paralysé la renaissance de la pensée matérialiste. Au lieu de se consacrer aux conditions concrètes de la production du savoir, la pensée matérialiste était entravée par l’obligation de recourir à l’interprétation économique. (shrink)

The volume explores the relationship between well-studied aspects of language (constructional alternations, lexical contrasts and extensions and multi-word expressions) in a variety of languages (Dutch, English, Russian and Spanish) and their representation in cognition as mediated by frequency counts in both text and experiment. The state-of-the-art data collection (ranging from questionnaires to eye-tracking) and analysis (from simple chi-squared to random effects regression) techniques allow to draw theoretical conclusions from (mis)matches between different types of empirical data. The sister volume focuses on (...) language learning and processing. (shrink)

Předkládaná studie je úvodem k textu Filozof, jehož autorem je francouzský gramatik a filozof César Chesneau Du Marsais (1676-1756). Po stručné charakteristice autora a jeho díla jsou představeny nejvýznamnější edice textu Filozof v 18. století: první vydání v roce 1743, anonymní verze v Encyklopedii a Voltairova edice z roku 1773.

This article presents a series of experiments which were conducted among native speakers of German to determine the influence of different types of German generics on the cognitive inclusion of women. Results indicate that the inclusion of women is higher with ‘non-sexist’ alternatives than with masculine generics, a tendency which was consistent across different studies. The different alternatives, however, showed different effects which also varied depending on the context. These results are discussed with regard to their practical consequences in situations (...) such as nominating women and men for awards or political offices. (shrink)

Breastfeeding policies and the production of motherhood: a historical–cultural approach This paper revisits some of the aspects that allow us to situate historically the process that has been called the ‘politicization of women's breasts’. It is part of a broader research project being undertaken in Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil, which is studying information from the educational material used in the National Campaign for the Incentive of Breastfeeding. The methodological approach used is cultural analysis, and its theoretical basis is informed (...) by feminist studies and cultural studies, from a poststructuralist perspective. Knowledges and practices that produce notions of maternity are problematized to argue that current political and economic arrangements have necessitated a redefinition of motherhood. This re‐signification of motherhood has transferred to women the duty of solving an array of problems that were previously considered government's responsibility, in particular those related to the physical and emotional development of infants. (shrink)

Although there is a broad consensus that both the procedural and declarative memory systems play a crucial role in language learning, use, and knowledge, the mapping between linguistic types and memory structures remains underspecified: by default, a dual-route mapping of language systems to memory systems is assumed, with declarative memory handling idiosyncratic lexical knowledge and procedural memory handling rule-governed knowledge of grammar.We experimentally contrast the processing of morphology (case and aspect), syntax (subordination), and lexical semantics (collocations) in a healthy L1 (...) population of Polish, a language rich in form distinctions. We study the processing of these four types under two conditions: a single task condition in which the grammaticality of stimuli was judged and a concurrent task condition in which grammaticality judgments were combined with a digit span task. Dividing attention impedes access to declarative memory while leaving procedural memory unaffected and hence constitutes a test that dissociates which types of linguistic information each long-term memory construct subserves.Our findings confirm the existence of a distinction between lexicon and grammar as a generative, dual-route model would predict, but the distinction is graded, as usage-based models assume: the hypothesized grammar–lexicon opposition appears as a continuum on which grammatical phenomena can be placed as being more or less “ruly” or “idiosyncratic.” However, usage-based models, too, need adjusting as not all types of linguistic knowledge are proceduralized to the same extent. This move away from a simple dichotomy fundamentally changes how we think about memory for language, and hence how we design and interpret behavioral and neuroimaging studies that probe into the nature of language cognition. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Cognitive Linguistics Jahrgang: 27 Heft: 4 Seiten: 447-463.

Description Logics are nowadays widely accepted as formalisms which provide reasoning facilities which allow us to discover inconsistencies in ontologies in an automatic fashion. Where ontologies are developed in modular fashion, they allow changes in one module to propogated through the system of ontologies automatically in a way which helps to maintain consistency and stability. For this feature to be utilized effectively, however, requires that domain ontologies be represented in a normalized form.

Clinical ethics support services are experiencing a phase of flourishing and of growing recognition. At the same time, however, the expectations regarding the acceptance and the integration of traditional CES services into clinical processes are not met. Ethics rounds as an additional instrument or as an alternative to traditional clinical ethics support strategies might have the potential to address both deficits. By implementing ethics rounds, we were able to better address the needs of the clinical sections and to develop a (...) more comprehensive account of ethics quality in our hospital, which covers the level of decisions and actions, and also the level of systems and processes and aspects of ethical leadership. (shrink)

Important similarities exist between the dynamical concepts implicit in Feldman & Levin's extended λ model and those basic to a dynamical systems approach. We argue that careful application of the key concepts of control and order parameters, equilibria, and stability, can relate known facts of neuromuscular processes to the observables of functional, task-specific behavior.

Plamondon & Alimi propose a universal account of trajectory formation and speed/accuracy trade-off in rapid movements but fail, because: (1) the kinematic model ignores the more fundamental dynamics of movement generation, and (2) it does not capture the essential space-time constraints of movement accuracy. Hence, the modeling lacks a biologically and behaviorally principled foundation and is driven by pragmatic function fitting.

Der Artikel spürt den subtilen Veränderungen nach, die bei Patienten, die mit tiefer Hirnstimulation behandelt werden, möglicherweise beobachtet werden können. Dabei sollen im Rückgriff auf Konzeptionen zur narrativen Identität mittels einer möglichst genauen Beschreibung und Analyse der Selbstwahrnehmung der Patienten sowie der Wahrnehmung ihres Umfelds die Änderungen im praktischen Selbstverhältnis untersucht werden, u. a. am Beispiel technomorpher Metaphern, die von den Patienten in ihren Selbstbeschreibungen verwendet werden. Ziel ist es, die Neuartigkeit und das Spezifische der Neurotechnologien – über die bisherigen (...) Untersuchungen hinaus – hinsichtlich des Umgangs mit sich selbst herauszuarbeiten und greifbar zu machen. Abschließend werden auf Basis der Analyse der Patienten-Narrationen die entsprechenden normativen Implikationen für eine ethische Bewertung des Einsatzes von Neurotechnologien benannt. (shrink)

We propose an ontological theory that is powerful enough to describe both complex spatio-temporal processes (occurrents) and the enduring entities (continuants) that participate therein. The theory is divided into two major categories of sub-theories: (sub-) theories of type SPAN and (sub-)theories of type SNAP. These theories represent two complementary perspectives on reality and result in distinct though compatible systems of categories. In SNAP we have enduring entities such as substances, qualities, roles, functions; in SPAN we have perduring entities such as (...) processes and their parts and aggregates. We argue that both kinds of ontological theory are required in order to give a non-reductionism account of complex domains of reality. (shrink)

According to the prevalent 'sum view' of stuffs, each portion of stuff is a mereological sum of its subportions. The purpose of this paper is to re-examine the sum view in the light of a modal temporal mereology which distinguishes between different varieties of summation relations. While admitting David Barnett's recent counter-example to the sum view, we show that there is nonetheless an important sense in which all portions of stuff are sums of their subportions. We use our summation relations (...) to develop, as an alternative to the sum view, an analysis of stuffs that distinguisher between the ways in which different sorts of stuffs are sums of their subportions. (shrink)

Bunnik and colleagues argued that financial barriers do not promote informed decision-making prior to prenatal screening and raise justice concerns. If public funding is provided, however, it would seem to be important to clarify its intentions and avoid any unwarranted appearance of a medical utility of the testing.

Das Gendiagnostikgesetz verbietet seit 2010 die pränatale Diagnostik spätmanifestierender Erkrankungen GenDG). In seiner Begründung bezog sich der Gesetzgeber in Analogie zu internationalen Empfehlungen für den pädiatrischen Bereich vor allem auf das Recht des heranwachsenden Kindes bzw. des späteren Erwachsenen auf Nichtwissen. Mit diesem gesetzlichen Verbot hat Deutschland einen viel diskutierten Sonderweg in der Regulierung genetischer Pränataldiagnostik eingeschlagen. Seither jedoch hat sich nicht nur die Perspektive auf prädiktive Testungen im Kindesalter verändert. In zunehmendem Maße generieren auf das gesamte Genom abzielende Diagnostikangebote (...) auch andere vorgeburtlich genetische Informationen, die – in ähnlicher Weise wie diejenigen zu spätmanifestierenden Erkrankungen eine potenzielle Gefahr für das Recht auf Nichtwissen der späteren Person darstellen. Es soll daher im Rahmen dieses Beitrages überprüft werden, inwiefern das deutsche Diagnostikverbot und dessen Bezug auf das Recht auf Nichtwissen des späteren Kindes eine tragfähige Basis zur Regulierung gendiagnostischer Untersuchungen in der Pränatalmedizin insgesamt darstellt bzw. zukünftig darstellen kann.Untersucht wird der Argumentationsgang des Diagnostikverbotes im Hinblick auf spätmanifestierende Erkrankungen vor dem Hintergrund der Entwicklungen in der prädiktiven Diagnostik. Eine Analyse des normativen Begründungsrahmens zeigt, dass nach wie vor deutlicher Klärungsbedarf hinsichtlich der philosophisch-ethischen Fundierung wie auch hinsichtlich der Interpretation eines Rechts auf Nichtwissen eines Kindes im Kontext von genetischer Diagnostik besteht. Darüber hinaus müssen auch Interessen des Kindes an eventuell möglich werdender pränataler Behandlung oder Prävention von Erkrankungen in die Abwägung miteinbezogen werden.Um zukünftigen Herausforderungen genomischer Pränataldiagnostik und -therapie begegnen zu können, müsste dringend geklärt werden, inwiefern Rechte zukünftiger Personen tatsächlich in der speziellen Situation der Schwangerschaft relevant sein können und mit welchen Pflichten diese für den Gesetzgeber, aber insbesondere auch für zukünftige Eltern und Ärzte einhergehen. Der Menschenrechtsdiskurs könnte hierfür eine tragfähige Basis und hilfreiche Strategien liefern. (shrink)

This study contextualizes Konrad of Megenberg’s “Book of Natural Things” within the natural philosophy practiced by the Faculty of Arts in the 14th century. Albert the Great and texts of ps.-Albert emerge as significant in this interpretation.

Der vorliegende Aufsatz analysiert die existenzphilosophischen Koinzidenzen im Steppenwolf und bei Friedrich Nietzsche. hierbei leitend ist die These, dass die in der Forschung aufgezeitgen gemeinsamen Motive Nietzsches und Hesses nicht unabhängig voneinander als singuläre Einzelthemen zu betrachten sind, sondern sich alle unter der zentralen Problematik der Suche nach personaler Identität subsumieren lassen unde hier iher thematische Einheit finden. Ausgangspunkt beider Autoren ist die Wahrnehmung eines fragmentierten Selbst, welches Leiden, Suizidgedanken, Einsamkeit und ein gespaltenes Verhältnis zur bürgerlichen Gesellschaft nach sich zeiht. (...) Philosophisch ist das desintegrierte Selbst insofern relevant, als es die Einnahme einer perspektivistishen Position zur Folge hat und aufgrund der sich gegenseitig abwertenden Ich - Fragmente in den Nihilismus mündet. The following essay analyzes existentialist themes as they appear in the Steppenwolf and the work of Friedrich Nietzsche. The overarching thesis is that the shared motifs commonly identified in the scholarly literature should not be viewed as separate topics but rather as elements of a single central problematic - the search for personal identity. The starting point for both authors is the perception of a fragmented self as the product of suffering, loneliness, thoughts of suicide, and an ambivalent relationship to bourgeois society. The fractured self is of interest to philosophy because it leads to the adoption of a perspectival position and because, as a collection of conflicting ego - fragments, such a self threatens to descend into nihilism. (shrink)

Recent interpretations explain the Augustinian elaboration of the division of the will in the light of Harry G. Frankfurt’s theory of will as a phenomenon of ambivalence between higher-order desires. My thesis on the contrary claims that a Frankfurt-based analysis of Conf. VIII is only compatible with the Augustinian conception of will as a whole if the division of the will is understood as a case of disharmony between second-order volitions and effective first-order desires. Leading aspect of the following essay (...) is the embedding of the questions about unity and freedom of the will into the greater subject of personal identity. The systematic and historic comparison of Augustine’s and Frankfurt’s theories is geared to the mutual implications of the tripartite complex of notion and freedom of the will as well as personal identity. (shrink)