Traditional mechanistic accounts of language processing derive almost entirely from the study of monologue. Yet, the most natural and basic form of language use is dialogue. As a result, these accounts may only offer limited theories of the mechanisms that underlie language processing in general. We propose a mechanistic account of dialogue, the interactive alignment account, and use it to derive a number of predictions about basic language processes. The account assumes that, in dialogue, the linguistic representations employed by the (...) interlocutors become aligned at many levels, as a result of a largely automatic process. This process greatly simplifies production and comprehension in dialogue. After considering the evidence for the interactive alignment model, we concentrate on three aspects of processing that follow from it. It makes use of a simple interactive inference mechanism, enables the development of local dialogue routines that greatly simplify language processing, and explains the origins of self-monitoring in production. We consider the need for a grammatical framework that is designed to deal with language in dialogue rather than monologue, and discuss a range of implications of the account. Key Words: common ground; dialogue; dialogue routines; language comprehension; language production; monitoring; perception-behavior link. (shrink)

Linguistic interaction between two people is the fundamental form of communication, yet almost all research in language use focuses on isolated speakers and listeners. In this innovative work, Garrod and Pickering extend the scope of psycholinguistics beyond individuals by introducing communication as a social activity. Drawing on psychological, linguistic, philosophical and sociological research, they expand their theory that alignment across individuals is the basis of communication, through the model of a 'shared workspace account'. In this workspace, interlocutors are actors who (...) jointly manipulate and control the interaction and develop similar representations of both language and social context, in order to achieve communicative success. The book also explores dialogue within groups, technologies, as well as the role of culture more generally. Providing a new understanding of cognitive representation, this trailblazing work will be highly influential in the fields of linguistics, psychology and cognitive linguistics. (shrink)

Currently, production and comprehension are regarded as quite distinct in accounts of language processing. In rejecting this dichotomy, we instead assert that producing and understanding are interwoven, and that this interweaving is what enables people to predict themselves and each other. We start by noting that production and comprehension are forms of action and action perception. We then consider the evidence for interweaving in action, action perception, and joint action, and explain such evidence in terms of prediction. Specifically, we assume (...) that actors construct forward models of their actions before they execute those actions, and that perceivers of others' actions covertly imitate those actions, then construct forward models of those actions. We use these accounts of action, action perception, and joint action to develop accounts of production, comprehension, and interactive language. Importantly, they incorporate well-defined levels of linguistic representation. We show how speakers and comprehenders use covert imitation and forward modeling to make predictions at these levels of representation, how they interweave production and comprehension processes, and how they use these predictions to monitor the upcoming utterances. We show how these accounts explain a range of behavioral and neuroscientific data on language processing and discuss some of the implications of our proposal. (shrink)

Q: If necessity is the mother of invention, whence necessity? A. : The matrix of necessity in God-talk is religious experience, philosophically interpreted. The interpreters, theists and non-thesists, have indeed been inventive.

Game-theoretic reasoning pervades economic theory and is used widely in other social and behavioural sciences. An Introduction to Game Theory International Edition, by Martin J. Osborne, presents the main principles of game theory and shows how they can be used to understand economics, social, political, and biological phenomena. The book introduces in an accessible manner the main ideas behind the theory rather than their mathematical expression. All concepts are defined precisely, and logical reasoning is used throughout. The book requires (...) an understanding of basic mathematics but assumes no specific knowledge of economics, political science, or other social or behavioural sciences. Coverage includes the fundamental concepts of strategic games, extensive games with perfect information, and coalitional games; the more advanced subjects of Bayesian games and extensive games with imperfect information; and the topics of repeated games, bargaining theory, evolutionary equilibrium, rationalizability, and maxminimization. The book offers a wide variety of illustrations from the social and behavioural sciences. Each topic features examples that highlight theoretical points and illustrations that demonstrate how the theory may be used. (shrink)

This book offers ways to overcome problems that arise when voters, politicians, and bureaucrats pursue selfish interests rather than the general interest in their political behavior. It combines previously published ideas about charging people the costs of their political actions and selling insurance against unfavorable political outcomes, with new ideas about competing legislatures and incentives for generating efficient political outcomes. The book includes new are discussed, as well as a proposed constitution and its rationale.

Self-executing treaties like the Salvage Convention 1989 automatically become "the supreme law of the land" in the United States under the Supremacy Clause of the U.S. Constitution.They require no legislation to make them operative but they have the same force and effect as an Article I legislative enactment.The fact that no implementing legislation is needed often leads to the paradoxical result that a self-executing treaty is more easily forgotten, perhaps for the simple reason that such treaties do not always appear (...) in the U.S. Code and so are not always easy to find. Perhaps that is the explanation of the curious fate of the Salvage Convention 1989, which does not appear anywhere in the U.S. Code. There can be no doubt, however, that when the provisions of a treaty prescribe a rule by which private rights may be determined, as the Salvage Convention 1989 does, a court must resort to the treaty for rules of decision, just as it would to a statute. A court may only refer to the law that would govern in the absence of the treaty - in the present context, general maritime law - when the treaty leaves an issue unresolved. In short, it is not acceptable for courts to continue to apply the general maritime law of salvage simply because it is broadly equivalent to the Salvage Convention 1989. Even when the general maritime law and the Salvage Convention 1989 would produce identical results, courts should apply the Salvage Convention 1989 and not the general maritime law. When the general maritime law and the Salvage Convention 1989 would (or even might) produce different results, which may occur quite often, there is no justification for applying the general maritime law. (shrink)

We describe seven challenges that confront the kind of cross-cultural research currently practiced in experimental philosophy, illustrating them in an example in which intuitions about moral responsibility were studied in participants in four different countries. The seven challenge are (1) defining culture, (2) finding representative samples, (3) defining cognition, (4) task variation, (5) ecological validity, (6) interpreting the results, and (7) conducting ethical research. We suggest that these challenges can be overcome or avoided by attending to the ways cognition arises (...) in everyday life, and briefly describe an approach which regards culture not as an independent variable but as the medium of human action and human life, and which regards cognition as situated in time and place. (shrink)

Our target article proposed that language production and comprehension are interwoven, with speakers making predictions of their own utterances and comprehenders making predictions of other people's utterances at different linguistic levels. Here, we respond to comments about such issues as cognitive architecture and its neural basis, learning and development, monitoring, the nature of forward models, communicative intentions, and dialogue.

In 1983, Harvard University Press published Derek Freeman's Margaret Mead And Samoa: The Making and Unmaking of an Anthropological Myth. Many anthropologists judged the book to be an unwarranted attack on the late Margaret Mead for the field work she did in 1925-26 for Coming of Age in Samoa, published in 1928. The implications from this now famous book served as evidence for a general liberal view of culture in America, resonated with the work of John Dewey as it became (...) popular in the 1920's, and established Mead as an intellectual icon until her death in 1978. Freeman's first critique…. (shrink)

_Reading Science_ looks at the distinctive language of science and technology and the role it plays in building up scientific understandings of the world. It brings together discourse analysis and critical theory for the first time in a single volume. This edited collection examines science discourse from a number of perspectives, drawing on new rhetoric, functional linguistics and critical theory. It explores this language in research and industrial contexts as well as in educational settings and in popular science writing and (...) science fiction. The papers also include consideration of the role of images in science writing and the importance of reading science discourse as multi-modal text. The internationally renowned contributors include M. A. K. Halliday, Charles Bazerman and Jay Lemke. (shrink)

Literature devoted to analyses of Plato’s Protagoras focus on topics such as Protagoras’ hedonism, the unity of virtue, akrasia, and the distinction between philosophy and sophistry. They pass over the fact that the political atmosphere in Athens and the character of the comrade together compel Socrates to be cautious about what he repeats. The dialogue with Hippocrates allows him to claim that he met with and dethroned Protagoras, not of his own choosing, but as a result of chance. The essay (...) also argues that the Protagoras exposes Socrates’ own inclination towards Hedonism. If Socrates didn’t know this before he met with Protagoras this time, it would be impossible for Socrates not to see it through his encounter and victory over the Sophist. This discovery may be the most profound dimension of Socratic irony. (shrink)

Following Schleiermacher, who was unable to account for several oddities in the dialogue, some scholars consider the Hipparchus a spurious Platonic work. This essay, by means of a dramatic re-enactment of the dialogue, accounts for those oddities. It demonstrates that the comrade is a recent immigrant to Athens who, having been deceived by a moneychanger in the agora, accuses ‘lovers of gain’ of being ‘profiteers’. Socrates exposes the comrade as fearful of risk-taking and then defends the reputation of Hipparchus, the (...) Athenian King who encouraged commercial development. By further correcting the democratic account of his assassination, Socrates exposes the comrade’s envy, which hides his own profiteering ambitions. The discussion points to a series of dualities regarding commerce and philosophy, including both the generating and non-generating qualities of the philosophic life. It also reveals the rural origins of Socrates’ ‘new’ accusers, and the notion of justice held by them. (shrink)

Advocates a new existential and political coalition among critical and postmodern social theorists and among critical gender, race, and class theorists, in dissent from the New World Order, to raise specters of liberation and empower radical democratic change.

Re/reading the Past is concerned with the discourses of history, from the complementary perspectives of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL). The papers in the book stress the discursive construction of the past, focussing on the different social narratives which compete for official acknowledgement. Issues of collective and cultural memory are addressed, reflecting the "linguistic turn" in the Social Sciences. The book covers a range of discourses, interpreting texts from popular culture to academic discourse including the construction (...) and evaluation of past events in a variety of places around the world. It is especially timely in its focus on the construction of time and value in a post-colonial world where history discourses are central to on-going processes of reconciliation, debates on war crimes, and the issues of amnesty and restitution. As such the book fills a significant gap in interdisciplinary debates as well as in register and genre analysis, and will be of general interest to historians, political scientists and discourse analysts as well as students and teachers of ESP (English for Specific Purposes) and EAP (English for Academic Purposes). (shrink)

The interactive-alignment model of dialogue provides an account of dialogue at the level of explanation normally associated with cognitive psychology. We develop our claim that interlocutors align their mental models via priming at many levels of linguistic representation, explicate our notion of automaticity, defend the minimal role of “other modeling,” and discuss the relationship between monologue and dialogue. The account can be applied to social and developmental psychology, and would benefit from computational modeling.

This study investigates the relation between CEO compensation and corporate fraud in China. We document a significantly negative correlation between CEO compensation and corporate fraud using data on publicly traded firms between 2005 and 2010. Our findings are consistent with the hypothesis that firms penalize CEOs for fraud by lowering their pay. We also find that CEO compensation is lower in firms that commit more severe frauds. Panel data fixed effects and propensity score methods are used to demonstrate these effects. (...) Our results also indicate that corporate governance mechanisms influence the magnitude of punishment. We find that CEOs of privately controlled firms, firms that split the posts of CEO and chairman, and CEOs of firms located in developed regions suffer larger compensation penalties for committing financial fraud. Finally, we show that CEOs at firms that commit fraud are more likely to be replaced compared to those at non-fraud firms. (shrink)

These are the basis of lectures to philosophy students in universities, colleges and seminaries. The text has been revised repeatedly in use with students in different years of philosophical studies.

In this article I consider a two-page autobiographical recount which appears at the end of Nelson Mandela's book Long Walk to Freedom as a summary of his life and what he has learned from it. My aim is to illustrate the role of a detailed analysis of single texts in the field of discourse analysis, as opposed to studies of selected variables across a corpus of texts. The analysis is conducted within the general theoretical framework of systemic functional linguistics, with (...) special attention to transitivity, mood, theme, grammatical metaphor, lexical relations, conjunction, tense, phase, process type, hierarchy of periodicity, polarity, continuity, elaboration, extension and the analysis of images in multimodal text. Through these procedures I show the way in which Mandela reconciles the linear unfolding of his life history with the deepening understanding of freedom that gives meaning to his life - by means of a spiral texture which returns again and again to the meaning of freedom at different levels of abstraction. The effect, I think, is inspirational - with no tinge of bitterness or betrayal; rather a message of hope and wisdom - grace personified. The approach exemplifies a positive style of discourse analysis that focuses on hope and change, by way of complementing the deconstructive exposé associated with critical discourse analysis. (shrink)

From the early nineteenth century, the successful use of fossils in stratigraphy oriented paleontology towards geology. The consequent marginalising of biological objectives was countered in the twentieth century by the rise of ‘Paläobiologie’, first in the German cultural area and only later, as ‘paleobiology’, in the anglophone world. Several kinds of paleobiological research flourished internationally after the Second World War, among them the novel field of ‘paleoecology’. Within this field there were attempts to apply functional morphology to the problematical cases (...) of fossil organisms, for which functions cannot be observed directly. This article describes the origins of the kind of functional inference for fossils that I proposed in 1961 as the method of ‘paradigms’. Here I summarize some of my ‘worked exemplars’, which were intended to show the paradigm method in action. These case-studies were all taken from the paleontologically important phylum of the Brachiopoda, but the method was claimed to have much wider implications for the interpretation of the fossil record in terms of adaptive evolution. This article takes the history of the paradigm method as far as the late 1960s. I hope to trace, in a sequel, its ambivalent fate during the 1970s and beyond, when for example Gould’s critique of ‘the adaptationist programme’ and the rise of computer-based quantitative methods for the evolutionary interpretation of the fossil record led to the relative eclipse of functional morphology in paleontology. (shrink)

This book explores in detail the relation between ontology and ethics in the early work of Ludwig Wittgenstein, notably the _Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus_ and, to a lesser extent, the _Notebooks 1914-1916_. Self-contained and requiring no prior knowledge of Wittgenstein's thought, it is the first book-length argument that his views on ethics decisively shaped his ontological and semantic thought. The book's main thesis is twofold. It argues that the ontological theory of the _Tractatus_ is fundamentally dependent on its logical and linguistic doctrines: (...) the tractarian world is the world as it appears in language and thought. It also maintains that this interpretation of the ontology of the _Tractatus_ can be argued for not only on systematic grounds, but also via the contents of the ethical theory that it offers. Wittgenstein's views on ethics presuppose that language and thought are but one way in which we interact with reality. Although detailed studies of Wittgenstein's ontology and ethics exist, this book is the first thorough investigation of the relationship between them. As an introduction to Wittgenstein, it sheds new light on an important aspect of his early thought. (shrink)