Psycholinguistic research has long established that focus-marked words have a processing advantage over other words in an utterance, e.g. they are recognised more quickly and remembered better. More recently, studies have shown that listeners infer contextual alternatives to a focused word in a spoken utterance, when marked with a contrastive accent, even when the alternatives are not explicitly mentioned in the discourse. This has been shown by strengthened priming of contextual alternatives to the word, but not other noncontrastive semantic associates, (...) when it is contrastively accented, e.g. after hearing ``The {\em customer} opened the window", {\em salesman} is strongly primed, but not {\em product}. This is consistent with Rooth's (1992) theory that \deleted{the focus is not only the most informative part of an utterance, but also that} focus-marking signals the presence of alternatives to the focus. However, almost all of the research carried out in this area has been on Germanic languages. Further, most of this work has looked only at one kind of focus-marking, by contrastive accenting (prosody). This paper reports on a cross-modal lexical priming study in Mandarin Chinese, looking at whether focus-marking heightens activation, i.e. priming, of words and their alternatives. Two kinds of focus-marking were investigated: prosodic and syntactic. Prosodic prominence is an important means of focus-marking in Chinese, however, it is realised through pitch range expansion, rather than accenting. The results showed that focus\added{ed} words, as well as their alternatives, were primed when the subject prime word carried contrastive prosodic prominence. Syntactic focus-marking, however, did not enhance priming of focused words or their alternatives. Noncontrastive semantic associates were not primed with either kind of focus-marking. These results extend previous findings on focus and alternative priming for the first time to Chinese. They also suggest that the processing advantages of focus, including priming alternatives, are particularly related to prosodic prominence, at least in Chinese and Germanic languages. This research sheds light on what linguistic mechanisms listeners use to identify important information, generate alternatives and understand implicature necessary for successful communication. (shrink)

The epistemological problems that are implicit in Marx’s theory on the “sensible world” indicate that Marx’s philosophy in fact contains within itself the topics of pure philosophy, but Marx did not involve himself in these topics. Through comparing with Husserl’s epistemological critique and Heidegger’s existentialism, we can clearly see that there are theoretical spaces in which we can develop Marx’s philosophy to the realm of pure philosophy, however, we must devote our creative efforts to the exploration of the spaces.

Role ethics, broadly speaking, is a normative ethical theory that has a prominent emphasis on roles. Although it was prominent in ancient cultures, such as in China and Greece, role ethics waned during the Enlightenment era. Not until very recently has role ethics been articulated in its own terms. Among current discussions on roles, the most systematic role ethics are Confucian role ethics, Epictetus’ role ethics, Sarah Harper’s rolecentered morality and Jeremy Evans’ role ethics. They are my primary interlocutors as (...) I develop and defend an alternative approach to understanding, examining and guiding our ethical life. By arguing that our ethical life is pervasively structured by roles, and drawing on the lights that my primary interlocutors have shed, I propose a role-structured ethics or role ethics that addresses some central issues regarding the nature of roles, the self, role identification, role fulfillment, role conflicts, and changing roles. Importantly, I emphasize the place of traditions in constructing a complete normative role ethics. So throughout the dissertation, I outline and defend the basic structure of any plausible specific role ethics, which is neutral among various traditions. I call such a structure “Role Ethics.” In particular, I investigate the nature of roles and its relation to the self, role fulfillment and its relation to the concept of duties, virtues and skills, as well as the nature of role conflicts and how to approach them. Along these lines of exploration, I also argue that they have important implications on the dignity of persons, moral education, and the notion of practical wisdom. Last but not the least, due to the universality of roles in various traditions, I propose that Role Ethics can serve as a platform to bring various traditions into meaningful dialogue. (shrink)

Marxist Philosophy in China is an important task is to use the basic theory of Marxist philosophy, viewpoint and method to sort, extract of traditional Chinese culture, philosophy. And the "legitimacy of Chinese philosophy," the discussion, while filling the job of "legitimacy" has also been a certain degree of skepticism. Including how to look at the cultural characteristics of Chinese philosophy, Western academic norms on how to look at the impact of Chinese philosophy and how to look at the transformation (...) of traditional Chinese philosophy, it is clear from the theoretical work to clarify the legality of the key. The main task of sinicizing Marxist philosophy is how to abstract philosophical thoughts from traditional Chinese culture with the guide of basic Marxist theories, viewpoints and methods. However, the validity problem of Chinese philosophy in a degree makes the validity of this project become a problem as well. How to understand the cultural identity of Chinese philosophy? How to evaluate the impact Western academic discourses left on Chinese philosophy? And how to judge the transformation of Chinese philosophy? We hold that theoretically, these three questions are the key points for the validity illumination of the project mentioned above. (shrink)

本书本着“依史立论，以论辨史，史论结合”原则，从区分“学科”与“学说”入手，首先将哲学作为人类共有的一个思想文化平台（学科）来加以考察，阐明其公共性的本质和特征；然后以“西、中、马”三大传统体系为主， 通过对现实中各大学说体系源流的简要考察，进一步展现哲学所特有的体系。.