Linear Logic for Meaning Assembly

Semantic theories of natural language associate meanings with utterances by providing meanings for lexical items and rules for determining the meaning of larger units given the meanings of their parts. Meanings are often assumed to combine via function application, which works well when constituent structure trees are used to guide semantic composition. However, we believe that the functional structure of Lexical-Functional Grammar is best used to provide the syntactic information necessary for constraining derivations of meaning in a cross-linguistically uniform format. It has been difficult, however, to reconcile this approach with the combination of meanings by function application. In contrast to compositional approaches, we present a deductive approach to assembling meanings, based on reasoning with constraints, which meshes well with the unordered nature of information in the functional structure. Our use of linear logic as a `glue' for assembling meanings allows for a coherent treatment of the LFG requirements of completeness and coherence as well as of modification and quantification.Comment: 19 pages, uses lingmacros.sty, fullname.sty, tree-dvips.sty, latexsym.sty, requires the new version of Late

Colliding employer-employee perspectives of employee turnover:evidence from a born-global industry

Set in the context of internationalization of the global division of labor, this article provides a deeper exploration of qualitative themes of conflicting accounts of employees’ reasons to quit and managerial strategies to prevent employee turnover in six business process outsourcing firms operating in India. Such differences in cognition and action between the two constituencies suggest that the decision to quit is not a linear and rational process as highlighted in most extant models of employee turnover. Our findings suggest that employees are attached more to a place or people they work with rather than the organization per se. Intergenerational differences between Generation Y knowledge workers and Generation X managers and the ineffectiveness of espoused human resource practices suggest the presence of “push” human resource management (HRM) systems. Our findings have implications for employee turnover models, intergenerational theory and high-commitment HRM, and practitioners

Corporate human rights responsibility and multinationality in emerging markets: from a developing notion to the legal dimension

The principal aim of this article is to highlight the evolving concepts and ideas of Corporate Human Rights Responsibility (CHRR) under international law and how it relates to other concepts of corporate responsibility. The point of departure is the observation that there is the need to close an existing impunity gap of Western and emerging market MNCs’ complicity in Human Rights violations committed in the developing world. Two case studies from India and China highlight the present accountability gap. This article understands that the key issue with CHRR is the absence of a binding regime of binding norms, paired with the observation that implementation and enforcement issues seriously hamper any such development. Based on related initiatives such as CSR and Good Corporate Practice this article calls for an approach which is borne by a multitude of stakeholders, from consumers, employees to executive directors. Thus, its main research objective of this paper is to examine the concept of ‘Corporate Human Rights Responsibility’ in the context of Multinationality in emerging markets such as China and India and thereby to assess this notion through the prism of the legal dimension