Children's non-adultlike interpretations of telic predicates across languages

The acquisition literature has documented several different types of misinterpretations of telic sentences by children, yet a comprehensive analysis of these child interpretations has not been attempted and a crosslinguistic perspective is lacking. This task is not easy, for, on the surface, children's non-adultlike interpretations appear to be scattered and even contradictory across languages. Several cognitive biases have been proposed to explain given patterns (children initially adhere to a Manner bias, or alternatively a Result bias). Reviewing a wide range of studies on the acquisition of telic sentences in relation to tense-aspect markers, we show that children's non-adultlike interpretations fall into three different patterns. We conclude that the diversity of non-adultlike interpretations that is found across child languages is incompatible with accounts that rely on these cognitive, language-independent principles, but instead is triggered by language-specific properties. Analyzing these patterns in detail, it appears that child learners across languages have problems with tense-aspect forms with variable meanings, in contrast to forms with a one-to-one form/meaning mappings which are acquired earlier. While adults use a context-sensitive interpretation of forms with multiple meanings, various semantic-pragmatic sources can explain children's difficulties with interpreting such forms. All explanations that we identify across child languages rely on children's immature command of pragmatic reasoning, albeit in very different ways for the three different patterns. Thus, by taking a crosslinguistic semantic approach and integrating detailed insights from the tense-aspect semantics of specific languages with universal pragmatic effects, we explain the non-adultlike interpretation of telic sentences in a variety of child languages in a comprehensive way.F. Martin was supported by the project B5 of the SFB 732 financed by the DFG and hosted by the University of Stuttgart, and by DFG award AL 554/8-1 (Leibniz-Preis 2014) to Artemis Alexiadou. I. García del Real was supported by the project MINECO/FEDER (FFI2015-68589-C2-1-P)

The problem of evil: unseen animal suffering

On my view, every bone, every fossil, and every putrid whiff of carrion that one smells on a hike in the country is just as good evidence for a divine intervention as it is for the suffering of an animal

Operationalization of Configuration Analysis in Interorganizational Information Systems Research: A Research Journey

Configuration analysis is still an under-developed tool for researchers to investigate interorganizational information systems (IOIS) and the forms of interorganizational integration that are supported by IOIS. In our attempt to explain observed phenomena in a target industry we applied configuration analysis proposed by Lyytinen and Damsgaard in their position paper from 2011 on an industry level. We operationalized the conceptual idea of configuration analysis in a research design defining research paradigm, type of reasoning, research goals, unit of analysis and research methods to make it feasible for IOIS research. Our findings indicate that our operationalization of configuration analysis is suitable for research fields in IOIS that have no or hardly any empirical groundwork to observe phenomena and hypothesize about the mechanics leading to the existence of the phenomena

Movement Observation-Analysis (MOA): How a new conceptual framework supports a better understanding of the coherence of the functional and expressive dimensions of movement

Our research proposes to bring together two approaches to qualitative movement analysis used in dance, Laban Movement Analysis (LMA), and Functional Analysis of the Dancing Body [L’Analyse Fonctionnelle du Corps dans le Mouvement Dansé] (AFCMD) in order to better represent the interplay between the functional and expressive dimensions of movement. The methodology designed for this research combines a phenomenological perspective and explicitation interviews with experts followed by an “activity analysis.” Our efforts led to two types of results: an understanding of the processes underlying the observation-analysis activity of the observers, and a proposed crosscutting conceptual framework integrating the main precepts the two approaches considered. The “Activity Analysis” epistemology allowed us to identify a distinctive configuration of activities specific to each of the approaches. In addition, the new framework graphs the identified observables in three overlapping spheres – Ground, Space and Dynamics – placing at the heart of the schema the integration of the dimensions of Function and Expression

The Dimensions of Argumentative Texts and Their Assessment

The definition and the assessment of the quality of argumentative texts has become an increasingly crucial issue in education, classroom discourse, and argumentation theory. The different methods developed and used in the literature are all characterized by specific perspectives that fail to capture the complexity of the subject matter, which remains ill-defined and not systematically investigated. This paper addresses this problem by building on the four main dimensions of argument quality resulting from the definition of argument and the literature in classroom discourse: dialogicity, accountability, relevance, and textuality (DART). We use and develop the insights from the literature in education and argumentation by integrating the frameworks that capture both the textual and the argumentative nature of argumentative texts. This theoretical background will be used to propose a method for translating the DART dimensions into specific and clear proxies and evaluation criteria