New Advances in Formosan Linguistics

The present volume is a festschrift in honour of Lillian M. Huang, who, in a very few years, became a leading figure in Formosan linguistics after she obtained her PhD degree in 1987. Over the past twenty-eight years, she has been involved in important groundwork, in both academia and indigenous language policies in Taiwan, as we will show below (sections 3 and 4). She has been engaged in the development of both through her pre-eminent role in projects relating to typological studies on Formosan languages in the early 1990s, and on language teaching materials and proficiency tests since the late 1990s and early 2000s. Lillian may retire in a few years. Before she does, we thought it would be most appropriate to honour her by putting together papers by a number of scholars and students who have benefitted from or have been in contact with her in one way or another (e.g. through collaborative work, teaching, supervising, advising etc.). The idea of such a volume was conceived by Elizabeth Zeitoun in the autumn of 2009. Further plans were initially worked out with Stacy F. Teng, soon joined by Joy J. Wu. The three editors have been close to Lillian since the early and mid 1990s. Of the three, Zeitoun, who has been working with her on diverse projects for over twenty years, is her closest collaborator on the academic level. Both Wu and Teng were Lillian’s MA supervisees. Through her fieldwork courses, she introduced Wu to Amis and Teng to Puyuma, languages on which they are still working. The title of the present volume, New advances in Formosan linguistics, reflects our pursuit of publishing cutting-edge, provocative, and thoughtful papers that explore new directions and perspectives on Formosan languages and linguistics. It is worth noticing that this is the first collected volume on Formosan languages that has not issued from a workshop or a conference—the papers included in this volume are thus varied in terms of topic coverage—and the first that specifically deals with (and covers nearly all) the Formosan languages, a grouping understood in its broader context, that is, including Yami, a Batanic (Philippine) language spoken on Orchid Island under the political jurisdiction of Taiwan. (Note: first three paragraphs of foreward)

Integrative Levels of Knowing

Diese Dissertation beschäftigt sich mit einer systematischen Organisation der epistemologischen Dimension des menschlichen Wissens in Bezug auf Perspektiven und Methoden. Insbesondere wird untersucht inwieweit das bekannte Organisationsprinzip der integrativen Ebenen, das eine Hierarchie zunehmender Komplexität und Integration beschreibt, geeignet ist für eine grundlegende Klassifikation von Perspektiven bzw. epistemischen Bezugsrahmen. Die zentrale These dieser Dissertation geht davon aus, dass eine angemessene Analyse solcher epistemischen Kontexte in der Lage sein sollte, unterschiedliche oder gar konfligierende Bezugsrahmen anhand von kontextübergreifenden Standards und Kriterien vergleichen und bewerten zu können. Diese Aufgabe erfordert theoretische und methodologische Grundlagen, welche die Beschränkungen eines radikalen Kontextualismus vermeiden, insbesondere die ihm innewohnende Gefahr einer Fragmentierung des Wissens aufgrund der angeblichen Inkommensurabilität epistemischer Kontexte. Basierend auf Jürgen Habermas‘ Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns und seiner Methodologie des hermeneutischen Rekonstruktionismus, wird argumentiert, dass epistemischer Pluralismus nicht zwangsläufig zu epistemischem Relativismus führen muss und dass eine systematische Organisation der Perspektivenvielfalt von bereits existierenden Modellen zur kognitiven Entwicklung profitieren kann, wie sie etwa in der Psychologie oder den Sozial- und Kulturwissenschaften rekonstruiert werden. Der vorgestellte Ansatz versteht sich als ein Beitrag zur multi-perspektivischen Wissensorganisation, der sowohl neue analytische Werkzeuge für kulturvergleichende Betrachtungen von Wissensorganisationssystemen bereitstellt als auch neue Organisationsprinzipien vorstellt für eine Kontexterschließung, die dazu beitragen kann die Ausdrucksstärke bereits vorhandener Dokumentationssprachen zu erhöhen. Zudem enthält der Anhang eine umfangreiche Zusammenstellung von Modellen integrativer Wissensebenen.This dissertation is concerned with a systematic organization of the epistemological dimension of human knowledge in terms of viewpoints and methods. In particular, it will be explored to what extent the well-known organizing principle of integrative levels that presents a developmental hierarchy of complexity and integration can be applied for a basic classification of viewpoints or epistemic outlooks. The central thesis pursued in this investigation is that an adequate analysis of such epistemic contexts requires tools that allow to compare and evaluate divergent or even conflicting frames of reference according to context-transcending standards and criteria. This task demands a theoretical and methodological foundation that avoids the limitation of radical contextualism and its inherent threat of a fragmentation of knowledge due to the alleged incommensurability of the underlying frames of reference. Based on Jürgen Habermas’s Theory of Communicative Action and his methodology of hermeneutic reconstructionism, it will be argued that epistemic pluralism does not necessarily imply epistemic relativism and that a systematic organization of the multiplicity of perspectives can benefit from already existing models of cognitive development as reconstructed in research fields like psychology, social sciences, and humanities. The proposed cognitive-developmental approach to knowledge organization aims to contribute to a multi-perspective knowledge organization by offering both analytical tools for cross-cultural comparisons of knowledge organization systems (e.g., Seven Epitomes and Dewey Decimal Classification) and organizing principles for context representation that help to improve the expressiveness of existing documentary languages (e.g., Integrative Levels Classification). Additionally, the appendix includes an extensive compilation of conceptions and models of Integrative Levels of Knowing from a broad multidisciplinary field

The Nature of Desire

Desires matter. What are desires? Many believe that desire is a motivational state: desiring is being disposed to act. This conception aligns with the functionalist approach to desire and the standard account of desire's role in explaining action. According to a second influential approach, however, desire is first and foremost an evaluation: desiring is representing something as good. After all, we seem to desire things under the guise of the good. Which understanding of desire is more accurate? Is the guise of the good even right to assume? Should we adopt an alternative picture that emphasizes desire's deontic nature? What do neuroscientific studies suggest? Essays in the first section of the volume are devoted to these questions, and to the puzzle of desire's essence. In the second part of the volume, essays investigate some implications that the various conceptions of desire have on a number of fundamental issues. For example, why are inconsistent desires problematic? What is desire's role in practical deliberation? How do we know what we want? This volume will contribute to the emergence of a fruitful debate on a neglected, albeit crucial, dimension of the mind

Frontiers in psychodynamic neuroscience

he term psychodynamics was introduced in 1874 by Ernst von Brücke, the renowned German physiologist and Freud’s research supervisor at the University of Vienna. Together with Helmholtz and others, Brücke proposed that all living organisms are energy systems, regulated by the same thermodynamic laws. Since Freud was a student of Brücke and a deep admirer of Helmholtz, he adopted this view, thus laying the foundations for his metapsychology. The discovery of the Default Network and the birth of Neuropsychoanalysis, twenty years ago, facilitated a deep return to this classical conception of the brain as an energy system, and therefore a return to Freud's early ambition to establish psychology as natural science. Our current investigations of neural networks and applications of the Free Energy Principle are equally ‘psychodynamic’ in Brücke’s original sense of the term. Some branches of contemporary neuroscience still eschew subjective data and therefore exclude the brain’s most remarkable property – its selfhood – from the field, and many neuroscientists remain skeptical about psychoanalytic methods, theories, and concepts. Likewise, some psychoanalysts continue to reject any consideration of the structure and functions of the brain from their conceptualization of the mind in health and disease. Both cases seem to perpetuate a Cartesian attitude in which the mind is linked to the brain in some equivocal relationship and an attitude that detaches the brain from the body -- rather than considering it an integral part of the complex and dynamic living organism as a whole. Evidence from psychodynamic neuroscience suggests that Freudian constructs can now be realized neurobiologically. For example, Freud’s notion of primary and secondary processes is consistent with the hierarchical organization of self-organized cortical and subcortical systems, and his description of the ego is consistent with the functions of the Default Network and its reciprocal exchanges with subordinate brain systems. Moreover, thanks to new methods of measuring brain entropy, we can now operationalize the primary and secondary processes and therefore test predictions arising from these Freudian constructs. All of this makes it possible to deepen the dialogue between neuroscience and psychoanalysis, in ways and to a degree that was unimaginable in Freud's time, and even compared to twenty years ago. Many psychoanalytical hypotheses are now well integrated with contemporary neuroscience. Other Freudian and post-Freudian hypotheses about the structure and function of the mind seem ripe for the detailed and sophisticated development that modern psychodynamic neuroscience can offer. This Research Topic aims to provide comprehensive coverage of the latest advances in psychodynamic neuroscience and neuropsychoanalysis. Potential authors are invited to submit papers (original research, case reports, review articles, commentaries) that deploy, review, compare or develop the methods and theories of psychodynamic neuroscience and neuropsychoanalysis. Potential authors include researchers, psychoanalysts, and neuroscientists

Complement clauses and complementation systems: a cross-linguistic study of grammatical organization

The dissertation provides a cross-linguistic investigation into the grammatical structure of complement clauses and the organization of complementation systems. Based on a balanced sample of 100 widely dispersed languages, the major goals of the present work are to set the two landmark typological reference articles on complementation (Noonan 1985|2007, Dixon 2006) onto a broad empirical basis and to explore hitherto understudied phenomena in the constitution of complementation systems. In particular, the traditional focus on object complement clauses is shifted to complements in ‘subject’ function, and the dissertation is the first to analyse systematically the cross-linguistic productivity, morphosyntactic coding, syntagmatic arrangement and diachronic rise of complements in S- and A-function, as compared to their corresponding object clauses. On a methodological plane, it combines a multivariate approach to clause-linkage with recent statistical techniques of data mining (e.g. HCFA, cluster analyses, NeighborNet, MDS) in order to measure (dis)similarities in the cross-linguistic organization of complementation constructions. This comprises, for example, a precise gauging of the degree to which the internal structure of complements is ‘desententialized’ (Lehmann 1988) and made NP-like, of the ways in which this correlates with the possible external functions and positions of the complement in the main clause, and of the ways in which these distributional patterns in complementation systems reflect the historical origins and lexical diffusion of the relevant constructions. Above all, the dissertation problematizes the conceptual and terminological foundations for the typological study of complementation, which, despite decades of intensive research, remain challenging to establish in a cross-linguistically satisfactory way