The UK School Games and the competition structure of selected participating sports: a study of policy implementation

The UKSG was a government-funded initiative that provided a high-quality, multi-sport event for the UK s elite young athletes of school age over a six-year period. At time of investigation, the event addressed six objectives (both developmental and operational in focus) through eight Olympic sports. Operational targets ensured that athletes were selected to compete at the UKSG. Developmental targets were indirectly linked to the event and made use of the UKSG profile to drive forward other youth related projects, such as the National Competition Framework (NCF). This study explored the outcomes of these objectives, whilst understanding the relationship between the Youth Sport Trust (YST) and eight sports, and locating the implementation of the UKSG within a broader analysis of the policy process for youth / school sport. The study utilized various policy process and implementation concepts to support analysis of findings. In particular, bottom-up and top-down theories of policy implementation and the advocacy coalition framework, policy networks and multiple streams approaches proved particularly useful as heuristic devices or useful points of comparison in the analysis of stages of policy process. The findings from the three case study sports (supported by the data collected from the five other investigated sports) made for interesting conclusions in relation to the three research questions: 1). What are the key impacts of the UKSG on the competition structures of the eight sports? 2). What is the relationship between the key organisations involved in the UKSG and the NCF? And 3). What is the perceived role of each of the organisations involved in the UKSG and the NCF? Through investigating the eight sports approach to the six UKSG objectives, empirical evidence was collected that related specifically to the sport s approach to youth competition and their newly established NCF (objectives two and three). Evidence identified these objectives as the most challenging of the six to address, due to the looseness of their definition and scope for reinterpretation across and within the sport organisations. With this flexibility came differences in inter-organisational power (between home country NGBs and School Sport Associations) and therefore policy implementation. This inevitably led to mismatches in policy expectations of the YST and policy outcomes delivered by the sports. The study moves on to reveal that the six UKSG objectives proved capable of challenging, and in some cases, changing NGB behavior, albeit through several different implementation approaches. In particular, the UKSG was a programme that supported the positive development of home country NGB and School Sport Association communication and working practices

Dissociation in Reasoning and Argumentation

This dissertation inquires into the nature of dissociation – a maneuver through which a single entity is subdivided and arranged according to a hierarchy – as proposed by Chaim Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca. Drawing on their New Rhetoric Project, Perelman’s regressive philosophy, and research on argumentation schemes, I develop ways of conceptualizing, analyzing, and appraising dissociation as it is utilized in reasoning and argument in natural language. I first examine Chaim Perelman’s regressive philosophy to better situate argumentation in relation to demonstration, then delineate the Project’s framework of argumentation as constituted by a speaker, an audience, and an argumentative discourse. Argumentation is defined here as a symbolic act increasing audience members’ epistemic adherence to a thesis, based on their adherence to the premise and the scheme’s changing of their “level of adherence.” Additionally, I conceptualize dissociation in relation to association, breaking links, and what I call “re-confirming connecting links.” In the process of conceptualization, I defend the position that dissociation and three other categories of argument contain, but are not reducible to, argumentation schemes proper. Based on the four-partite category of argument and the premise-scheme-thesis structure, I analyze eight examples of dissociation and validate the notion that dissociation makes use of various argumentation schemes proper in advancing definitive theses, subdividing an entity, and arranging the subdivided entities according to a hierarchy. Building upon the analysis of dissociation, I explore ways in which to appraise dissociation by incorporating regressive philosophy, critical questions, and universal audience. Principles of regressive philosophy remind the critic that argumentation challenges the totality of experience in the rhetorical situation, never achieves certainty, and leaves room for revision. Critical questions address specific points that dissociation must answer in order to count as a “cogent” argument. The universal audience, anchored in particular audience members, must be constructed to maintain the balance between normative orientations of appraisal as well as realistic expectations of the rhetorical situation. Besides advancing our understanding of dissociation, this dissertation contributes to a richer understanding of the New Rhetoric Project, defends relativism in argumentation, and emphasizes the significance of production as well as appraisal of argument

Procedurally Rhetorical Verb-Centric Frame Semantics as a Knowledge Representation for Argumentation Analysis of Biochemistry Articles

The central focus of this thesis is rhetorical moves in biochemistry articles. Kanoksilapatham has provided a descriptive theory of rhetorical moves that extends Swales' CARS model to the complete biochemistry article. The thesis begins the construction of a computational model of this descriptive theory. Attention is placed on the Methods section of the articles. We hypothesize that because authors' argumentation closely follows their experimental procedure, procedural verbs may be the guide to understanding the rhetorical moves. Our work proposes an extension to the normal (i.e., VerbNet) semantic roles especially tuned to this domain. A major contribution is a corpus of Method sections that have been marked up for rhetorical moves and semantic roles. The writing style of this genre tends to occasionally omit semantic roles, so another important contribution is a prototype ontology that provides experimental procedure knowledge for the biochemistry domain. Our computational model employs machine learning to build its models for the semantic roles and rhetorical moves, validated against a gold standard reflecting the annotation of these texts by human experts. We provide significant insights into how to derive these annotations, and as such have contributions as well to the general challenge of producing markups in the domain of biomedical science documents, where specialized knowledge is required