Morphological word structure in English and Swedish : the evidence from prosody

Trubetzkoy's recognition of a delimitative function of phonology, serving to signal boundaries between morphological units, is expressed in terms of alignment constraints in Optimality Theory, where the relevant constraints require specific morphological boundaries to coincide with phonological structure (Trubetzkoy 1936, 1939, McCarthy & Prince 1993). The approach pursued in the present article is to investigate the distribution of phonological boundary signals to gain insight into the criteria underlying morphological analysis. The evidence from English and Swedish suggests that necessary and sufficient conditions for word-internal morphological analysis concern the recognizability of head constituents, which include the rightmost members of compounds and head affixes. The claim is that the stability of word-internal boundary effects in historical perspective cannot in general be sufficiently explained in terms of memorization and imitation of phonological word form. Rather, these effects indicate a morphological parsing mechanism based on the recognition of word-internal head constituents. Head affixes can be shown to contrast systematically with modifying affixes with respect to syntactic function, semantic content, and prosodic properties. That is, head affixes, which cannot be omitted, often lack inherent meaning and have relatively unmarked boundaries, which can be obscured entirely under specific phonological conditions. By contrast, modifying affixes, which can be omitted, consistently have inherent meaning and have stronger boundaries, which resist prosodic fusion in all phonological contexts. While these correlations are hardly specific to English and Swedish it remains to be investigated to which extent they hold cross-linguistically. The observation that some of the constituents identified on the basis of prosodic evidence lack inherent meaning raises the issue of compositionality. I will argue that certain systematic aspects of word meaning cannot be captured with reference to the syntagmatic level, but require reference to the paradigmatic level instead. The assumption is then that there are two dimensions of morphological analysis: syntagmatic analysis, which centers on the criteria for decomposing words in terms of labelled constituents, and paradigmatic analysis, which centers on the criteria for establishing relations among (whole) words in the mental lexicon. While meaning is intrinsically connected with paradigmatic analysis (e.g. base relations, oppositeness) it is not essential to syntagmatic analysis

The interplay of the Dirty Hands of British area bombing and the Wicked Problem of defeating Nazi Germany in World War II - a lesson in leadership ethics

The British area bombing of Germany in World War II has provided for enduring ethical controversy. Eschewing conventional approaches, we present area bombing as a Dirty Hands leadership response to the Wicked Problem of Britain’s wartime strategic predicament. Using historical methodology, we establish two distinct phases in area bombing: 1942-1944, when this was ethically contentious but politically necessary; and 1944-1945, which lacks a Dirty Hands legitimation. The second phase follows upon a six-month lull in area bombing during Bomber Command’s assignment to Overlord (D-Day) duties. It is characterised by credible alternatives to area bombing, a waning sense of proportionality in Bomber Command activity, and intensifying death and destruction without justifiable purpose. We relate the breaching of the boundaries of Dirty Hands in Phase II to a precise date - September 1944. This coincides with the mutation of the strategic Wicked Problem into a Critical Problem, visible in the stalling of the Allied land campaign in France. Mistaking this for a Tame Problem, the C-in-C of Bomber Command, Arthur Harris, exploits the political context to escalate his commitment. Following Watters’ (2017) alignment of Critical Problems with Virtue Ethics, we argue that Harris’ leadership in Phase II is not consistent with Virtue Ethics (of which recognition of the boundaries of Dirty Hands is a function). Harris is the archetype of the leader who gets away with exploiting a Wicked Problem because his superiors have let down their guard. In the final instance, his failure of ethical leadership becomes their own

Automating joiners

Pictures taken from different view points cannot be stitched into a geometrically consistent mosaic, unless the structure of the scene is very special. However, geometrical consistency is not the only criterion for success: incorporating multiple view points into the same picture may produce compelling and informative representations. A multi viewpoint form of visual expression that has recently become highly popular is that of joiners (a term coined by artist David Hockney). Joiners are compositions where photographs are layered on a 2D canvas, with some photographs occluding others and boundaries fully visible. Composing joiners is currently a tedious manual process, especially when a great number of photographs is involved. We are thus interested in automating their construction. Our approach is based on optimizing a cost function encouraging image-to-image consistency which is measured on point-features and along picture boundaries. The optimization looks for consistency in the 2D composition rather than 3D geometrical scene consistency and explicitly considers occlusion between pictures. We illustrate our ideas with a number of experiments on collections of images of objects, people, and outdoor scenes

Multi-View Image Compositions

The geometry of single-viewpoint panoramas is well understood: multiple pictures taken from the same viewpoint may be stitched together into a consistent panorama mosaic. By contrast, when the point of view changes or when the scene changes (e.g., due to objects moving) no consistent mosaic may be obtained, unless the structure of the scene is very special. Artists have explored this problem and demonstrated that geometrical consistency is not the only criterion for success: incorporating multiple view points in space and time into the same panorama may produce compelling and informative pictures. We explore this avenue and suggest an approach to automating the construction of mosaics from images taken from multiple view points into a single panorama. Rather than looking at 3D scene consistency we look at image consistency. Our approach is based on optimizing a cost function that keeps into account image-to-image consistency which is measured on point-features and along picture boundaries. The optimization explicitly considers occlusion between pictures. We illustrate our ideas with a number of experiments on collections of images of objects and outdoor scenes