Gavagai again

Quine (1960, ch.2) claims that there are a variety of equally good schemes for translating or interpreting ordinary talk. ‘Rabbit’ might be taken to divide its reference over rabbits, over temporal slices of rabbits, or undetached parts of rabbits, without significantly affecting which sentences get classified as true and which as false. This is the basis of his famous ‘argument from below’ to the conclusion that there can be no fact of the matter as to how reference is to be divided. Putative counterexamples to Quine’s claim have been put forward in the past (see especially Evans, 1975; Fodor, 1993), and various patches have been suggested (e.g. Wright, 1997). One lacuna in this literature is that one does not find any detailed presentation of what exactly these interpretations are supposed to be. Drawing on contemporary literature on persistence, the present paper sets out detailed semantic treatments for fragments of English, whereby predicates such as ‘rabbit’ divide their reference over four-dimensional continuants (Quine’s rabbits), instantaneous temporal slices of those continuants (Quine’s rabbit-slices) and the simple elements which compose those slices (undetached rabbit parts) respectively. Once we have the systematic interpretations on the table, we can get to work evaluating them

RHETORICAL MOVES AND LINGUISTIC REALIZATIONS OF RESEARCH ARTICLE ABSTRACTS BY INDONESIAN AUTHORS IN APPLIED LINGUISTICS PUBLISHED IN INTERNATIONAL JOURNALS

The existence of abstract is compulsory within a research article (RA). Abstract is a summary or brief overview that describes entire content of RA. At a glimpse, abstract tells readers what the RA is all about and at the same time, it acknowledges readers and allows them indirectly to give pre-assessment about quality of the RA. This study aims to find rhetorical moves and linguistic features; tenses and voice forms of RA abstracts by Indonesian authors in Applied Linguistics published in international journals. Using content analysis method, sixty RA abstracts were extracted from two international journals; Indonesian Journal of Applied Linguistics (IJAL) and TEFLIN journal, and examined based on their rhetorical move following five-move model by Hyland (2005) and Arsyad (2014) for fact-finding. The results reveal; 1) Move 2 (Aim/ Purpose), Move 3 (Method) and Move 4 (Finding/ Result) exist in total sixty RA abstracts, unlike Move 1 (Introduction) and Move 5 (Conclusion and Suggestion), 2) The Simple Present Tense is major tense to apply in all rhetorical moves except in Move 3 (Method) in which Past Tense is mostly used. 3) Active voice dominates rhetorical moves except in Move 3 (Method) in which Passive voice is precisely more applied. This study concludes that the use of rhetorical move models and linguistic features in RA abstracts implies the quality of RA abstracts. Indonesian authors are suggested to follow international standards and trends to achieve outstanding RA abstract