Courtly Love and Its Counterparts in the Medieval Mediterranean

At least since Stendhal\u27s De l\u27Amour, scholars have argued that the theories of courtly love expressed in the Old French literature of the High Middle Ages were inspired by or drew upon elements of Islamicate culture. In this dissertation, I explore the theories of love represented in works of literature, lover\u27s manuals and medical treatises composed in and around the late twelfth–century court of Marie de Champagne, which I read in conjunction with contemporaneous works from the Islamicate world, ranging from Al‑Andalus to Persia, in order to show how these works reflect the common cultural orientation of the medieval Mediterranean. By showing that the theories of amatory practice described in Andreas Capellanus\u27s De amore cannot be accounted for exclusively from within the Ovidian tradition, I posit that by viewing the Old French theories of courtly love as a synthesis of the earlier Ovidian and Islamicate traditions, as represented by Ibn Hazm’s Tawq al‑Hamāma, we can better understand the place of courtly love within the constellation of medieval Mediterranean cultures. This conclusion serves as the point of departure for my subsequent analyses as I endeavor to show that the Tristan legend drew heavily upon the Persianate epic, Vīs u Rāmīn, a claim I substantiate through a comparision between those two works and Chrétien de Troyes\u27s anti-Tristan, Cligès. Further, I maintain that the act of literary appropriation, whether through inspiration or translation, remained an active process that sought to recontextualize and adapt content to the needs of its new cultural milieu. I then focus on the routes of pilgrimage and trade that spanned and linked the fragmented spaces of Christian and Islamic Mediterraneans and that made such cultural and literary exchanges possible accross political, cultural, religion and linguistic borders. I do this through a study of the “Tale of Niʿma and Nuʿm” from the Alf Layla wa Layla and its old French adaptation, the Conte de Floire et Blancheflor by Robert d\u27Orbigny. There were, however, limits to the influence of Islamicate thought on the representation of love in Old French literature as is evinced in medical discourse: although theoretical medicine was revolutionized by the translation of medical treatises sich as Constantinus Africanus\u27s eleventh-century Viaticum peregrinantis, literary love-discourse resisted change. Even as theories of love and lovesickness were redefined in light of this new medical knowledge, I demonstrate that the literary representation of love medicine continued to cleave to older, Ovidian tropes through the middle of the thirteenth century. By focusing on theories of love, which intersect with as disparate domains as theology and law, politics and science, I am able to show the ways in which Old French literature engages with and extends contemporaneous cultural and literary trends within the Islamicate world, thereby resituating it in its Mediterranean context

Determinants of international migration

Migrations have occurred throughout human history. Today, people inhabit virtually every corner of the world. In fact, given the upsurge in the last few decades, more people are on the move today than at any other point in time. In order to get an understanding of the driving forces shaping migration patterns across countries and within destinations, this dissertation investigates the determinants of bilateral international migration and the location choice of immigrants with particular attention to a number of methodological challenges and for various geographical regions, i.e. migration to the OECD, migration between SSA countries and immigrants’ location choice in Belgium. Specifically, the first chapter presents an overview of the most important migration theories, the stance of the recent empirical literature and methodological issues that arise. It elucidates also how the following empirical chapters address some of these methodological issues as well as how they contribute to the literature. The second chapter investigates the determinants of bilateral immigrant flows to 19 OECD countries between 1998 and 2007 from both advanced and developing origin countries. It pays particular attention to dynamics by including both the lagged migrant flow and the migrant stock to capture partial adjustment and network effects. To correct for the dynamic panel data bias of the fixed effects estimator a bootstrap algorithm is used. The results indicate that immigrants are primarily attracted by better income opportunities and higher growth rates abroad. Also short-run increases in the host country’s employment rate positively affect migration from both advanced and developing countries. High public services, on the other hand, discourage migration from advanced countries but exert a pull on migration from developing sources, in line with the welfare state hypothesis. Finally, there is evidence for both partial adjustment and the presence of strong network effects. This confirms that both should be considered crucial elements of the migration model and that a correction for their joint inclusion is required. Despite great accomplishments in the migration literature, however, the determinants of South-South migration remain poorly understood. In an attempt to fill this gap, the third chapter formulates and tests an empirical model for intraregional migration in Sub-Saharan Africa within an extended human capital framework, taking into account spatial interaction. Using bilateral panel data between 1980-2000, intraregional migration on the subcontinent appears predominantly driven by economic opportunities and sociopolitics in the host country, facilitated by geographical proximity. The role played by network effects and environmental conditions is also apparent. Finally, origin and destination spatial dependence should definitely not be ignored. The fourth chapter analyses migratory streams to Belgian municipalities between 1990-2007. The Belgian population register constitutes a rich and unique database of yearly migrant inflows and stocks broken down by nationality, which allows to empirically explain the location choice of immigrants at municipality level. Specifically, it aims at separating the network effect, captured by the number of previous arrivals, from other location-specific characteristics such as local labour or housing market conditions and the presence of public amenities. Labour and housing market variables are expected to operate on different levels and develop a nested model of location choice in which an immigrant first chooses a broad area, roughly corresponding to a labour market, and subsequently chooses a municipality within this area. The spatial repartition of immigrants in Belgium seems to be determined by both network effects and local characteristics. The determinants of local attractiveness vary by nationality, as expected, but for all nationalities, they seem to dominate the impact of network effects

Minimizing dependencies across languages and speakers. Evidence from basque, polish and spanish and native and non-native bilinguals.

223 p.Within the last years, evidence for a general preference towards grammars reducing the linear distance between elements in a dependency has been accumulating (e. g., Futrell, Mahowald, and Gibson, 2015b; Gildea and Temperley, 2010). This cognitive bias towards dependency length minimization has been argued to result from communicative and cognitive pressures at play during language production. Although corpus evidence supporting this claim is quite broad insofar as grammaticalized structures are concerned (e. g., Futrell et al., 2015b; Liu, 2008; Temperley, 2007, among others), its validity rests on more shaky foundations regarding production preferences (Stallings, MacDonald, and O¿Seaghdha, 1998; Wasow, 1997; Yamashita and Chang, 2001, among others). This dissertation intends to address this gap. It examines whether dependency length minimization is an active mechanism shaping language production preferences, and explores the specific nature of this principle and its interplay with linguistic specifications and architectural properties of the human memory system. In a series of 5 cued-recall production experiments and 2 complex memory span tasks, I investigate the effect of dependency length in modulating production preferences across languages with differing grammatical properties (e.g., head-position and case marking) and across speakers (e. g., natives and non-natives and with variable working memory capacity). I begin by showing that the preference for short dependencies is better accounted by a general cognitive preference for minimizing the distance across dependents than by conceptual availability. I then show how languages as diverse as Basque, Spanish and Polish tend to choose the communicatively more efficient structures, when there is more than one available alternative to express the same meaning. Crucially, I confirm that there is consistent variation regarding this tendency both across languages and across speakers. I argue that language-specific (e. g., pluripersonal agreement) and general cognitive mechanisms (e. g., word order based-expectations) interact with the preference towards dependency length minimization. Also, I show that the degree of communicative efficiency achieved by highly proficient and early non-native bilingual speakers is lower than that reached by their native peers. Finally, I find that the bias towards shifted orders that yield shorter dependencies correlates positively with working memory. Based on these findings, I conclude that there is strong evidence supporting the claim that dependency length minimization is a pervasive force in human language production, resulting from a general cognitive constraint towards efficient communication, and also that its strength varies depending on grammatical and individual specifications compatible with information-theoretic considerations

Minimizing dependencies across languages and speakers. Evidence from basque, polish and spanish and native and non-native bilinguals.

223 p.Within the last years, evidence for a general preference towards grammars reducing the linear distance between elements in a dependency has been accumulating (e. g., Futrell, Mahowald, and Gibson, 2015b; Gildea and Temperley, 2010). This cognitive bias towards dependency length minimization has been argued to result from communicative and cognitive pressures at play during language production. Although corpus evidence supporting this claim is quite broad insofar as grammaticalized structures are concerned (e. g., Futrell et al., 2015b; Liu, 2008; Temperley, 2007, among others), its validity rests on more shaky foundations regarding production preferences (Stallings, MacDonald, and O¿Seaghdha, 1998; Wasow, 1997; Yamashita and Chang, 2001, among others). This dissertation intends to address this gap. It examines whether dependency length minimization is an active mechanism shaping language production preferences, and explores the specific nature of this principle and its interplay with linguistic specifications and architectural properties of the human memory system. In a series of 5 cued-recall production experiments and 2 complex memory span tasks, I investigate the effect of dependency length in modulating production preferences across languages with differing grammatical properties (e.g., head-position and case marking) and across speakers (e. g., natives and non-natives and with variable working memory capacity). I begin by showing that the preference for short dependencies is better accounted by a general cognitive preference for minimizing the distance across dependents than by conceptual availability. I then show how languages as diverse as Basque, Spanish and Polish tend to choose the communicatively more efficient structures, when there is more than one available alternative to express the same meaning. Crucially, I confirm that there is consistent variation regarding this tendency both across languages and across speakers. I argue that language-specific (e. g., pluripersonal agreement) and general cognitive mechanisms (e. g., word order based-expectations) interact with the preference towards dependency length minimization. Also, I show that the degree of communicative efficiency achieved by highly proficient and early non-native bilingual speakers is lower than that reached by their native peers. Finally, I find that the bias towards shifted orders that yield shorter dependencies correlates positively with working memory. Based on these findings, I conclude that there is strong evidence supporting the claim that dependency length minimization is a pervasive force in human language production, resulting from a general cognitive constraint towards efficient communication, and also that its strength varies depending on grammatical and individual specifications compatible with information-theoretic considerations

Price, Perceived Value and Customer Satisfaction: A Text-Based Econometric Analysis of Yelp! Reviews

We examine the antecedents of customer satisfaction in the restaurant sector, paying particular attention to perceived value and price level. Using Latent Dirichlet Allocation, we extract latent topics from the text of Yelp! reviews, then analyze the relationship between these topics and satisfaction, measured as the difference between review rating and user average review rating

International migration for employment and domestic labour market development:: the jordanian experience.

Following a review and evaluation of previous research in the field of international migration for employment, it is argued that the extent to which such migration is beneficial depends critically on how it is organized and by whom. The development of Jordan's traditional image as a regional labour supplier is traced from the early twentieth century and is explained largely in terms of a response to repeated economic and political crises. A case study of the Kuwait labour market is used to demonstrate the recent (post-1978) collapse in Jordanian labour migration and to establish the changing character of the international labour market. The central role assumed by international emigration for employment in the Jordanian economy and the problems; and policy constraints which that places on labour market management are illustrated. An attempt is made to identify scarce skills and to assess the development and utility of the government's policy response towards labour shortages. The scale and characteristics of labour inflows into the Jordanian labour market are established. This reveals the complex role of immigrant workers in an emigrant economy and demonstrates the need for a substantial revision of the 'replacement' labour migration model. The parallel themes of primary labour emigration and secondary labour immigration are explored in a detailed case study of local labour markets and agricultural development in the East Jordan Valley. A concluding chapter summarises the problems of manpower planning and of labour market information: gathering under conditions of heightened uncertainty

Semantic and Syntactic Matching of Heterogeneous e-Catalogues

In e-procurement, companies use e-catalogues to exchange product infor-mation with business partners. Matching e-catalogues with product requests helps the suppliers to identify the best business opportunities in B2B e-Marketplaces. But various ways to specify products and the large variety of e-catalogue formats used by different business actors makes it difficult. This Ph.D. thesis aims to discover potential syntactic and semantic rela-tionships among product data in procurement documents and exploit it to find similar e-catalogues. Using a Concept-based Vector Space Model, product data and its semantic interpretation is used to find the correlation of product data. In order to identify important terms in procurement documents, standard e-catalogues and e-tenders are used as a resource to train a Product Named Entity Recognizer to find B2B product mentions in e-catalogues. The proposed approach makes it possible to use the benefits of all availa-ble semantic resources and schemas but not to be dependent on any specific as-sumption. The solution can serve as a B2B product search system in e-Procurement platforms and e-Marketplaces

U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform

The U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform was created by Congress to assess U.S. immigration policy and make recommendations regarding its implementation and effects. Mandated in the Immigration Act of 1990 to submit an interim report in 1994 and a final report in 1997, the Commission has undertaken public hearings, fact-finding missions, and expert consultations to identify the major immigration-related issues facing the United States today.LBJ School of Public Affair