Leibniz, Acosmism, and Incompossibility

Leibniz claims that God acts in the best possible way, and that this includes creating exactly one world. But worlds are aggregates, and aggregates have a low degree of reality or metaphysical perfection, perhaps none at all. This is Leibniz’s tendency toward acosmism, or the view that there this no such thing as creation-as-a-whole. Many interpreters reconcile Leibniz’s acosmist tendency with the high value of worlds by proposing that God sums the value of each substance created, so that the best world is just the world with the most substances. I call this way of determining the value of a world the Additive Theory of Value (ATV), and argue that it leads to the current and insoluble form of the problem of incompossibility. To avoid the problem, I read “possible worlds” in “God chooses the best of all possible worlds” as referring to God’s ideas of worlds. These ideas, though built up from essences, are themselves unities and so well suited to be the value bearers that Leibniz’s theodicy requires. They have their own value, thanks to their unity, and that unity is not preserved when more essences are added

Resistance to change. Exploring the convergence of institutions, organizations and the mind toward a common phenomenon

Resistance to change is not a new concept in economic literature (Coch and French 1948, Boulding 1956). However, in the last few decades it has acquired specific connotations and meanings that deserve attention. The first aim of the paper is to analyze how the concept has evolved since its introduction by Lewin (1946) and how it has diversified. Having acknowledged that resistance characterizes institutions, organizations and the mind, we suggest that the convergence toward such phenomenon is not surprising. Indeed, it may be explained by taking the bounds that affect the cognitive and emotional counterparts of economic behavior into account. We finally reinterpret resistance to change as a heuristic that helps manage the natural tendency of human beings to fear, uncertainty and its expected effects.Change - cognitive economics - heuristic - emotions - resistance

"Come Si Dice in Italiano?": A Case Study of L1 Attrition

This paper describes a case study of Italian Ll attrition. Several areas of the participant's Ll are examined, with a focus on lexical attrition and the consequent use of communication strategies to prevent communication breakdowns. Particular attention is given to the manner in which the redundancy reduction, markedness, and salience principles may affect production. The participant's Ll competence is tested as well to examine whether certain areas of it are at all affected by attrition. From the data collected, there are reasons to believe that attrition affects mainly production, in the form of diminished accessibilitY

The construction of viewpoint aspect: the imperfective revisited

This paper argues for a constructionist approach to viewpoint Aspect by exploring the idea that it does not exert any altering force on the situation-aspect properties of predicates. The proposal is developed by analyzing the syntax and semantics of the imperfective, which has been attributed a coercer role in the literature as a de-telicizer and de-stativizer in the progressive, and as a de-eventivizer in the so-called ability (or attitudinal) and habitual readings. This paper proposes a unified semantics for the imperfective, preserving the properties of eventualities throughout the derivation. The paper argues that the semantics of viewpoint aspect is encoded in a series of functional heads containing interval-ordering predicates and quantifiers. This richer structure allows us to account for a greater amount of phenomena, such as the perfective nature of the individual instantiations of the event within a habitual construction or the nonculminating reading of perfective accomplishments in Spanish. This paper hypothesizes that nonculminating accomplishments have an underlying structure corresponding to the perfective progressive. As a consequence, the progressive becomes disentangled from imperfectivity and is given a novel analysis. The proposed syntax is argued to have a corresponding explicit morphology in languages such as Spanish and a nondifferentiating one in languages such as English; however, the syntax-semantics underlying both of these languages is argued to be the same

A grammar of Hadari Arabic: a contrastive-typological perspective

This thesis provides a synchronic morphosyntactic description of the Hadari dialect, a variety of Gulf Arabic spoken in Kuwait, and presents a current documentation of this rapidly changing, under documented spoken dialect of Arabic. The description covers the basic morphology and syntax of Hadari, focusing mainly on the syntax. The description refers to Modern Standard Arabic both as a point of comparison and a point of reference when describing the spoken dialect’s morphology and syntax. The study also draws on discussion of existing descriptions of the dialect and reflects upon their current adequacy. This thesis adopts a typological approach to describing the Hadari dialect, making reference both to Greenbergian typology and to modern typological theory. Two of the main typological theories applied in this description include an application of Matthew Dryer’s exceptionless properties of V-initial languages (1990) and of the Branching Direction Theory (Dryer1992), to the spoken dialect. Furthermore, the study sheds light on the similarities and differences between Modern Standard Arabic and Hadari, regarding the expression of various syntactic aspects. One of the more significant contributions in this section is the typological description of the relative clause in Hadari. Furthermore, the thesis provides descriptions of clause structure, word order, modality, valency, copular clauses, interrogatives, negation, and subordination, in Hadari. The analysis is based on empirical data from recordings of everyday interactions in uncontrolled environment, television shows, radio broadcasts, and personal interviews

New Perspectives in Biblical and Rabbinic Hebrew

"Most of the papers in this volume originated as presentations at the conference Biblical Hebrew and Rabbinic Hebrew: New Perspectives in Philology and Linguistics, which was held at the University of Cambridge, 8–10th July, 2019. The aim of the conference was to build bridges between various strands of research in the field of Hebrew language studies that rarely meet, namely philologists working on Biblical Hebrew, philologists working on Rabbinic Hebrew and theoretical linguists. This volume is the published outcome of this initiative. It contains peer-reviewed papers in the fields of Biblical and Rabbinic Hebrew that advance the field by the philological investigation of primary sources and the application of cutting-edge linguistic theory. These include contributions by established scholars and by students and early career researchers.

The syntax and discourse function of preposed temporal ἐπεί-clauses in Homeric Greek

The interplay in the Iliad and Odyssey between preposed temporal ἐπεί-clauses and preceding text is investigated. It is demonstrated that the metrical and compositional conditions of the poems influence lexical and grammatical form, distorting or restricting the semantics of some words while prescribing a limited set of phrasal patterns from which to form subordinate clauses. By combining in a single investigation observations on the syntax and discourse function of ἐπεί-clauses, a distinction can be drawn between components which are predominantly necessary for metrical or information purposes (such as αὐτάρ and personal pronouns) and those which facilitate the organisation of the text (such as the antiphonal relationship of imperfect and aorist accounts of events). Following an introduction to the syntax of ἐπεί-clauses, Chapter 3 argues that out of metrical necessity the typical antithetical meaning of αὐτάρ weakened to a progressive meaning when juxtaposed to ἐπεί. In Chapter 4 instances of left-dislocation of noun phrases before a preposed ἐπεί-clause are considered. It is suggested that this dislocation is determined by the discourse processing challenges posed by subordination and does not perform the role of organising discourse on a broader textual basis. Chapter 5 surveys the discourse function of the ἐπεί-clauses with the observation made that those clauses which start books bear a subtly different relationship to preceding text when compared with book-internal clauses. In Chapter 6 a range of preposed clauses are examined; they are shown to relate back to preceding text through recapitulation or through expectancy. Chapter 7 considers the discourse function of ἐπεί-clauses which, in their relationship to a preceding account of the commencement of that event, emphasise thorough completion. The wording of the ἐπεί-clause is considered in Chapter 8, with the observation made that ἐπεί-clauses which denote completion are lexically and/or phrasally distinctive

Elementary New Testament Greek

https://place.asburyseminary.edu/academicbooks/1005/thumbnail.jp

Advances in formal Slavic linguistics 2018 (Volume 4)

Advances in Formal Slavic Linguistics 2018 offers a selection of articles that were prepared on the basis of talks presented at the conference Formal Description of Slavic Languages (FDSL 13) or at the parallel Workshop on the Semantics of Noun Phrases, which were held on December 5–7, 2018, at the University of Göttingen. The volume covers a wide array of topics, such as situation relativization with adverbial clauses (causation, concession, counterfactuality, condition, and purpose), clause-embedding by means of a correlate, agreeing vs. transitive ‘need’ constructions, clitic doubling, affixation and aspect, evidentiality and mirativity, pragmatics coming with the particle li, uniqueness, definiteness, maximal interpretation (exhaustivity), kinds and subkinds, bare nominals, multiple determination, quantification, demonstratives, possessives, complex measure nouns, and the NP/DP parameter. The set of object languages comprises Russian, Czech, Polish, Bulgarian, Macedonian, Serbo-Croatian, and Torlak Serbian. The numerous topics addressed demonstrate the importance of Slavic linguistics. The original analyses prove that substantial progress has been made in major fields of research