Organized social complexity as an analytical problem - An introduction and explication

Systems analysis of organized social complexity in terms of independent variable

Book Review

Edmund Burke\u27s Aesthetic Ideology: Language, Gender and Political Economy in Revolution (Tom Furniss) Eighteenth-Century Aesthetics and the Reconstruction of Art (Ed. Paul Mattick, Jr.) (Reviewed by Frances Ferguson) History, Gender and Eighteenth-Century Literature (Ed. Beth Fowkes Tobin) Alexander Pope and his Eighteenth-Century Women Readers (Claudia N. Thomas) (Reviewed by Charlotte Sussman) Dangerous Enthusiasm: William Blake and the Culture of Radicalism in the 1790s (Jon Mee) Witness Against the Beast: William Blake and the Moral Law (E. P. Thompson) (Reviewed by Michael Scrivener) Experiencing Narrative Worlds: On the Psychological Activities of Reading (Richard J. Gerrig) (Reviewed by Richard Marback) Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity (Ed. John R. Gillis) (Reviewed by Charles J. Stivale) Discovering Difference: Contemporary Essays in American Culture (Ed. Christoph K. Lohmann) (Reviewed by Suzanne E. Smith) Real and Imagined Women: Gender, Culture and Postcolonialism (Rajeswari Sunder Rajan) (Reviewed by Suchitra Mathur

How Classes are Made: Critical Reflections on E. P. Thompson's Theory of Working-Class Formation

http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/51104/1/336.pd

Response to Failure as Reflected in the Poetry of G. M. Hopkins, His Contemporaries (Francis Thompson and Lionel Johnson), and the Moderns (William Butler Yeats, Ireland, T. S. Eliot).

The study of the poetic persona\u27s responses to the experience of failure, as expressed in the poetry of G. M. Hopkins, his minor contemporaries (Francis Thompson and Lionel Johnson), and the moderns (particularly Dylan Thomas), actualizes the poet-text-reader interactions in the reading experience. Chapter one concentrates on the Hopkins persona as he responds to his failures in priesthood and poetry writing, the effects upon the reader, the reader\u27s involvement in the outcome of the poem, and the parallels and divergences between Hopkins and the persona. Chapter two studies Hopkins\u27 persona in his struggle to move from human isolation to human association. The poems of isolation emphasize the persona\u27s dissociation from family, homeland and humanity in general. Through the medium of human interaction, the persona establishes a bond with God. Chapter three deals with the dual vision expressed in Francis Thompson\u27s poetry--the vision of the playful child and the aged man. In examining the poems in which the persona fails or succeeds in integrating the heavens and the London streets, the central interest is in Thompson\u27s pull towards and away from Hopkins and the decadents. Chapter four is concerned with Lionel Johnson and his aesthetics of failure. A combination of the mask, anti-mask polarities of the self, the persona here is preoccupied with antithetical elements such as art and religion, life and death, and success and failure. Chapter five examines the emergence of the anti-heroic clown persona in modern poetry. The clown figure images the central paradox in the modern world-view: a rejection of theology, yet a yearning to image the self as a kind of god. The chapter briefly analyses the use of personae in Yeats, Pound and Eliot, and concentrates on the variety and complexity of the clown personae as developed by Dylan Thomas. The conclusion traces the movement from Hopkins, through Thompson and Johnson, to the moderns as that of a shift from a renewed integration of the self with God to a comic-pathetic collision of self with self and the existential reality

Complex Noun Phrases in ESL Narratives: Structural and Discourse Properties

This study characterizes the structural and discourse properties of nominal postmodifiers in the narratives of ESL learners. It assumes that a full understanding of language acquisition requires the integration of structural and functional aspects of language use. Spontaneous oral and written narratives were elicited from Japanese and Korean native speakers. The analysis of these narratives was informed by Biber, Johansson, Leech, Conrad, and Finegan\u27s (1999) descriptive grammatical categories and corpus findings and by Fox and Thompson\u27s (1990) study of relative clause function in English conversations. The discussion focuses on prepositional phrases, relative clauses, and participial clauses. The results indicate that their structural and discourse properties are largely consistent with reported English uses. Unexpected patterns are examined and tentatively explained in terms of discourse function or possible influence of the L 1. These results provide support for an approach to the study of language acquisition and use that recognizes the interdependence of discourse and grammar

Optimising Unicode Regular Expression Evaluation with Previews

The jsre regular expression library was designed to provide fast matching of complex expressions over large input streams using user-selectable character encodings. An established design approach was used: a simulated non-deterministic automaton (NFA) implemented as a virtual machine, avoiding exponential cost functions in either space or time. A deterministic automaton (DFA) was chosen as a general dispatching mechanism for Unicode character classes and this also provided the opportunity to use compact DFAs in various optimization strategies. The result was the development of a regular expression Preview which provides a summary of all the matches possible from a given point in a regular expression in a form that can be implemented as a compact DFA and can be used to further improve the performance of the standard NFA simulation algorithm. This paper formally defines a preview and describes and evaluates several optimizations using this construct. They provide significant speed improvements accrued from fast scanning of anchor positions, avoiding retesting of repeated strings in unanchored searches, and efficient searching of multiple alternate expressions which in the case of keyword searching has a time complexity which is logarithmic in the number of words to be searched

Subjektin sijamuoto 700- ja 800-luvun toscanalaisten asiakirjojen latinassa

The object of this study is the case marking of the subject in early medieval charter Latin. The work explores whether and how the nominative/accusative-type morphosyntactic alignment changed into a semantically motivated (active/inactive) alignment in Late Latin before the disappearance of the case system. It is known that the accusative originally the case of the direct object extended in Late Latin to the subject function in which Classical Latin allowed only the nominative. On this basis, it has been postulated that in Late Latin the nominative/accusative contrast was (re)semanticized so that the nominative came to encode all the Agent-like arguments and the accusative all the Patient-like arguments. The study examines which semantic and syntactic factors determine the selection of the subject case in each subject/finite verb combination in the Late Latin Charter Treebank (LLCT). The LLCT is an annotated corpus of Latin charter texts (c. 200,000 words) written in Tuscany between AD 714 and 869. The central result of the study is that the Latin of the LLCT shows a semantically based morphosyntactic alignment in those parts of nominal declension where the morphological contrast between nominative- and accusative-based forms is morphophonologically intact. The following picture of intransitivity split turns up: the low-animacy subjects of the LLCT occur more often in the accusative than do the agentive high-animacy subjects. Likewise, the accusative percentage of SO subject constructions is higher than that of A/SA subject constructions. The common denominator of the examined semantic variables is likely to be the control exercised by the subject over the verbal process. Syntactic factors seem to influence the case distribution pattern as well. For example, the immediate preverbal position of the subject implies a high retention of the nominative. The immediate preverbal position of SV(O) language is a canonical subject position where the syntactic complexity measured as dependency lengths is at its lowest and the cohesion of the verbal nucleus at its highest. Thus, a by then already marked nominative form results. The control of the subject over the verbal process (semantic variable) and the cohesion of the verbal nucleus (syntactic variable) may be partly conflated, i.e., both may affect the subject case selection in certain conditions.Klassisessa latinassa subjektin sijamuoto oli nominatiivi ja suoran objektin akkusatiivi. Myöhäislatinassa akkusatiivia alettiin käyttää myös subjektin sijana. Tämä tutkimus selvittää varhaiskeskiaikaisen asiakirjakorpuksen avulla, miten klassisen latinan nominatiivi akkusatiivi-perustainen sijamerkintäjärjestelmä muuttui vähitellen semanttisesti motivoituneeksi aktiivi inaktiivi-järjestelmäksi. Semanttisessa sijamerkinnässä nominatiivi erikoistuu merkitsemään kaikkia argumentteja, jotka ovat semanttiselta rooliltaan agentteja, ja akkusatiivi argumentteja, jotka ovat rooliltaan patientteja. Huolimatta järjestelmän semanttisuudesta myös syntaktisten tekijöiden oletetaan vaikuttavan sijamerkintään. Tutkin, mitkä semanttiset ja syntaktiset muuttujat näyttävät parhaiten selittävän subjektin sijamuodon kussakin Late Latin Charter Treebankin (LLCT) subjekti finiittiverbi-yhtymässä. LLCT on latinankielisten asiakirjatekstien annotoitu korpus (n. 200 000 sanaa), joka sisältää 519 asiakirjaa Toscanasta Italiasta vuosilta 714 869 jKr. Tutkimuksen perusteella LLCT:n latinassa vallitsi semanttisesti motivoitunut sijamerkintäjärjestelmä niissä taivutusluokissa, joissa oli säilynyt morfofonologinen ero nominatiivi- ja akkusatiivipohjaisten muotojen välillä: tarkoitteeltaan elottomat subjektit esiintyvät useammin akkusatiivissa kuin tarkoitteeltaan elolliset, agentiiviset subjektit. Vastaavasti epäakkusatiivisten rakenteiden SO-subjektit ovat useammin akkusatiivissa kuin epäergatiivisten ja transitiivisten rakenteiden A/SA-subjektit. Tutkittuja semanttisia muuttujia näyttää yhdistävän se, kuinka vahvasti subjekti kontrolloi predikaattiverbin ilmaisemaa tilaa tai toimintaa. Myös syntaktiset tekijät näyttävät vaikuttavan LLCT:n subjektien sijajakaumaan. Esimerkiksi välittömästi ennen predikaattiverbiä sijaitsevissa subjekteissa nominatiivi on erityisen yleinen. Predikaattiverbiä edeltävä asema on SV(O)-kielessä subjektin kanoninen asema, jossa dependenssietäisyytenä mitattu syntaktinen kompleksisuus on minimissään ja verbin ja sen argumenttien välinen koheesio vahvimmillaan. Tällainen ympäristö sallii oletettavasti tunnusmerkittömästä tunnusmerkkiseksi muuttuneen nominatiivin realisoitumisen. Subjektin verbaaliprosessiin kohdistama kontrolli (semanttinen muuttuja) ja verbin sekä sen argumenttien välinen koheesio (syntaktinen muuttuja) näyttävät sulautuneen osittain yhteen