Living in a global world: ethnobotany, local knowledge and sustainability. 58th Annual Meeting of the Society for Economic Botany: book of abstracts

It gives us great pleasure to welcome you to the 58th Annual Meeting of the Society for Economic Botany (SEB) and the 2nd Hispano-Portuguese Meeting on Ethnobiology (II EHPE), a joint event aiming at connecting economic botanists and ethnobiologists from all over the world. The Society for Economic Botany (SEB) was established in 1959 and the annual meeting brings together people interested in the past, present, and future uses of plants, and the relationship between plants and human societies. SEB fosters and encourages scientific research and education in the transdisciplinary field of economic botany. With members from across the U.S.A. and more than 64 countries around the globe, SEB serves as the world’s largest and most-respected professional society for individuals who are concerned with basic botanical, as well as, with agronomical, anthropological, phytochemical, ethnological and many others studies of plants known to be useful or those which may have potential uses so far undeveloped. Since 1960, SEB Annual Meetings provide a stimulating milieu for scientific exchange amongst SEB members and researchers from different countries and regions. The Hispano-Portuguese Meeting on Ethnobiology (EHPE) highlights previous collaborations between Hispano-Portuguese ethnobiologists and aims to involve the global Hispanic-Portuguese-speaking communities to the greatest extent possible. Albacete, Castilla La Mancha, Spain, hosted the I EHPE in 2010, simultaneously with the 11th Congress of the International Society of Ethnopharmacology (ISE 2010). In Albacete, about 80 Hispano-Portuguese speakers with diverse backgrounds and interest, researching in Europe, South America, Africa and Asia, presented their works and discussed wider importance of Ethnobiological research. Six years later, we promote a second meeting (II EHPE) aiming at updating and strengthening networks between different research groups, experts, students and any people interested in interdisciplinary ethno biological approaches. In 2017, the 58th SEB Annual Meeting and the 2nd Hispano-Portuguese Meeting on Ethnobiology are held in the city of Bragança, Portugal within an ecological and culturally fascinating environment, organized by the Mountain Research Centre (CIMO) of the Polytechnic Institute of Bragança (IPB) and the Society for Economic Botany (SEB) with the active involvement of local, national and international entities. Several institutions sponsored a comprehensive programme: the William L. Brown Center (USA), Springer Nature (UK), Regional Northern Culture Directorate (DRCN, Portugal), Bragança Municipality (CMB, Portugal), Centro Ciencia Viva de Bragança (Portugal) and Fundação Caixa CA, Bragança (Portugal). The conference theme Living in a global world: ethnobotany, local knowledge and sustainability gathered 230 delegates from 41 countries of Africa, Americas, Asia, Europe and Oceania. A total of 230 abstracts were submitted: 12 plenary lectures and special addresses, 152 papers and 66 posters. Bringing together the European community and a broader international community of scientists and stakeholders, this joint event creates a unique opportunity for individuals and institutions to share experiences and to establish information and collaboration networks, taking advantage of a multicultural, friendly and pleasant environment. Thank you for your contributions and support! We are very grateful to those who helped and contributed to achieve this event.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Using a word knowledge framework to research vocabulary

The study of vocabulary acquisition is not exactly a new area, but previous research and hypothesizing has failed to produce a coherent overall theory which adequately describes it. This is partly because of the complexity of the subject. One method of reducing the complexity is to work with the individual components of vocabulary knowledge, in an attempt to understand the whole by first better understanding the parts. The word knowledge listing proposed by Nation (1990) is adopted in this thesis as a framework from which to study vocabulary. Chapter 1 introduces the word knowledge framework. Chapter 2 provides a literature review which summarizes the research concerning each of the eight types of word knowledge. Chapter 3 reports on a study which attempts to quantify native and non-native intuitions of word frequency. Chapter 4 describes how a procedure for weighting word association responses was developed. Chapter 5 does the same for a measure of collocational knowledge. Chapter 6 applies the word knowledge research paradigm to the evaluation of the vocabulary items on the TOEFL test. Chapter 7 reports on a longitudinal study of four non-native subjects which tracked their incremental acquisition of spelling, association, collocation, grammar, and meaning knowledge for eleven words over one year. Chapter 8 examines the data from the longitudinal study to see if the various kinds of word knowledge are learned in a developmental sequence. Chapter 9 concludes the thesis by giving the author's opinions about the strengths and weaknesses of the reported course of research

Using a word knowledge framework to research vocabulary

The study of vocabulary acquisition is not exactly a new area, but previous research and hypothesizing has failed to produce a coherent overall theory which adequately describes it. This is partly because of the complexity of the subject. One method of reducing the complexity is to work with the individual components of vocabulary knowledge, in an attempt to understand the whole by first better understanding the parts. The word knowledge listing proposed by Nation (1990) is adopted in this thesis as a framework from which to study vocabulary. Chapter 1 introduces the word knowledge framework. Chapter 2 provides a literature review which summarizes the research concerning each of the eight types of word knowledge. Chapter 3 reports on a study which attempts to quantify native and non-native intuitions of word frequency. Chapter 4 describes how a procedure for weighting word association responses was developed. Chapter 5 does the same for a measure of collocational knowledge. Chapter 6 applies the word knowledge research paradigm to the evaluation of the vocabulary items on the TOEFL test. Chapter 7 reports on a longitudinal study of four non-native subjects which tracked their incremental acquisition of spelling, association, collocation, grammar, and meaning knowledge for eleven words over one year. Chapter 8 examines the data from the longitudinal study to see if the various kinds of word knowledge are learned in a developmental sequence. Chapter 9 concludes the thesis by giving the author's opinions about the strengths and weaknesses of the reported course of research

The Shareholder Value Revolution

My dissertation blends intellectual and business history to explain why American businesses chose to endorse the idea that corporations existed primarily to maximize the value of their shareholders’ investments during the final decades of the twentieth century. Shareholder value maximization was not just a financial strategy that corporate leaders adopted, it was an entirely different way of understanding what a corporation was and what its place in society should be. This new way of understanding the corporation was the product of decades of research in financial economics. Financial economists argued that corporations owed nothing to society beyond the maximization of shareholder value and that managers should focus on boosting their firms’ stock price above all else. In the 1980s and 1990s, activist investors, management consultants, legal theorists, and financial economists themselves used these ideas to justify hostile takeovers of businesses with low stock prices and to pressure managers to restructure their businesses around the promotion of shareholder value. Through an examination of these consultants’ methods and the theory behind them, this dissertation demonstrates how ideas in favor of shareholder value maximization redefined fundamental business concepts such as profit and value. This process of redefinition transformed actions once seen as signs of corporate failure like layoffs and divestitures into signs that managers were willing to make the difficult choices needed to redirect corporate funds away from workers and “unproductive” investment and to shareholders. Consultants and academics also encouraged companies’ boards of directors to grant top executives compensation in the form of stock options to encourage managers to engage in the often-painful sorts of restructurings needed to maximize shareholder value. Thanks to boards’ generosity with these stock options, executives were able to take home unprecedentedly large levels of compensation during the late 1980s and the 1990s, while being incentivized to shed their obligations to workers and to maximize value for shareholders. The root of contemporary concerns about economic inequality and a slowdown in economic growth trace back to these decisions that executives made to embrace shareholder value maximization

Maritime expressions:a corpus based exploration of maritime metaphors

This study uses a purpose-built corpus to explore the linguistic legacy of Britain’s maritime history found in the form of hundreds of specialised ‘Maritime Expressions’ (MEs), such as TAKEN ABACK, ANCHOR and ALOOF, that permeate modern English. Selecting just those expressions commencing with ’A’, it analyses 61 MEs in detail and describes the processes by which these technical expressions, from a highly specialised occupational discourse community, have made their way into modern English. The Maritime Text Corpus (MTC) comprises 8.8 million words, encompassing a range of text types and registers, selected to provide a cross-section of ‘maritime’ writing. It is analysed using WordSmith analytical software (Scott, 2010), with the 100 million-word British National Corpus (BNC) as a reference corpus. Using the MTC, a list of keywords of specific salience within the maritime discourse has been compiled and, using frequency data, concordances and collocations, these MEs are described in detail and their use and form in the MTC and the BNC is compared. The study examines the transformation from ME to figurative use in the general discourse, in terms of form and metaphoricity. MEs are classified according to their metaphorical strength and their transference from maritime usage into new registers and domains such as those of business, politics, sports and reportage etc. A revised model of metaphoricity is developed and a new category of figurative expression, the ‘resonator’, is proposed. Additionally, developing the work of Lakov and Johnson, Kovesces and others on Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT), a number of Maritime Conceptual Metaphors are identified and their cultural significance is discussed