The International Patent Practice Narrative: Patent Agents, Epistemic Capture and the Patent Bargain

This work explores the question of how professionalization of patent agency along with its accompanying discourse has affected the direction of international patent institutions and networks. Professionalization of patent agency is defined as the government regulation of who may provide patent agent services to the public through the form of professional licensing requirements. To the extent that professionalization of patent agency has created a unique discourse of patent agency, to what degree and in what respects has this discourse transformed global patent institutions? In particular, has this discourse created a form of ‘epistemic’ or ‘cultural’ capture that has the effect of delegitimizing other valid forms of discourse? Through the application of several methodologies, namely, historical analyses, doctrinal analyses and qualitative empirical work, this study attempts to create what epistemic capture theorists refer to as a capture story, which is a story of how cultural influences of a regulated industry – here, professional patent agents – come to dominate the regulatory discourse to the exclusion of other viable, competing conceptions of what constitutes the public interest. This work concludes that professionalization of agency within the patent system is interconnected with enablement as an organizing principle of the patent system as a social institution. Prior to professionalization, when agency was democratized throughout the patent system, so too was democratized enablement a guiding principle of the patent system. The formation of a unique, legitimized professional patent agent epistemic community has resulted in diminishing the democratization of enablement across the patent system as a social institution. This work discusses several of the practical and normative implications of the diminishing value of democratized enablement. Finally, this work concludes with a discussion of the future prospects of agency within the patent system

The formal nature of anaphoric relations

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Linguistics and Philosophy, 1982.MICROFICHE COPY AVAILABLE IN ARCHIVES AND HUMANITIESBibliography: leaves 412-419.by Joseph Aoun.Ph.D

Relativisation in Maltese

We develop a detailed description of the differences and similarities between the syntax of restrictive and non-restrictive relative clauses in Maltese. We show that Maltese makes use of both a complementiser strategy and a wh-pronoun strategy in each type of relative clause. We discuss in some detail the ways in which the distribution of gaps and resumptive pronouns differs between these two strategies, being heavily constrained in the case of the wh-pronoun strategy. The discussion highlights some differences between the standard and dialectal varieties of Maltese, especially in regard to wh-relatives. Beyond these major strategies, we illustrate two further relative constructions, a highly constrained bare relativisation strategy for restrictive relativisation and a further wh-pronoun strategy found only in non-restrictives. While the main focus of this paper is a synchronic description of relativisation in Maltese, we draw a number of comparisons between Maltese and some Arabic dialects, in particular the Western dialects to which Maltese is closely related