The spatiotemporal domains of natural climate solutions research and strategies for implementation in the Pacific Northwest, USA

Natural climate solutions have been proposed as a way to mitigate climate change by removing CO2 and other greenhouse gases from the atmosphere and increasing carbon storage in ecosystems. The adoption of such practices is required at large spatial and temporal scales, which means that local implementation across different land use and conservation sectors must be coordinated at landscape and regional levels. Here, we describe the spatiotemporal domains of research in the field of climate solutions and, as a first approximation, we use the Pacific Northwest (PNW) of the United States as a model system to evaluate the potential for coordinated implementations. By combining estimates of soil organic carbon stocks and CO2 fluxes with projected changes in climate, we show how land use may be prioritized to improve carbon drawdown and permanence across multiple sectors at local to regional scales. Our consideration of geographical context acknowledges some of the ecological and social challenges of climate change mitigation efforts for the implementation of scalable solutions

The importance of language for language development: Linguistic determinism in the 1980s

The semantic and syntactic functions of verbs are the major aspects of linguistic complexity that contribute to the cognitive requirements for learning language between two and three years of age. Several contrastive categories of verbs emerged from our studies with action/state as the largest and most general. Contrastive subcategories of action verbs were locative/nonlocative action, durative/nondurative action, and completive/noncompletive action. The subcategories of state verbs were volitional/epistemic/notice/communication states. The psychological and linguistic validity of these semantic categories rests on their being coextensive with major grammatical developments and/or their sequential development

Variations on the Pear Tree Experiment : different variables, new results?

Inspired by the Pear Stories Project, the Pear Tree Project has investigated how different cultures and languages describe the same film in order to apply its findings to audio description (AD). Participants from different countries were asked to "write down what they saw" in a controlled setting. This article proposes an alternative experiment, also based on the original Pear Stories Project, which aims to shed light on two issues: how different describer profiles (translation students with AD training/without AD training) and different instructions concerning the target audience profiles (blind/non-blind) could alter the final production. The results are analysed in this paper, taking into account the elements covered in the original Pear Stories Project as well as some additional elements proposed by the authors

CANELC: constructing an e-language corpus

This paper reports on the construction of CANELC: the Cambridge and Nottingham e-language Corpus.3 CANELC is a one million word corpus of digital communication in English, taken from online discussion boards, blogs, tweets, emails and SMS messages. The paper outlines the approaches used when planning the corpus: obtaining consent; collecting the data and compiling the corpus database. This is followed by a detailed analysis of some of the patterns of language used in the corpus. The analysis includes a discussion of the key words and phrases used as well as the common themes and semantic associations connected with the data. These discussions form the basis of an investigation of how e-language operates in both similar and different ways to spoken and written records of communication (as evidenced by the BNC - British National Corpus). 3 CANELC stands for Cambridge and Nottingham e-language Corpus. This corpus has been built as part of a collaborative project between The University of Nottingham and Cambridge University Press with whom sole copyright of the annotated corpus resides. CANELC comprises one-million words of digital English taken from SMS messages, blogs, tweets, discussion board content and private/business emails. Plans to extend the corpus are under discussion. The legal dimension to corpus ‘ownership’ of some forms of unannotated data is a complex one and is under constant review. At the present time the annotated corpus is only available to authors and researchers working for CUP and is not more generally available

Recognizing speculative language in biomedical research articles: a linguistically motivated perspective

We explore a linguistically motivated approach to the problem of recognizing speculative language (“hedging”) in biomedical research articles. We describe a method, which draws on prior linguistic work as well as existing lexical resources and extends them by introducing syntactic patterns and a simple weighting scheme to estimate the speculation level of the sentences. We show that speculative language can be recognized successfully with such an approach, discuss some shortcomings of the method and point out future research possibilities.

Contrastive focus and emphasis

The paper puts forward a discourse-semantic account of the notoriously evasive phenomena of contrastivity and emphasis. Based on new evidence from Chadic, it is argued that occurrences of focus that are treated in terms of ‘contrastive focus’, ‘kontrast’ (Vallduví-Vilkuna 1998) or ‘identificational focus’ (É. Kiss 1998) in the literature should not be analyzed in familiar semantic terms as involving the introduction and subsequent exclusion of alternatives. Rather, an adequate analysis must take into account discourse-semantic notions like ‘hearer expectation’ or ‘discourse expectability’ of the focused content in a given discourse situation. The less expected the focus content is judged to be for the hearer, relative to the Common Ground, the more likely a speaker is to mark the focus constituent by means of special grammatical devices, thus giving rise to emphasis

Describing Sensory Experience: The Genre of Wine Reviews

The purpose of the article is to shed light on how experiences of sensory perceptions in the domains of VISION, SMELL, TASTE and TOUCH are recast into text and discourse in the genre of wine reviews. Because of the alleged paucity of sensory vocabularies, in particular in the olfactory domain, it is of particular interest to investigate what resources language has to offer in order to describe those experiences. We show that the main resources are, on the one hand, words evoking properties that are applicable cross-modally and properties of objects that range over more than one domain, and on the other, vivid imagery that compares the characteristics of the wine with people, building, animals and the hustle and bustle of market places and other events. The second goal is to account for the construals of the meanings of the expressions used in the recontextualization into written discourse in the light of their apparent flexibility across the descriptions of the sensory experiences. In contrast to a large body of the literature on sensory meanings in language, we argue that the descriptors of properties such as sharp, soft, lemon and cherry used to describe a wine’s qualities across the sensory domains are not polysemous synesthetic metaphors, but monosemous synesthetic metonymizations, more precisely zone activations. With regard to the imagery used, the construals represented cover both similes, metaphorizations and metonymizations proper

The discourse dynamics approach to metaphor and metaphor-led discourse analysis

The use of metaphor as a tool to uncover people's ideas, attitudes, and values through analysis of discourse is demonstrated and illustrated with data collected in a social science research project. A 'discourse dynamics' approach to metaphor situated within a complexity/dynamic systems perspective is developed. This approach is turned into a method of 'metaphor-led discourse analysis' which is described in detail, using a focus group discussion to illustrate the procedure: transcription, metaphor identification, coding metaphors and using software, and finding patterns of metaphor use from coded data. The reasoning that justifies decisions at each stage of the procedure is made explicit so that the trustworthiness of the method can be maximized. The method of metaphor-led discourse analysis has been developed through a series of empirical projects to be accessible and relevant to social science researchers as well as to metaphor scholars

Formulaic Language in Native and Second Language Speakers: Psycholinguistics, Corpus Linguistics, and TESOL

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/89473/1/j.1545-7249.2008.tb00137.x.pd