Budgeting in a Chaotic Economic Environment ... Factors Leading to Improvement

Traditional budgets and budgeting processes have been identified as frustrating and inflexible. They are based on immovable targets and often lead to suboptimal attitudes and behaviors. When the budget process is performed in a chaotic economic environment, these negative aspects are exacerbated. This paper identifies and discusses actions that can be implemented to enhance the flexibility of budgets and their processes and to reduce the negative aspects involved

Exploration Of Accounting Software Usage: An Empirical Research Applied On The Pennsylvania Home Building Industry

The purpose of this study was to investigate the utilization of information technology in accounting functions, related to the scale of operations, by Pennsylvania’s home building contractors.  The researchers examined whether differences in firm size played a factor in how often accounting or project management software was used for job costing, whether or not the primary accounting function was computerized, and if computerized, the primary program used for the accounting functions by home builders. According to the findings, the researchers concluded that there are significant differences among and between firm sizes in the use of accounting and project management software for job costing by Pennsylvania home building firms.  Secondly, the data showed significant differences existed among firm sizes between the use of a computerized accounting system or manual accounting system.  Finally, the data revealed that there are significant differences among firm sizes in the primary program used for estimating when a firm is computerized

"Thank you for a lovely day!" Contrastive thanking in textbooks for teaching English and Spanish as foreign languages

Thanking, as other speech acts such as apologizing or requesting,can be performed in numerous contexts and, for their analysis, many crucial variables must be taken into consideration (eg. social distance, gender, age,etc.), which often are difficult to control. Besides these variables, speech acts are carried out in different situations, taking into account the culture in which they are performed. For example, thanking might be performed after alighting a bus in the UK, the USA or Australia, but this might not necessarily happen in Spain. The aim of the study on which this paper is based, in to explore thanking contrastively in British English and in Peninsular Spanish from a pragmatic viewpoint,by looking at specific independent variables: the context and situation in which this speech act is performed, the relationship between the interlocutors who perform it, which includes social power and distance, and the reason for expressing gratitude. For the purpose of this investigation, a corpus of 128 textbooks (64 for each language) for the learning and teaching of Spanish and English as foreign languages was used. It is important to note that, although these corpora are built on prefabricated dialogues and these can be regarded as abstractions of reality, the communicative situations found in the textbooks are aimed at depicting exchanges and linguistic patterns representing what naturally occurs in real conversations in both cultures

Network analysis of a corpus of undeciphered Indus civilization inscriptions indicates syntactic organization

Archaeological excavations in the sites of the Indus Valley civilization (2500-1900 BCE) in Pakistan and northwestern India have unearthed a large number of artifacts with inscriptions made up of hundreds of distinct signs. To date there is no generally accepted decipherment of these sign sequences and there have been suggestions that the signs could be non-linguistic. Here we apply complex network analysis techniques to a database of available Indus inscriptions, with the aim of detecting patterns indicative of syntactic organization. Our results show the presence of patterns, e.g., recursive structures in the segmentation trees of the sequences, that suggest the existence of a grammar underlying these inscriptions.Comment: 17 pages (includes 4 page appendix containing Indus sign list), 14 figure

Ostasienwissenschaften Meyer-Struckmann-Preis 2016: Florian Coulmas

Mit dem Meyer-Struckmann-Preis für geistes- und sozialwissenschaftliche Forschung, 2016 ausgeschrieben für Ostasienwissenschaften, wurde Professor Dr. Florian Coulmas ausgezeichnet. Florian Coulmas ist Senior-Professor für Sprache und Kultur des modernen Japan am Institut für Ostasiatische Studien der Universität Duisburg-Essen. Die Jury würdigt mit Coulmas einen Wissenschaftler, der als Direktor des Deutschen Instituts für Japanstudien in Tokio wegweisend die internationale Forschung zum demographischen Wandel einer nicht-westlichen Industrienation bereichert hat. Nach Einschätzung der Jury besitzt der Linguist, Soziologe und Japanologe sowohl durch seine fachliche Expertise im Bereich der sozialwissenschaftlichen Japanforschung als auch als Soziolinguist ein internationales Renommee. Im deutschsprachigen Raum machte sich Coulmas darüber hinaus als populärer Sachbuch-Autor zu aktuelle Japanthemen einen Namen

Formulaic sequence (FS) cannot be an umbrella term in SLA : Focusing on psycholinguistic FSs and their identification

The term formulaic sequence (FS) is used with a multiplicity of meanings in the SLA literature, some overlapping but others not, and researchers are not always clear in defining precisely what they are investigating, or in limiting the implicational domain of their findings to the type of formulaicity they focus on. The first part of the article provides a conceptual framework focusing on the contrast between linguistic or learner-external definitions, that is, what is formulaic in the language the learner is exposed to, such as idiomatic expressions or collocations, and psycholinguistic or learner-internal definitions, that is, what is formulaic within an individual learner because it presents a processing advantage. The second part focuses on the methodological consequences of adopting a learner-internal approach to the investigation of FSs, and examines the challenges presented by the identification of psycholinguistic formulaicity in advanced L2 learners, proposing a tool kit based on a hierarchical identification method