Common dolphins (Delphinus delphis) status in the central and southern Mediterranean around the Maltese Islands

Since 1997, a conservation biology research project focusing on cetaceans in the Central and Southern Mediterranean Sea around the Maltese Islands has managed to increase accurate information of the various species inhabiting these waters (Vella, 1998; 2000a; 2000b). Among the species studied, this paper focuses upon the common dolphin, Delphinus delphis in the Mediterranean. This species/subpopulation rated as endangered in the Mediterranean (EN A2abc - IUCN 2003 - http://www.redlist.org) necessitates particular conservation assessment, monitoring and management planning in this region (IUCN, 2003; Reeves et al., 2003). This ongoing longterm research therefore also aims at contributing valuable information (Vella, 2000b) required in relation to the Agreement on the Conservation of Cetaceans of the Black Sea, Mediterranean Sea and Contiguous Atlantic Area (ACCOBAMS). Although Mediterranean cetaceans are legally protected by Maltese law, through specific legal notices, this field conservation research is, to date, the only scientific effort around the Maltese Islands that may furnish the required details for local conservation measures to be implemented. Common dolphin distribution, abundance, habitat preference, behaviour, and associations with fisheries that are exploited in the same area are among the parameters studied. Marine habitat degradation and resource over-exploitation are considerations that need to be addressed since both may affect cetacean survival in the region. Part of the study area, closer to the Maltese Islands is shown in Fig.1, and includes most of the fishing area utilised by Maltese fishermen.peer-reviewe

G-BOOKシステムの問題点と今後への課題

1.はじめに　2. G-BOOKを取巻く環境変化　3. G-BOOK普及に向けた課題と問題点　4. おわり

Euro-Islam and Euro Muslims

Lecture Series on Current Issues in Islam Civil Society and Social Cohesion : in Europe: Muslim Perspectives The aim of these lectures is to give students an insight into the way in which Muslim communities, to the extent that these communities take on an Islamic perspective, organize civil society and develop strategies to foster the kind of social cohesion that they envisage

What corpora can and cannot tell us about cognition: The case of prototypicality

Since their advent on the linguistic scene, corpora have been widely used to describe language. Linguists have repeatedly shown that corpus-based analyses can reveal facts about language which would not be accessible on the basis of intuition alone, and the descriptive function of corpora, therefore, need no longer be demonstrated. Some linguists, however, have suggested that corpora can also be used to say something about cognition. The idea is that, since the human mind is a black box which cannot be accessed directly, it has to be studied indirectly, via some of its manifestations. Language, as one type of systematic behaviour of humans, has been presented as a “relatively privileged (…) ‘source of information’ on conceptualization” (Pederson & Nuyts 1997: 4), because it “explicitly encodes and transmits conceptual information” (ibid.). But the relation between conceptualisation/cognition and language is far from clear. While some underline the links that exist between corpora and cognitive processes (cf. Reali & Christiansen [2007], who claim that “processing of relative clauses is made easier by frequency of occurrence”), others argue that such links are not systematic (Schmitt et al. [2004], for example, show that recurrent clusters identified on the basis of corpora are not necessarily “psycholinguistically valid, that is, stored as holistic units in the minds of proficient speakers”). In this discussion of the link between corpora and cognition, the focus will be on the issue of cognitive salience (understood here as what is most accessible in the mind), and more precisely the following question: can linguistic frequency (as attested in corpora) be used as a shortcut to cognitive salience? Results from my own and others’ research will be reported which, by comparing corpus and experimental data, suggest that the (sometimes unspoken) assumption that frequent items are somehow cognitively salient, and more generally that corpora are “psycholinguistically valid”, may have to be called into question

Linking up phraseology and complexity research in L2

In this talk, I will present my current research efforts to define and circumscribe the construct of phraseological complexity and to theoretically and empirically demonstrate its relevance for second language theory (e.g. Paquot, 2017). As illustration, I will report on a study in which we made use of syntactic co-occurrences, more particularly verb + object structures, to trace phraseological complexity development (in the form of phraseological sophistication) in the French L2 component of the Longitudinal Database of Learner English (LONGDALE; Meunier 2013) (cf. Paquot et al, submitted)