'We went to the restroom or something'. General extenders and stuff in the speech of Dutch learners of English

This article investigates how learners of English who are native speakers of Dutch use general extenders such as 'and stuff' and 'or something'. The corpus consists of the Dutch component of the Louvain International Database of Spoken English Interlanguage (LINDSEI), which is comprised of fifty interviews of some fifteen minutes each. These data are compared with the Louvain Corpus of Native English Conversation (LOCNEC), LINDSEI’s native speaker reference corpus. The study shows that overall frequencies of general extenders point at a close alignment of the two speaker groups, but that discrepancies exist if these numbers are further broken down for the adjunctive and disjunctive categories of general extenders. The former type is used considerably less frequently in the learner corpus than in the native, whereas the opposite holds for the latter. A detailed qualitative and quantitative analysis offers a few tentative explanations for the learners’ choice of general extenders, most notably L1 transfer, the intensity of exposure to certain forms in the target language, and learners’ restricted repertoire of pragmatic devices.status: publishe

Place marketing, place branding and foreign direct investments: Defining their relationship in the frame of local economic development process

Attracting foreign direct investments (FDI) constitutes one of the primary aims of the regions and cities, globally. In the new internationalized environment, places are characterized by a plurality of efforts to create their images based on their distinctive characteristics, and through this way to attract investments and specialized human resources. Traditional economic factors, such as agglomeration economies, access to the European and national markets, urban infrastructure, but also qualitative soft factors, such as the quality of life, urban aesthetic and local development policies, were considered as location criteria for business establishment in potential places. In this framework, the role of strategic planning, place marketing and branding has been increasingly important in Europe and all over the world. The aim of this article is to present, using a conceptual model, the FDI attraction through the use of place marketing process in order to provide answers in three critical points. First, how important and effective is place marketing as a tool in FDI. attraction? Second, what are the prerequisites for place marketing implementation so that FDI attraction becomes successful? Third, how important is branding on overall place marketing effectiveness? © 2010 Macmillan Publishers Ltd

A relational vulnerability analytic: Exploring hybrid methodologies for human dimensions of climate change research in the Himalayas

Vulnerability assessments are critical tools when exploring the Human Dimensions of Climate Change in the Global South. Additionally, Social Ecological Systems research utilizes such assessments to describe and predict potential spaces/tools of policy intervention. However, much of the assessment methodology fails to address the coupled structural processes underlying vulnerability and the experience of climate change. First, most scholarship does not operationalize mixed-methods research using plural epistemologies. Second, it fails to incorporate the communally produced knowledge of marginalized regional populations. Ultimately, power inequalities and their impact on vulnerability within complex adaptive systems, are overwhelmingly ignored. This project attempts to address these issues through a ‘Relational Vulnerability Analytic’ (RVA). We utilize a plural epistemological approach to construct an analytic that envisions the various relationships, processes and tools that need to be cultivated and managed in order to empower the community as co-producers of knowledge, while challenging the disciplinary bias in explorations of climate change risk and adaptation. Our method brings top-down spatial analysis tools, mathematical models, grounded ethnographic fieldwork and participatory feminist epistemologies into productive tension to reveal the sources of vulnerability and the agency of subjects, in rural Himalayan households. Additionally, we addresses the appeal for long term, collaborative, multi-dimensional research mobilization in the Himalayas. While the analytic is parameterized for the Himalayan region, it can be implemented in other regions with certain salient customizations. The project concludes that future efforts should be to operationalize this analytic for different regions and populations