Large Surveys and Small Voices: Meanings of Hunger in Pakistan

DFI

Pakistan: Year 3 Findings from the Life in a Time of Food Price Volatility Study

Major shifts in food prices are significant events in people’s lives; in 2012 researchers at the Institute of Development Studies, Sussex (IDS) and Oxfam started a four-year project to track the impacts of this volatility. This project, Life in a Time of Food Price Volatility, aims to monitor and record how Food Price Volatility (FPV) changes everyday life becauseso many of the social costs of managing change are invisible to policy makers. Nutritional or poverty measures may indicate that people living in poverty have coped well and appear to be ‘resilient’, but only because such measures often neglect the costs of this apparent resilience, including the increased time and effort required to feed and look after people; the non-monetary effects on family, social, or gender relations; mental health costs, such as stress; reductions in quality of life; and cultural issues, such as the pressure to eat ‘foreign’ fare, or food considered inferior. These issues tend to be neglected in nutrition and poverty impact studies, but they tend to matter a great deal to those affected.DFI

Going Against the Grain of Optimism: Flour Fortification in Pakistan

Food fortification is a popular strategy for addressing ‘hidden hunger’, and staple foods are seen as promising, if unproven, vehicles for the delivery of essential micronutrients to poor people in developing countries. This article examines wheat flour fortification with iron in Pakistan as a case of technocratic optimism in the face of institutional constraints. An evaluative framework based on the analysis of entire value chains can provide a reality check on technocratic optimism. We find that poor people based their preferences for different types of flour on price as well as perceptions of nutritional value. Many of these flour types are not covered by fortification programmes. Fortification interventions, meanwhile, have attempted to leverage public–private partnerships in a segment of the wheat flour value chain which is beset with regulatory weakness. This article illustrates why technical interventions should support rather than ignore a broader agenda of reforms in food policy.Department for International Development (DFID

Investigating the timecourse of accessing conversational implicatures during incremental sentence interpretation

Many contextual inferences in utterance interpretation are explained as following from the nature of conversation and the assumption that participants are rational. Recent psycholinguistic research has focussed on certain of these ‘Gricean’ inferences and have revealed that comprehenders can access them in online interpretation. However there have been mixed results as to the time-course of access. Some results show that Gricean inferences can be accessed very rapidly, as rapidly as any other contextually specified information (Sedivy, 2003; Grodner, Klein, Carbery, & Tanenhaus, 2010); while other studies looking at the same kind of inference suggest that access to Gricean inferences are delayed relative to other aspects of semantic interpretation (Huang & Snedeker, 2009; in press). While previous timecourse research has focussed on Gricean inferences that support the online assignment of reference to definite expressions, the study reported here examines the timecourse of access to scalar implicatures, which enrich the meaning of an utterance beyond the semantic interpretation. Even if access to Gricean inference in support of reference assignment may be rapid, it is still unknown whether genuinely enriching scalar implicatures are delayed. Our results indicate that scalar implicatures are accessed as rapidly as other contextual inferences. The implications of our results are discussed in reference to the architecture of language comprehension

The equivalence of four extensions of context-free grammars

There is currently considerable interest among computational linguists in grammatical formalisms with highly restricted generative power. This paper concerns the relationship between the class of string languages generated by several such formalisms, namely, combinatory categorial grammars, head grammars, linear indexed grammars, and tree adjoining grammars. Each of these formalisms is known to generate a larger class of languages than context-free grammars. The four formalisms under consideration were developed independently and appear superficially to be quite different from one another. The result presented in this paper is that all four of the formalisms under consideration generate exactly the same class of string languages