Diskurse verstehen? Optionen linguistischer Diskurshermeneutik

Obwohl die Frage, in welchem Sinn man Diskurs(e) verstehen kann, keineswegs trivial ist, beschäftigt sich die moderne Diskurs- linguistik (wie die Linguistik generell) kaum mit der Reflexion hermeneuti- scher Verfahren. Deshalb werden hier Optionen linguistischer Diskursher- meneutik vorgestellt und diskutiert. Teils aus der historischen Semantik, teils aus der Textpragmatik hervorgegangen, hat sie einerseits eher enge, anderer- seits zu komplexe Interessen verfolgt. Ein anderes, texttechnologisches Vor- gehen wirft die Frage nach der Rolle der Hermeneutik neu auf. Viel grund- sätzlicher kann man Diskurse als den empirischen Ort der Semiose im Sinne einer unverfälschten Saussure-Rekonstruktion verstehen

Gerenciamento de tendências em comunicação audiovisual: análise de um comercial de TV de uma campanha “alemã”

O artigo trata de um texto audiovisual encenado artisticamente. É um texto persuasivo, parte de uma grande campanha midiática, um comercial de dois minutos para TV, cuja análise pode demonstrar como complexos de sentidos audiovisuais podem ser elaborados e como podem ser utilizados e interpretados em tempos politicamente tumultuados. Esses textos são decifradores de aspectos culturais, pois contêm – como se condensados em uma pintura significativa –, naturalmente em uma determinada perspectiva, uma imagem de uma sociedade em uma situação historicamente definida, que deve ser refletida

THE 40% PROJECT: An Oral History of Gun Violence in America & The Survivors, A Documentary Play Based on the Interviews

The number of gun violence victims is 110,000 Americans on average every year, a number that does not include the families of victims, and other people most affected. THE 40% PROJECT: An Oral History of Gun Violence in America, documents the stories of both those who have survived being shot, and those who have lost loved ones to gun violence. (*40% refers to the fact that at least forty percent of Americans will either be shot or know someone who has been shot in their lifetimes.) The oral histories in The 40% Project include people from New York City to suburban Florida to rural Louisiana to sprawling Phoenix to small town Washington State. They include people who have been injured and survived and those whose loved ones have either committed suicide or been killed. They include women and men, sons, fathers, wives, girlfriends, young single men, divorced, middle-aged women, widows, nieces, mothers and friends. They are both African American and white (although neither Latinx nor Native American nor immigrant – so far). Two of the white mothers I interviewed about daughters who had been randomly killed are married to African American men; their daughters were biracial. All are life story interviews. I focus on where the survivors are from, sense of place and home, family, faith, education, the gun violence itself, and its aftermath. My documentary play, The Survivors, is based on the interviews. Keywords: Gun ownership and violence; poverty related violence; domestic violence; mass shootings; suicide; "ethical loneliness," or societal abandonment; legal: easy access to guns/how the laws enable the shootings; identity/Second Amendment/gun ownership; legal versus illegal weapons market; public health; the true cost of gun violence; survivors; GVP activism; culture wars; social and environmental justice; toxic masculinity; money in politic

Immobility and the Re-imaginings of Ethnic Identity among Mongolian Kazakhs in the 21st Century

Accompanying the dissolution of the USSR and the formation of new nation states in the 1990s, nearly half of Mongolian Kazakhs migrated from their adopted home of Mongolia to the imagined homeland of Kazakhstan. By 2000, a sizable percentage returned to Mongolia. In explaining their decisions to stay in or to return to Mongolia, the Kazakhs we interviewed cite several culturally specific factors. Place identities, as expressed through cultural elements of religiosity, kinship ties, and language versatility, tie Mongolian Kazakhs strongly to western Mongolia while meta-narratives about diaspora and homeland prescribe identity with Kazakhstan. Utilizing life history interviews, participant observation, and questionnaire data we argue that Mongolian Kazakhs actively employ narratives of their cultural history to re-create and re-establish place identities in Mongolia and ultimately re-imagine Mongolian-Kazakh community and identity. These recreated place identities have emerged among Mongolian-Kazakhs who chose to remain immobile or return migrated from the ‘homeland’ of Kazakhstan.National Science Foundatio

The Kazakhs of Western Mongolia: Transnational Migration from 1990-2008

The Kazakhs are the largest minority group in Mongolia, a relatively homogenous country dominated by Khalkha Mongols. Since 1991, Mongolia has transitioned politically and economically and witnessed significant changes in internal and international migration flows. The large-scale movement of ethnic Kazakhs from western Mongolia to Kazakhstan represents one such emerging international flow. This migration is influenced by economic motivations, historical cultural ties to Kazakhstan, and immigration policies of both countries. This paper assesses the local and national circumstances that shape migration decision-making in western Mongolia during the transition years and highlights changes in the characteristics and directions of migration flows during this time. We identify three periods of migration with each period characterized by changing economies and national policies in Mongolia and Kazakhstan, as well as changes in communications technologies and extensiveness of social networks among prospective migrants. These periods illustrate how transnational migration flows evolve through time and are affected by national, local, and individual circumstances.National Science Foundatio

Rebuttal to “The case of the Biscayne Bay and aquifer near Miami, Florida: density-driven flow of seawater or gravitationally driven discharge of deep saline groundwater?” by Weyer (Environ Earth Sci 2018, 77:1-16)

© The Author(s) 2018 This article is distributed under the terms of the Crea-tive Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creat ivecommons .org/licen ses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribu-tion, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.A recent paper by Weyer (Environ Earth Sci 2018, 77:1–16) challenges the widely accepted interpretation of groundwater heads and salinities in the coastal Biscayne aquifer near Miami, Florida, USA. Weyer (2018) suggests that the body of saltwa-ter that underlies fresh groundwater just inland of the coast is not a recirculating wedge of seawater, but results instead from upward migration of deep saline groundwater driven by regional flow. Perhaps more significantly, Weyer (2018) also asserts that established hydrologic theory is fundamentally incorrect with respect to buoyancy. Instead of acting along the direction of gravity (that is, vertically), Weyer (2018) claims, buoyancy acts instead along the direction of the pressure gradient. As a result, Weyer (2018) considers currently available density-dependent groundwater flow and transport modeling codes, and the analyses based on them, to be in error. In this rebuttal, we clarify the inaccuracies in the main points of Weyer’s (2018) paper. First, we explain that Weyer (2018) has misinterpreted observed equivalent freshwater heads in the Biscayne aquifer and that his alternative hypothesis concerning the source of the saltwater does not explain the observed salinities. Then, we review the established theory of buoyancy to identify the problem with Weyer’s (2018) alternative theory. Finally, we present theory and cite successful benchmark simulations to affirm the suitability of currently available codes for modeling density-dependent groundwater flow and transport

Increased Soil Frost Versus Summer Drought as Drivers of Plant Biomass Responses To Reduced Precipitation: Results from A Globally-Coordinated Field Experiment

Reduced precipitation treatments often are used in field experiments to explore the effects of drought on plant productivity and species composition. However, in seasonally snow-covered regions reduced precipitation also reduces snow cover, which can increase soil frost depth, decrease minimum soil temperatures and increase soil freeze-thaw cycles. Therefore, in addition to the effects of reduced precipitation on plants via drought, freezing damage to overwintering plant tissues at or below the soil surface could further affect plant productivity and relative species abundances during the growing season. We examined the effects of both reduced rainfall (via rain-out shelters) and reduced snow cover (via snow removal) at 13 sites globally (primarily grasslands) within the framework of the International Drought Experiment, a coordinated distributed experiment. Plant cover was estimated at the species level and aboveground biomass was quantified at the functional group level. Among sites, we observed a negative correlation between the snow removal effect on minimum soil temperature and plant biomass production the next growing season. Three sites exhibited significant rain-out shelter effects on plant productivity, but there was no correlation among sites between the rain-out shelter effect on minimum soil moisture and plant biomass. There was no interaction between snow removal and rain-out shelters for plant biomass, although these two factors only exhibited significant effects simultaneously for a single site. Overall, our results reveal that reduced snowfall, when it decreases minimum soil temperatures, can be an important component of the total effect of reduced precipitation on plant productivity