Languages and Cultures in Action: Snippets of Interactions from Singapore

The city-state of Singapore is known for its linguistic and cultural diversity, with a community made up of people from a variety of cultural traditions and an education system that promotes plurilingualism in English, Chinese, Malay, and Tamil. Within each of these languages, there are further variations and complications. Speakers of 'Chinese', for example, find themselves using, in addition to Mandarin, a mix of 'Chinese dialects', with Hokkien (Min) being the most popular, but there are equally large numbers speaking Toechew (or Chaozhou), Hakka (or Kejia) and Cantonese (Yue). In this paper we move from a bird's eye view of the community to an engagement with languages and cultures at the ground level by zooming in on talk-in-interaction in Singapore as people go about their everyday businesses. Using snippets of social interactions in the form of video recordings and an Ethnomethodological and Conversation Analytic approach, I will show how a host of interactional goals are achieved via the skilled use of a pool of interlingual and intercultural resources that have a distinctly 'Singaporean flavour'. By approaching these interactions as 'culture in action' (Hester and Eglin 1997), I will unpack the localisms and distinctive forms of expression in an attempt to document and celebrate a rich and colorful kaleidoscope of creative practices that we can identify as 'speaking, the Singapore way'

QCD and strongly coupled gauge theories : challenges and perspectives

We highlight the progress, current status, and open challenges of QCD-driven physics, in theory and in experiment. We discuss how the strong interaction is intimately connected to a broad sweep of physical problems, in settings ranging from astrophysics and cosmology to strongly coupled, complex systems in particle and condensed-matter physics, as well as to searches for physics beyond the Standard Model. We also discuss how success in describing the strong interaction impacts other fields, and, in turn, how such subjects can impact studies of the strong interaction. In the course of the work we offer a perspective on the many research streams which flow into and out of QCD, as well as a vision for future developments.Peer reviewe

31st Annual Meeting and Associated Programs of the Society for Immunotherapy of Cancer (SITC 2016) : part two

Background The immunological escape of tumors represents one of the main ob- stacles to the treatment of malignancies. The blockade of PD-1 or CTLA-4 receptors represented a milestone in the history of immunotherapy. However, immune checkpoint inhibitors seem to be effective in specific cohorts of patients. It has been proposed that their efficacy relies on the presence of an immunological response. Thus, we hypothesized that disruption of the PD-L1/PD-1 axis would synergize with our oncolytic vaccine platform PeptiCRAd. Methods We used murine B16OVA in vivo tumor models and flow cytometry analysis to investigate the immunological background. Results First, we found that high-burden B16OVA tumors were refractory to combination immunotherapy. However, with a more aggressive schedule, tumors with a lower burden were more susceptible to the combination of PeptiCRAd and PD-L1 blockade. The therapy signifi- cantly increased the median survival of mice (Fig. 7). Interestingly, the reduced growth of contralaterally injected B16F10 cells sug- gested the presence of a long lasting immunological memory also against non-targeted antigens. Concerning the functional state of tumor infiltrating lymphocytes (TILs), we found that all the immune therapies would enhance the percentage of activated (PD-1pos TIM- 3neg) T lymphocytes and reduce the amount of exhausted (PD-1pos TIM-3pos) cells compared to placebo. As expected, we found that PeptiCRAd monotherapy could increase the number of antigen spe- cific CD8+ T cells compared to other treatments. However, only the combination with PD-L1 blockade could significantly increase the ra- tio between activated and exhausted pentamer positive cells (p= 0.0058), suggesting that by disrupting the PD-1/PD-L1 axis we could decrease the amount of dysfunctional antigen specific T cells. We ob- served that the anatomical location deeply influenced the state of CD4+ and CD8+ T lymphocytes. In fact, TIM-3 expression was in- creased by 2 fold on TILs compared to splenic and lymphoid T cells. In the CD8+ compartment, the expression of PD-1 on the surface seemed to be restricted to the tumor micro-environment, while CD4 + T cells had a high expression of PD-1 also in lymphoid organs. Interestingly, we found that the levels of PD-1 were significantly higher on CD8+ T cells than on CD4+ T cells into the tumor micro- environment (p < 0.0001). Conclusions In conclusion, we demonstrated that the efficacy of immune check- point inhibitors might be strongly enhanced by their combination with cancer vaccines. PeptiCRAd was able to increase the number of antigen-specific T cells and PD-L1 blockade prevented their exhaus- tion, resulting in long-lasting immunological memory and increased median survival

Telephone conversation openings across languages, cultures and settings

The organization of telephone conversation has received much scholarly attention since Schegloff’s pioneering work in the 1960s and 1970s (Schegloff 1968, 1979). There are several reasons why researchers have been fascinated by telephone conversations in spite of their “apparently perfunctory character” (Schegloff 1986: 113). First, telephone calls are arguably the second most important site of speech interaction after face-to-face conversation. For tens of thousands of years face-to-face conversation was the only mode of speech interaction that humans had for communication. However, with the invention of the telephone in 1876 and its subsequent popularization, a new mode of communication was born. In today’s rapidly shrinking world of telecommunications, many people, particularly in the urban areas, are spending as much, if not more, time on telephone conversation than face-to-face interaction. Telephone conversation has thus gained a special status for students of language and social interaction. Second, for those interested in naturally occurring talk, the telephone offers a source of good quality data, unlike face-to-face conversations which often come with noise and other disturbances and complications. It is true that telephone calls are subject to a much more restrictive set of ‘ecological constraints’ than face-to-face conversations; for example, participants have no access to visual cues such as facial expressions and gestures. However, this turns out to be both a limitation and an advantage. From the analyst’s point of view, one of the attractions of telephone conversational data lies precisely in its absence of visual information. With telephone data, ‘what you hear is what you get’, which means that the same amount of speech information available to the participants is also available to the analyst. This contrasts significantly with recordings of face-to-face talk, where the analyst may not have access to visual cues, unless he also has a video recording. Yet another reason for the appeal of telephone conversations -- perhaps the most attractive one for many -- is the possibility of cross-linguistic and cross-cultural generalisations. As a type of speech event, telephone conversations the world over can in principle be defined and delimited by a set of organizational tasks, including such elements as making contact, establishing identity, exchanging preliminaries, presenting reason-for-call, managing topics, moving into closing, terminating calls, etc. With reference to these parameters researchers can chart variations in how these organizational tasks are handled in different linguistic, social and cultural settings. Thus, it has been suggested that “when it comes to making comparisons across linguistic and cultural settings, telephone conversations provide us with as close a situation as we could get to controlled experimental conditions.” (Luke and Pavlidou 2002: 6

Dislocation or afterthought? : a conversation analytic account of incremental sentences in Chinese

For almost 80 years, Chinese linguists have been fascinated by sentences like “Pijiu ba, he dianr!” (“Beer, I'll have some!”), which look superficially like a jumbled-up version of “normal-order sentences.” Numerous accounts have been proposed to explain their structure and meaning, but no consensus has been reached as to how their true essence should be captured, making it one of the most intriguing and least well understood phenomena in Chinese grammar. This article adopts a “dynamic” perspective and analyzes these sentences from the point of view of their planning and delivery in real time. It is argued that the key to a full understanding of these sentences is to think of them as “incremental sentences” (i.e., bipartite structures consisting of a “host” followed by an “increment”). An examination of a corpus of naturally occurring data shows that, as a grammatical form, the incremental sentence can be used in different sequential contexts to perform a variety of actions. These span a spectrum of possibilities, including intensification, emphasis, backgrounding, qualification, clarification, and disambiguation

Telephone conversation openings across languages, cultures and settings

The organization of telephone conversation has received much scholarly attention since Schegloff’s pioneering work in the 1960s and 1970s (Schegloff 1968, 1979). There are several reasons why researchers have been fascinated by telephone conversations in spite of their “apparently perfunctory character” (Schegloff 1986: 113). First, telephone calls are arguably the second most important site of speech interaction after face-to-face conversation. For tens of thousands of years face-to-face conversation was the only mode of speech interaction that humans had for communication. However, with the invention of the telephone in 1876 and its subsequent popularization, a new mode of communication was born. In today’s rapidly shrinking world of telecommunications, many people, particularly in the urban areas, are spending as much, if not more, time on telephone conversation than face-to-face interaction. Telephone conversation has thus gained a special status for students of language and social interaction. Second, for those interested in naturally occurring talk, the telephone offers a source of good quality data, unlike face-to-face conversations which often come with noise and other disturbances and complications. It is true that telephone calls are subject to a much more restrictive set of ‘ecological constraints’ than face-to-face conversations; for example, participants have no access to visual cues such as facial expressions and gestures. However, this turns out to be both a limitation and an advantage. From the analyst’s point of view, one of the attractions of telephone conversational data lies precisely in its absence of visual information. With telephone data, ‘what you hear is what you get’, which means that the same amount of speech information available to the participants is also available to the analyst. This contrasts significantly with recordings of face-to-face talk, where the analyst may not have access to visual cues, unless he also has a video recording. Yet another reason for the appeal of telephone conversations -- perhaps the most attractive one for many -- is the possibility of cross-linguistic and cross-cultural generalisations. As a type of speech event, telephone conversations the world over can in principle be defined and delimited by a set of organizational tasks, including such elements as making contact, establishing identity, exchanging preliminaries, presenting reason-for-call, managing topics, moving into closing, terminating calls, etc. With reference to these parameters researchers can chart variations in how these organizational tasks are handled in different linguistic, social and cultural settings. Thus, it has been suggested that “when it comes to making comparisons across linguistic and cultural settings, telephone conversations provide us with as close a situation as we could get to controlled experimental conditions.” (Luke and Pavlidou 2002: 6

Functional shortcuts in language co-occurrence networks.

Human language contains regular syntactic structures and grammatical patterns that should be detectable in their co-occurence networks. However, most standard complex network measures can hardly differentiate between co-occurence networks built from an empirical corpus and a body of scrambled text. In this work, we employ a motif extraction procedure to show that empirical networks have much greater motif densities. We demonstrate that motifs function as efficient and effective shortcuts in language networks, potentially explaining why we are able to generate and decipher language expressions so rapidly. Finally we suggest a link between motifs and constructions in Construction Grammar as well as speculate on the mechanisms behind the emergence of constructions in the early stages of language acquisition