Le présent historique et ses fonctions textuelles

According to some grammarians the use of the historical present tense is a technique for enhancing the dramatic effect of a story by making addressees feel as if they were present at the time of the experience, witnessing events as they occurred. Others have suggested that the historical present represents events as if they were occurring before the speaker’s eyes. My own position on the matter, though, is that the necessity to postulate a “metaphorical shift”, an “as if”, is due to the interpretation of the basic meaning of the present as being contemporality with the speaker’s present and the identification of a speaker (narrator) with an “intradiegetic” participant in the story (character). In support of this position the paper argues that the temporal referential of the present tense is the speech referential, organised by and around the speaker/character. The speech process is an incomplete process with a validation interval closed to the left and open to the right. This property motivates use of the present as a gram-matical vehicle for re-presentation

Holistic sustainability: advancing interdisciplinary building design through tools and data in Denmark

Sustainable housing and buildings constitute a fundamental part of the future urban fabric. This study aims at clarifying how different actors employ parameters of sustainability in building design and what enables the holistic perspective of the interrelating social, economic and environmental parameters. Interviews with building developers and designers show that decision support tools are used late in the design process and commonly focused on single parameters of sustainability. The analysis shows how practitioners of the planning and early design phases operate at general levels of geometrical clusters and volumes but must continuously evaluate each project from the perspective of the specifications of end-users and the public, to ensure holistic sustainability. This opposing relationship between need and availability of general and specific data, however, challenges the implementation of holistic sustainability. Advancing the interdisciplinary, holistic building design requires systematic aggregation of data from executed projects of this data into applicable rules-of-thumb. In parallel, future tools for simulation and dialogue must employ a broader scope of sustainability parameters. The conceptual frameworks of data and tools presented in this study can be used as a backdrop for developing sectora

Holdninger til likestilling og vold mot kvinner

Partnervold er et globalt problem med store helsemessige, sosiale og økonomiske kostnader. Kvinner er særlig utsatt. Gjennom analyser av en spørreundersøkelse (N=1029) om holdninger til likestilling og holdninger til vold i nære relasjoner analyserer vi i) hvordan nordmenn vurderer ulike holdninger som trivialiserer og minimerer vold i parforhold, og ii) hvordan variasjoner i slike holdninger kan forklares av holdninger til likestilling. Funnene viser signifikante sammenhenger mellom holdninger til likestilling og holdninger til vold. Blant respondenter med negative holdninger til likestilling finner vi en gruppe som bagatelliserer vold mot kvinner. Studien viser at menn rapporterer mer negative holdninger til likestilling enn kvinner. Menn med negative holdninger til likestilling er langt på vei de samme som er tilbøyelige til å unnskylde vold og mene at vold bør holdes i familien. Vi argumenterer for å se dette i sammenheng med en individualisering i samfunnet som stiller den enkelte til ansvar for sine valg. Vi stiller spørsmål om dette ansvaret blir større for kvinner som lever i en velferdsstat som slutter opp om likestilling og tilbyr hjelp til voldsutsatte.  publishedVersio