2,757 research outputs found
Examining Enneagram Personality Type 5 through Photography
Undergraduate
2-
Questions and responses in Lao
This paper surveys the structure of questions and their responses in Lao, a Southwestern Tai language spoken in Laos, Thailand, and Cambodia. Data are from video-recordings of naturally occurring conversation in Vientiane, Laos. An outline of the lexico-grammatical options for formulating questions describes content (‘WH’) questions and polar (‘yes/no’) questions. The content question forms are from a set of indefinite pronouns. The WHAT, WHERE, and WHO categories have higher token frequency than the other categories. Polar questions are mostly formed by the addition of different turn-final markers, with different meanings. ‘Declarative questions’ (i.e., polar questions which are formally identical to statements) are common. An examination of the interactional functions of questions in the data show asymmetries between polar and content questions, with content questions used mostly for requesting information, while polar questions are also widely used for requesting confirmation, among other things. There is discussion of the kinds of responses that are appropriate or preferred given certain types of question. Alongside discussion of numerous examples, the paper provides quantitative data on the frequencies of various patterns in questions and responses. These data form part of a large-scale, ten-language coding study
The Export Trading Company Act of 1982 and the photovoltaics industry: An assessment
The potential advantages of recent export promotion legislation for the U.S. photovoltaics industry were assessed. The provisions of the Export Trading Company Act of 1982 were reviewed and the export trade sector was surveyed to determine what impact the Act is haviang on export company activity. The photovoltaics industry was then studied to determine whether the Act offers particular advantages for promoting its product overseas
Frames, biases, and cultural transmission
What causes a language to be the way it is? Some features are universal, some
are inherited, others are borrowed, and yet others are internally innovated.
But no matter where a bit of language is from, it will only exist if it has
been diffused and kept in circulation through social interaction in the
history of a community. This book makes the case that a proper understanding
of the ontology of language systems has to be grounded in the causal
mechanisms by which linguistic items are socially transmitted, in
communicative contexts. A biased transmission model provides a basis for
understanding why certain things and not others are likely to develop, spread,
and stick in languages. Because bits of language are always parts of systems,
we also need to show how it is that items of knowledge and behavior become
structured wholes. The book argues that to achieve this, we need to see how
causal processes apply in multiple frames or 'time scales' simultaneously, and
we need to understand and address each and all of these frames in our work on
language. This forces us to confront implications that are not always
comfortable: for example, that "a language" is not a real thing but a
convenient fiction, that language-internal and language-external processes
have a lot in common, and that tree diagrams are poor conceptual tools for
understanding the history of languages. By exploring avenues for clear
solutions to these problems, this book suggests a conceptual framework for
ultimately explaining, in causal terms, what languages are like and why they
are like that
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