More on in situ WH- and focus constructions in Hausa

Hausa is conventionally analyzed as having only one strategy for both focus and wh-constructions--fronting, with special inflectional marking on the TAM. Recently, however, some new facts have emerged which demonstrate that focus can also occur IN SITU, with a general TAM (Jaggar 2001:496-98; Green & Jaggar 2003). Hausa in situ wh-questions and focus constructions are especially common with adverbial (especially locative) elements and/or nonverbal predicates and so are more restricted in their distribution than the ex situ strategies, but they represent an interesting new problem which requires extensive study of naturally occurring discourse and detailed syntactic analysis. The Hausa facts also need to be viewed in the wider comparative-historical context of the syntax of in situ focus and wh-constructions in related West Chadic languages

Quantification and polarity: negative adverbial intensifiers (‘never ever’, ‘not at all’, etc.) in Hausa.

Hausa has a typologically interesting but poorly understood set of quantifying time and degree adverbs—equivalent to English 'never ever', 'not at all', etc.—which behave as negative polarity items and enhance the pragmatic impact of a negative utterance (both verbal and non-verbal). The functional distribution of these adverbial intensifiers is unusual, however, in that some are "bipolar", i.e., they can express opposite (minimal/maximal) values according to whether they occur in negative or positive syntactic environments, with the minimal intensifiers operating at the negative pole. An intensifier such as dàɗai, for example, can mean either 'never' (negative) or 'always' (positive), and other modifiers, e.g., atàbau, can express these same temporal meanings in addition to 'absolutely'. This paper provides a unified account of this natural functional class of adverbs, and is seen as a contribution to cross-linguistic research into polarity items and their licensing contexts

The Hausa perfective tense-aspect used in wh-/focus constructions and historical narratives: a unified account

In this paper I revisit and elaborate some of the ideas I outlined in the earlier paper, concentrating on the semantic characteristics of the paired Perfective tense-aspects in a major (universal) discourse context—spontaneously-produced past-time narrative. The main focus is on the role of the paradigm known traditionally (and unfortunately) as the “Relative Perfective”, a set which is in partial complementary distribution with the “General/Neutral Perfective”. This specially inflected tense-aspect form is the one exploited at discourse-level to assert prominent events on the time-axis in foregrounded narrative sequences, but it is also required in classic clause-level wh-constructions, i.e., wh-interrogatives, declarative focus constructions, and relative clauses, operations which often share structural properties across languages. The central claim is that the fronted focus/wh- constructions and pivotal foregrounded portions of past-time narratives utilize the same specialized Perfective tense-aspect morphology because they achieve the same discourse-pragmatic goals—they all supply the most communicatively PROMINENT and focal NEW information

Quantification and polarity: negative adverbial intensifiers ('never ever', 'not at all', etc.) in Hausa

Hausa has a typologically interesting but poorly understood set of quantifying time and degree adverbs—equivalent to English 'never ever', 'not at all', etc.—which behave as negative polarity items and enhance the pragmatic impact of a negative utterance (both verbal and non-verbal). The functional distribution of these adverbial intensifiers is unusual, however, in that some are "bipolar", i.e., they can express opposite (minimal/maximal) values according to whether they occur in negative or positive syntactic environments, with the minimal intensifiers operating at the negative pole. An intensifier such as dàɗai, for example, can mean either 'never' (negative) or 'always' (positive), and other modifiers, e.g., atàbau, can express these same temporal meanings in addition to 'absolutely'. This paper provides a unified account of this natural functional class of adverbs, and is seen as a contribution to cross-linguistic research into polarity items and their licensing contexts

Naturalizing Moral Justification: Rethinking the Method of Moral Epistemology

The companion piece to this article, “Situating Moral Justification,” challenges the idea that moral epistemology\u27s mission is to establish a single, all‐purpose reasoning strategy for moral justification because no reasoning practice can be expected to deliver authoritative moral conclusions in all social contexts. The present article argues that rethinking the mission of moral epistemology requires rethinking its method as well. Philosophers cannot learn which reasoning practices are suitable to use in particular contexts exclusively by exploring logical relations among concepts. Instead, in order to understand which reasoning practices are capable of justifying moral claims in different types of contexts, we need to study empirically the relationships between reasoning practices and the contexts in which they are used. The article proposes that philosophers investigate case studies of real‐world moral disputes in which people lack shared cultural assumptions and/or are unequal in social power. It motivates and explains the proposed case study method and illustrates the philosophical value of this method through a case study

Situating Moral Justification: Rethinking the Mission of Moral Epistemology

This is the first of two companion articles drawn from a larger project, provisionally entitled Undisciplining Moral Epistemology. The overall goal is to understand how moral claims may be rationally justified in a world characterized by cultural diversity and social inequality. To show why a new approach to moral justification is needed, it is argued that several currently influential philosophical accounts of moral justification lend themselves to rationalizing the moral claims of those with more social power. The present article explains how discourse ethics is flawed just in this way. The article begins by identifying several conditions of adequacy for assessing reasoning practices designed to achieve moral justification and shows that, when used in contexts of cultural diversity and social inequality, discourse ethics fails these conditions. It goes on to argue that the failure of discourse ethics is rooted in its reliance on a broader conception of moral epistemology that is invidiously idealized. It concludes by pointing to the need to rethink both the mission and the method of moral epistemology

In Vitro Transformation of Non-established Bovine Fibroblasts by BPV4 and Cooperating Factors

An in vitro assay system utilising non-established bovine fibroblasts derived from foetal palate was developed for the detection of BPV4-encoded transforming functions. This involved cotransfection of a dominant coselectable marker gene neo and recombinant BPV4 DNA linearised within the E1 ORF. The presence of BPV4 DNA resulted in the formation of colonies of diameter greater than 5mm (macrocolonies) which displayed a contact-inhibited phenotype. Cloning of regions of BPV4 into two vectors, pSV2neo and pZIPneoSV(X1), indicated that macrocolony formation could be induced by two regions of the genorpe. The first, a 2.0kb Xholl fragment (nts 6487-1275) encoded two complete ORFs, namely E7 and E8. A construct lacking 233bp (nts 906-1139), resulting in interruption of the E7 ORF, was inactive in this assay, indicating a requirement for the E7 ORF for induction of the phenotype. The second region, encoded by a 3.9kb Xholl fragment (nts 2597-6487), contained the E2, E3, E4, E5 and L2 ORFs. In this case, colonies contained cells showing a more elongated phenotype. Cotransfections of linear BPV4 with an activated ras gene did not lead to a loss of contact-inhibition. In contrast, overexpression of the 2.0kb fragment, in the presence of ras did lead to the formation of non-contact-inhibited neo r macrocolonies. An intact E7 ORF was again required for this activity. In the case of the 3.9kb construct, a single non-contact-inhibited colony was observed in constructs utilising the BPV4 promoters upon cotransfection with ras