Conciliation ou agression : Un examen de quelques facteurs susceptibles d’influencer la politique étrangère soviétique au cours des années 80.

This paper analyzes the way in which internal forces are likely to affect Soviet foreign policy over the next few years. Four developments are examined: potential Soviet petroleum shortages, the growing Soviet Muslim population, the slowdown in the rate of economic growth in the Soviet Union, and the imminent post-Brezhnev succession struggle. The question is posed: Will these factors soon impel the Soviet Union toward foreign expansion and adventurism?It is our conclusion that two of these factors, the leveling off of oil production and the rapid growth of Soviet Muslims, are not likely to have a strong influence on Soviet foreign policy. On the other hand, the decline in growth rates and the demise of Brezhnev are likely to have a major impact on future Soviet policies. The Soviet system is not experiencing a terminal crisis, but it is definitely laboring under growing burdens. It would be a mistake, however, to assume that this will necessarily result in foreign expansion. A new, rejuvenated leadership may well seek a relaxation of tensions, as it did upon Stalin’s death in 1953, so as to create favorable conditions for dealing with its pressing problems. The future remains highly uncertain. International developments will be at least as important as domestic factors, and much will depend upon the policies adopted by Western governments

Experimental investigations of ambiguity: the case of most

In the study of natural language quantification, much recent attention has been devoted to the investigation of verification procedures associated with the proportional quantifier most. The aim of these studies is to go beyond the traditional characterization of the semantics of most, which is confined to explicating its truth-functional and presuppositional content as well as its combinatorial properties, as these aspects underdetermine the correct analysis of most. The present paper contributes to this effort by presenting new experimental evidence in support of a decompositional analysis of most according to which it is a superlative construction built from a gradable predicate many or much and the superlative operator -est (Hackl, in Nat Lang Semant 17:63–98, 2009). Our evidence comes in the form of verification profiles for sentences like Most of the dots are blue which, we argue, reflect the existence of a superlative reading of most. This notably contrasts with Lidz et al.’s (Nat Lang Semant 19:227–256, 2011) results. To reconcile the two sets of data, we argue, it is necessary to take important differences in task demands into account, which impose limits on the conclusions that can be drawn from these studies