Editorial. Clinical pragmatics: an emergentist perspective

[First Paragraph] Clinical pragmatics has been a major growth area in clinical linguistics and speech and language pathology over the past two decades. Its scope is vast: if we define pragmatics in broad terms, there are no communicative disorders which do not involve pragmatic impairment at least to some degree (Perkins, 2003). Early work in the area tended to focus on the application of pragmatic theory in the analysis of pragmatic impairment (e.g. speech act theory (Hirst, LeDoux, & Stein, 1984), conversational implicature (Damico, 1985) and, more recently, relevance theory (Leinonen & Kerbel, 1999)) and on the development of pragmatic assessments, tests and profiles which included a theoretically eclectic range of items drawn from both pragmatic theory and elsewhere (e.g. Bishop, 1998; Penn, 1985; Prutting & Kirchner, 1983). In more recent years there has been an increasing interest in the neurological and cognitive bases of pragmatic impairment (e.g. Paradis, 1998; Perkins, 2000; Stemmer, 1999) and in the use of interactional approaches such as conversation analysis (e.g. Goodwin, 2003). This special issue of Clinical Linguistics and Phonetics draws on all of these areas but focuses on a particular aspect of pragmatic impairment which has often been overlooked – namely, that the behaviours we describe as pragmatic impairments are in fact the outcome of very varied and highly complex processes. This neglect is partly due to a common tendency to see pragmatics as a separate ‘level’ or even ‘module’ of language, on a par with syntax and semantics. Influenced on the one hand by speech act theory, with its distinction between language structure and communicative acts, and on the other hand by clinical populations who were either able to communicate well despite being linguistically impaired or else were poor communicators despite having good linguistic ability, clinicians assumed there to be a clear dissociation between linguistic and pragmatic competence. Although there is still considerable neurological evidence for a broadly modular view in terms of the lateralisation of linguistic and pragmatic functions, there is also compelling evidence for seeing pragmatic impairment as a more complex, non-unitary phenomenon. Non-modular, or ‘interactional’, views of pragmatic impairment have been influenced by connectionist and functional models of linguistic and cognitive processing (e.g. Bates, Thal, & MacWhinney, 1991), by a growing awareness of the role played in pragmatics by cognitive capacities such as inference, theory of mind and executive function (Martin & McDonald, 2003), and by approaches such as Conversation Analysis (e.g. Damico, Oelschlaeger, & Simmons-Mackie, 1999) which focus on those features of pragmatics which can only be accounted for in terms of interpersonal, collaborative activity. All of these interactional approaches share a view of pragmatic impairment as ‘emergent’, or ‘epiphenomenal’ (Perkins, 1998), rather than as a stand-alone, monadic entity

Pragmatic ability and disability as emergent phenomena

A holistic approach to pragmatic ability and disability is outlined which takes account both of the behaviour of individuals involved in the communicative process, and also of the underlying factors which contribute to such behaviour. Rather than being seen as resulting directly from a dysfunction in some kind of discrete pragmatic ‘module’ or behavioural mechanism, pragmatic impairment and also normal pragmatic functioning are instead viewed as the emergent consequence of interactions between linguistic, cognitive and sensorimotor processes which take place both within and between individuals

Induced radionuclides in astronauts Second quarterly activity report, 1 Oct. 1967 - 1 Jan. 1968

Tissue irradiated with protons and thermal/fast neutrons to study induced radioactive isotope production in astronaut

The effect of delta 3 on a yawing HAWT blade and on yaw dynamics

A single degree of freedom aeroelastic computer model, WMSTAB3, was employed to perform a parametric analysis of HAWT blade behavior during yaw maneuvers. Over 1,000 different combinations of delta sub 3 and normal frequency were analyzed. The effect of delta sub 3 and flapping stiffness on flapping frequency, phase, and magnitude are discussed. The moments transmitted to the fixed system during yaw maneuvers were calculated and reduced to time constants of response to step changes in wind direction. The significance of the time constants for the configurations considered relative to yaw response rate and lag angle is discussed, along with their possible significance for large HAWT

Teleprinter uses thermal printing technique

Alphameric/facsimile printer receives serial digital data in the form of a specified number of bits per group and prints it on thermally sensitive paper. A solid state shift-register memorizes the incoming serial digital data

Scaling Properties of Paths on Graphs

Let $G$ be a directed graph on finitely many vertices and edges, and assign a positive weight to each edge on $G$. Fix vertices $u$ and $v$ and consider the set of paths that start at $u$ and end at $v$, self-intersecting in any number of places along the way. For each path, sum the weights of its edges, and then list the path weights in increasing order. The asymptotic behaviour of this sequence is described, in terms of the structure and type of strongly connected components on the graph. As a special case, for a Markov chain the asymptotic probability of paths obeys either a power law scaling or a weaker type of scaling, depending on the structure of the transition matrix. This generalizes previous work by Mandelbrot and others, who established asymptotic power law scaling for special classes of Markov chains.Comment: 23 pages, 2 figure

Raman scattering in a Heisenberg {\boldmath S=1/2S=1/2} antiferromagnet on the triangular lattice

We investigate two-magnon Raman scattering from the $S=1/2$ Heisenberg antiferromagnet on the triangular lattice, considering both the effect of renormalization of the one-magnon spectrum by 1/S corrections and final-state magnon-magnon interactions. The bare Raman intensity displays two peaks related to one-magnon van-Hove singularities. We find that 1/S self-energy corrections to the one-magnon spectrum strongly modify this intensity profile. The central Raman-peak is significantly enhanced due to plateaus in the magnon dispersion, the high frequency peak is suppressed due to magnon damping, and the overall spectral support narrows considerably. Additionally we investigate final-state interactions by solving the Bethe-Salpeter equation to $O(1/S)$. In contrast to collinear antiferromagnets, the non-collinear nature of the magnetic ground state leads to an irreducible magnon scattering which is retarded and non-separable already to lowest order. We show that final-state interactions lead to a rather broad Raman-continuum centered around approximately twice the 'roton'-energy. We also discuss the dependence on the scattering geometry.Comment: 7 pages, 5 figure

Aerocrane: A hybrid LTA aircraft for aerial crane applications

The Aerocrane, a hybrid aircraft, combines rotor lift with buoyant lift to offer VTOL load capability greatly in excess of helicopter technology while eliminating the airship problem of ballast transfer. In addition, the Aerocrane concept sharply reduces the mooring problem of airships and provides 360 deg vectorable thrust to supply a relatively large force component for control of gust loads. Designed for use in short range, ultra heavy lift missions, the Aerocrane operates in a performance envelope unsuitable for either helicopters or airships. Basic design considerations and potential problem areas of the concept are addressed

A viable axion from gauged flavor symmetries

We consider a string inspired non-supersymmetric extension of the standard model with gauged anomalous U(1) flavor symmetries. Consistency requires the Green-Schwarz mechanism to cancel mixed anomalies. The additional required scalars provide Stuckelberg masses for the $Z'$ particles associated to the gauged flavor symmetry, so they decouple at low energies. Our models also include a complex scalar field $\phi$ to generate Froggatt-Nielsen mass terms for light particles giving a partial solution to the fermion mass problem. A residual approximate (anomalous) global symmetry survives at low energies. The associated pseudo-Goldstone mode is the phase of the $\phi$ scalar field, and it becomes the dominant contribution to the physical axion. An effective field theory analysis that includes neutrino masses gives a prediction for the axion decay constant. We find a simple modeI where the axion decay constant is in the center of the allowed window.Comment: 4 pages, 1 figure. v2: Couplings of axions to matter revised, other minor revision