A CONCEPT OF GENERAL MEANING: SELECTED THEORIES IN COMPARISON TO SELECTED SEMANTIC AND PRAGMATIC THEORIES

The paper discusses a concept of general meaning with reference to various relevant semantic and pragmatic theories. It includes references to Slavic axiological semantics (e.g. Krzeszowski (1997); Puzynina (1992)), Wierzbicka’s (e.g. 1980, 1987) atomic expressions and classical pragmatics theories, such as speech acts, Gricean theory of conversational implicature, politeness theory and and relevance theory

South Africa’s BIG debate in comparative perspective

The idea of a Basic Income Grant (BIG) has for long been an appealing alternative to the means-tested social security nets associated with the welfare state as we know it. Proponents of BIG highlight as comparative advantages its unconditionality, its inclusiveness and its administrative simplicity. Moreover, as capital-intensive investment and demographic evolutions engender a decline in activity rates, social security nets that rely on labour as both a source of financing and a condition for entry seem more and more untenable. These latter systems have however for long been in place and have a firm historical embeddedness. Hence, the introduction of BIG requires a revolutionary momentum. South Africa has gone through a period of profound societal change over the last two decades. After decades of racial exclusion, post-apartheid opened the pursuit of a progressive social inclusionary politics. South Africa has been one of the few countries where social security expenditure has been steadily on the rise since the second half of the 1990s. The ANC-government has opted to strengthen several targeted grants (pensions, child grant, etc.), leaving the searing unemployed active population uncovered. This article contends that the introduction of a modest BIG, alongside the pre-existing grant system is a feasible and promising option as it would have a considerable beneficial effect on poverty without entailing large costs. This position is shared among an impressive coalition of civil society organisations and political parties. The article inquires why the ANC, in these conditions, shuns away from the introduction of BIG. We conclude that, how ripe South Africa may be for BIG, the ANC-ideology pushes government to strengthen the workfare-approach, including employment programmes, over a radical overhaul of the social security system.

Bibliography of Pragmatics Online: 12th Release, updated and expanded

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Social security coverage of non-active persons moving to another Member State

This ad hoc Analytic Study with regard to the transitional coverage of non-active persons moving to another Member State is the result of an analysis and evaluation of the replies of several EU Member States to a questionnaire from the European Commission. It can be situated as a contribution to the further acquisition of knowledge on the relationship between social security coordination Regulation 883/2004 and residence Directive 2004/38, which both the Commission and the Member States have deemed necessary

DYAMAND: dynamic, adaptive management of networks and devices

Consumer devices increasingly are "smart" and hence offer services that can interwork with and/or be controlled by others. However, the full exploitation of the inherent opportunities this offers, is hurdled by a number of potential limitations. First of all, the interface towards the device might be vendor and even device specific, implying that extra effort is needed to support a specific device. Standardization efforts try to avoid this problem, but within a certain standard ecosystem the level of interoperability can vary (i.e. devices carrying the same standard logo are not necessarily interoperable). Secondly, different application domains (e.g. multimedia vs. energy management) today have their own standards, thus limiting trans-sector innovation because of the additional effort required to integrate devices from traditionally different domains into novel applications. In this paper, we discuss the basic components of current so-called service discovery protocols (SDPs) and present our DYAMAND (DYnamic, Adaptive MAnagement of Networks and Devices) framework. We position this framework as a middleware layer between applications and discoverable/controllable devices, and hence aim to provide the necessary tool to overcome the (intra- and inter-domain) interoperability gaps previously sketched. Thus, we believe it can act as a catalyst enabling trans-sector innovation