Cambio cultural y desarrollo humano en contextos minoritarios : el papel de la mujer en una comunidad gitana /

Consultable des del TDXTítol obtingut de la portada digitalitzadaEsta tesis es un estudio, desde el marco epistemológico de la Psicología Cultural, de los procesos de cambio cultural en una comunidad minoritaria. Parte de los datos recogidos en un proyecto de investigación - acción participante, de datos etnográficos y de entrevistas grupales. Adopta un enfoque evolutivo al afrontar el estudio de los procesos de socialización y de formación de la identidad en el marco las comunidades gitanas, orientándose a partir de los postulados teóricos y los trabajos prácticos de autores como Vygotsky, Bruner, Rogoff, Cole , Greenfield y Valsiner. Se aborda, desde un enfoque psicosocial, el estudio de los procesos de identidad minoritaria, de relaciones interculturales y de relaciones de poder, todo ello desde una perspectiva situada. Las conclusiones del estudio son las siguientes: 1. Existe actualmente un marcado proceso de cambio cultural en las sociedades gitanas. 2. Este proceso de cambio no puede desligarse de la condición de minorías culturales de las sociedades gitanas. 3. Esta nueva organización de roles supone cambios importantes en el proyecto de desarrollo de los miembros de esta cultura. 4. Este cambio, entre otras cosas, supone una nueva organización de los roles de género. 5. La nueva orientación del desarrollo de los sujetos en la cultura gitana (grupo minoritario) no puede asimilarse a la orientación del desarrollo de los sujetos del grupo dominante. 6. Los cambios en las estrategias educativas dan lugar a nuevos sujetos que contribuyen al cambio cultural.This work is an study, from Cultural Psychology epistemological frame, about cultural change processes in a minority community. Data are collected from a research-intervention project, ethnographical data and group interview. The study adopt a developmental focus in the analysis of socialisation processes and identity construction inside gypsy communities, oriented by theoretical frame developed by authors as Vygotsky, Bruner, Rogoff, Cole , Greenfield y Valsiner. A psychosocial focus is analysis of minority self, intercultural relationships and power relationships, from a situated perspective. These are the conclusions: : 7. Exists today a deep process of cultural change in gypsy societies. 8. For understand this process must be link with the condition of cultural minorities of these societies. 9. Cultural change suppose new role distribution and, consequently, important changes in the «developmental project» of memberships of culture. 10. There are a new organisation of gender roles. 11. New developmental orientation cannot be assimilated to development of members of dominant culture. 12. Changes in educational strategies produce new subjects that contribute to cultural change

FDI Spillovers at Regional Level: Evidence from Portugal

This paper aims to establish whether geographical proximity between the locations of multinational firms and domestic firms facilitates the occurrence of FDI spillovers. Using data for Portugal, this hypothesis is clearly confirmed. However, the impact varies according to whether the externalities considered are horizontal or vertical. In the first case, the impact is negative, which may result from the competition effect at regional level. With regard to vertical externalities, a positive impact through backward linkages is observed. These results raise important implications for the definition of economic policies aiming to attract FDI and promote regional development.vertical spillovers; horizontal spillovers; multinational firms productivity; FDI.

The Spatial Dimension in FDI Spillovers: Evidence at the Regional Level from Portugal

There are theoretical reasons to expect that benefits to domestic firms from foreign direct investment would be confined to the area where the multinational firm is located and that the benefits depend on the development level of the host region. However, there is a scarcity of empirical studies on FDI’s indirect effects at the regional level, particularly with regard to inter-industry spillovers. This paper is an empirical contribution to this literature with data for Portugal. Both intra-industry and inter-industry FDI spillovers are considered. The concept of region adopted comprises the county in which the domestic firm is located, together with all of the directly neighbouring counties. Equations are estimated using the System GMM, with robust estimation of covariance matrices. Data confirms the relevance of both the geographical proximity and the development level of the region to this phenomenon. Furthermore, FDI spillovers are more evident at the inter-industry level. These results raise important implications for economic policy.Portugal, FDI intra-industry spillovers, FDI inter-industry spillovers, counties, regional development level, geographical proximity.

Productivity Spillovers from Multinational Corporations in the Portuguese Case: Evidence from a Short Time Period Panel Data

Empirical evidence on productivity spillovers - a concept that embodies the fact that foreign enterprises own intangible assets which can be transmitted to domestic firms, thus raising their productivity level - is ambiguous. With a panel data set at the firm level for the Portuguese manufacturing industry, we aim to uncover the possibility that the choice of statistical techniques will have profound effects on evidence of spillovers diffusion. We will consider the panel data models commonly used in the literature and the recent and more robust Extended GMM technique, specially devised for panels with a small number of time periods. We find that positive spillovers occur only when the technologic gap between domestic and foreign firms is moderate. Though all methods agree on this result. there are differences worth to be noted, revealing that the traditional estimates can sometimes be misleading.Domestic firm productivity; multinational corporations; Portugal; technological spillovers; panel data; Extended GMM.

The limits of my language are the limits of my world: The Scientific Lexicon from 1350 to 1640

[Abstract] A diachronic compilation of different types of texts such as the Helsinki Corpus provides adequate material for a preliminary approach to the degree of diffusion of scientific/technical vocabulary (mainly nouns). The presence of this specific lexicon in writings other than scientific may be taken as an indicator of this diffusion. In addition, the lexical features of certain texts may originate a variety of language for specific purposes as a linguistic response to external demands. Socio-economic specialisation in a speech community is paralleled by the creation of specific registers

Stance is present in scientific writing, indeed. Evidence from the Coruña Corpus of English Scientific Writing

[Abstract]Stance as a pragmatic feature has been discussed widely in recent years, although the analysis of its presence in the scientific register has been more limited. Stance is most clearly seen in the use of adverbs (Quirk et al. 1985; Biber et al. 1999; Huddleston – Pullum 2002), providing a comment on the propositional content of an utterance. Thus, in any speech act the information they transmit involves both participants, which in the case of academic prose are the writer and reader. Biber et al. (1999) have claimed that oral registers exhibit the highest number of stance adverbs and that these are “relatively common” in academic prose (Tseronis 2009). In this paper we try to ascertain the extent to which stance adverbs were used in Late Modern scientific discourse, and whether differences in use can be observed between British and American authors and also across disciplines and genres, taking the orality or written nature of texts as a key feature in the analysis. Data have been drawn from around one hundred and twenty authors, from three sub-corpora of the Coruña Corpus of English Scientific Writing (see also Zea, this volume). Each of these sub-corpora contains extracts of texts from different scientific disciplines written between 1700 and 1900. However, for the present study, only nineteenth-century authors have been selected. The material also allowed us to consider whether the sex of a writer had a bearing on the use of these forms. Ultimately, we have found that the most frequently used stance adverbs are those indicating inclusiveness and expressing either emphasis or tentativeness. Curiously enough, they are more abundant in texts written by North American authors and when we come to sex, male uses exceed by far female ones.Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad;FFI2013-42215-

Persuasion in English Philosophy Texts (CEPhiT)

[Abstract]The aim of this paper is to offer a description of the Corpus of English Philosophy Texts (CEPhiT) as well as to present a pilot study on persuasion strategies. Although this corpus contains samples from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, only eighteenth-century texts have been selected for this study. Methodologically speaking, some specific linguistic features indicating persuasion and argumentation (Biber, 1988) have been searched for: predictive modals, necessity modals, conditional subordinators and verbs with a suasive meaning. The interpretation of our findings will provide an overview of the author-reader relationship in late Modern English Philosophy writings, especially focusing on variables such as sex or genre.Galicia. Consellería de Economía e Industria; 10 PXIB 167 061 PR

Involved In Writing Science: Nineteenth-Century Women in the Coruña Corpus

[Abstract]The aim of this work is to offer an overview of female scientific writing in English in the nineteenth century. In particular, we want to focus on the analysis of the more or less informational style of texts written by women. Variables such as discipline or subject-matter and genre will be used to measure the way in which the informative character of scientific texts develops once Empiricism is well settled. Assuming the andro-centric nature of scientific discourse in the Modern Age, the survey of these variables will help us explore the extent to which this informational style is revealed in female scientific works. The fact that these authors are women could imply that some involvement on their part may be required. This could be caused by extra-linguistic factors such as the need to be taken more seriously not only in a field completely dominated by males but also in the social context surrounding women’s lives in general

Adjectival forms in Middle English: syntactic and semantic implications.

[Abstract] Our main purpose in this paper is to look into the place of adjectives in a particular period in the history of English as regards their position in the Noun Phrase and whether such position may somehow alter the meaning of the adjective and of the NP itself. To this end, only adjectives in an attributive function both as premodifiers or postmodifiers of the head will be considered. In section 1 we will briefly attempt to draw a line between the class “adjective” and other morphological classes considering different viewpoints. Section 2 will be devoted to the consideration of word-order as one of the factors characterising adjectives inside the NP and how their position may alter the meaning of the whole phrase. The next step in our research will be embodied in section 3 where we will present the corpus material for our study taken from the Middle English part of the Helsinki Corpus of English Texts and section 4 will provide the analysis of the data obtained from our evidence. Section 5 will finally supply our conclusions. We will attempt —if possible— to find an explanation grounded on syntactic and semantic criteria for the different shades of meaning found to depend on position

CETA in the context of the Coruña Corpus

[Abstract] The Coruña Corpus (CC): a Collection of Samples for the Historical Study of English Scientific Writing is a project on which the MUSTE group has been working since 2003 in the University of A Coruña (Spain). It has been designed as a tool for the study of language change in English scientific writing in general as well as within the different scientific disciplines (excluding medicine) between 1650 and 1900. Its purpose is to facilitate investigation at all linguistic levels, although, in principle, phonology is not included among our intended research topics. At the same time, we believe that the CC is an excellent tool for the study of scientific register/style at particular moments in history: it also offers the researcher the chance to analyse how this ‘specific English’ behaves from a synchronic point of view. To allow for socio-linguistic research using these scientific texts, we have included, when possible, some personal details about the author of each sample and, even, about the work from which the sample has been extracted in a separate file. From a technical point of view, all the texts have been keyed in following the Text Encoding Initiative conventions and saved in the XML format. The use of an extended mark-up language will make wide distribution and exploitation possible. Moreover, in order to retrieve information from the compiled data, we have decided to create a corpus management tool. Loosely speaking, the Coruña Corpus Tool is an Information Retrieval system, where the indexed textual repository is a set of compiled documents that constitutes the CC