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The paper provides an example of how immigration is constructed by receiving societies as a comprehension or language problem that requires special solutions. It focuses on the application of Easy-to-Read, a simplified register currently in expansion which addresses different groups of people with intellectual disabilities, to immigrants in Spain. Following a general introduction on the glottopolitical approach to migration processes and a historical overview of tendencies of discursive simplification in Europe and the Americas, the co-text of the term 'immigrants' in a corpus including drafting guides of Easy-to-Read, newspapers and websites of the supporters of this variety is analysed in the empirical part. Methods of semantic discourse analysis (semantic relations and prototype theory) allow to identify new meanings and categories that are constructed in the selected texts ('immigrant' as a co-hyponym of 'person with a disability').

In this paper, we introduce a new way of detecting semantic similarities between learning objects by analysing their usage in web portals. Our approach relies on the usage-based relations between the objects themselves rather then on the content of the learning objects or on the relations between users and learning objects. We then take this new similarity measure to enhance existing recommendation approaches for the use in technology enhanced learning.

The focus of this paper is on immigrant minority languages in urban Western Europe. Both multidisciplinary and cross-national perspectives will be offered on two major domains in which language transmission occurs, i.e., the domestic domain and the public domain. Prototypical of these two domains are the home and the school, respectively. At home, language transmission occurs between parents and children; at school this occurs between teachers and pupils. Viewed from the perspectives of majority language speakers "versus" minority language speakers, language transmission becomes a very different issue. In the case of majority language speakers, language transmission at home and at school is commonly taken for granted: at home, parents speak this language usually with their children; at school this language is usually the only or major subject and medium of instruction. In the case of minority language speakers, there is usually a mismatch between the language of the home and the language of the school. Whether parents in such a context continue to transmit their language to their children is strongly dependent on the degree to which these parents conceive of this language as a core value of cultural identity. After a short introduction, we offer "phenomenological" perspectives on the semantics of our field of study and some central European notions in this field. Next we discuss major agencies and documents on "language rights" at the global and European level. We also discuss the utilisation and effects of different "demographic" criteria for the definition and identification of (school) population groups in a multicultural society. Next we offer "sociolinguistic" perspectives on the distribution and vitality of immigrant minority languages across Europe. In this context the rationale and major outcomes of the "Multilingual Cities Project", realised in six major multicultural cities in different European Union nation-states, are presented. Finally we offer comparative perspectives on "educational" policies and practices in the domain of immigrant minority languages in the six European Union countries under discussion. We conclude with an overview on how multilingualism can be promoted for all children in an increasingly multicultural Europe. (Contains 9 tables and 1 figure.)

Purpose – The crisis of confidence in political institutions has become a phenomenon with uniform trends across Europe. Nevertheless, citizens still express interest in politics and are engaged in political and social activities. What are the issues that still motivate them to go to the polls and/or engage in non-institutional forms of political participation? The case study of the Italian referendum in favour of the “Water Common Good” (June 2011) is particularly appropriate to explore these issues and motivations. The paper aims to discuss these issues. Design/methodology/approach – The paper proposes a multidisciplinary common good’s framework focusing on its social and political challenges. As the referendum succeeded also thanks to the rhetorical effectiveness of the “common good” epithet, a survey on 120 Roman citizens who voted in favour of the “Water Common Good” was conducted. The hypothesis was that the referendum success could be associated with social needs to defend strategic resources (“commons”) by actively participating in the deliberations on them. A quantitative non-probabilistic research was carried out face-to-face, through a standardized and semi-structured questionnaire. Findings – The main findings refer to the leading role that distrust in political institutions, civil society activism and common good rhetorical effectiveness played. Originality/value – The most original contribution of this paper is the explanatory and stipulative definition of common good, which reduces the semantic uncertainty of the concept including common sense meanings. This novel conceptualization has practical implications in policy terms, as it explicates the social need to change the way of conceiving the relationship with strategic resources and decision-making processes concerning them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In contemporary research on the word race, there is no consensus on what race actually is. Moreover, scholarly research has stated that the notion of race does not apply to the human species. However, as soon as race enters political discourse, it becomes so "self-evident" that it does not raise the question of what we are talking about when we talk about race. This paper deals with the issue that there are a number of different meanings of the word race, focusing primarily on the difference between the "Anglo-American" meaning of the word race and that used in continental Europe. The paper argues that the meaning of race depends on the cultural, social and historical context of a given country, making race a fluid and context-shifting concept whose meanings are not compatible with each other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Semantic interoperability of eHealth services within and across countries has been the main topic in several research projects. It is a key consideration for the European Commission to overcome the complexity of making different health information systems work together. This paper describes a study within the EU-funded project ASSESS CT, which focuses on assessing the potential of SNOMED CT as core reference terminology for semantic interoperability at European level., Objective: This paper presents a quantitative analysis of the results obtained in ASSESS CT to determine the fitness of SNOMED CT for semantic interoperability., Methods: The quantitative analysis consists of concept coverage, term coverage and inter-annotator agreement analysis of the annotation experiments related to six European languages (English, Swedish, French, Dutch, German and Finnish) and three scenarios: (i) ADOPT, where only SNOMED CT was used by the annotators; (ii) ALTERNATIVE, where a fixed set of terminologies from UMLS, excluding SNOMED CT, was used; and (iii) ABSTAIN, where any terminologies available in the current national infrastructure of the annotators' country were used. For each language and each scenario, we configured the different terminology settings of the annotation experiments., Results: There was a positive correlation between the number of concepts in each terminology setting and their concept and term coverage values. Inter-annotator agreement is low, irrespective of the terminology setting., Conclusions: No significant differences were found between the analyses for the three scenarios, but availability of SNOMED CT for the assessed language is associated with increased concept coverage. Terminology setting size and concept and term coverage correlate positively up to a limit where more concepts do not significantly impact the coverage values. The results did not confirm the hypothesis of an inverse correlation between concept coverage and IAA due to a lower amount of choices available. The overall low IAA results pose a challenge for interoperability and indicate the need for further research to assess whether consistent terminology implementation is possible across Europe, e.g., improving term coverage by adding localized versions of the selected terminologies, analysing causes of low inter-annotator agreement, and improving tooling and guidance for annotators. The much lower term coverage for the Swedish version of SNOMED CT compared to English together with the similarly high concept coverage obtained with English and Swedish SNOMED CT reflects its relevance as a hub to connect user interface terminologies and serving a variety of user needs., (Copyright © 2019 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)

This paper considers the work of the European Cluster Observatory (ECO) in light of current debates around the notion of clusters. Examining the definitions employed by the ECO, questions are posed about how effective policy can be when using highly restrictive means of analysis. Further, the work contends that, far from this being purely an analytical problem, there also exists a fundamental semantic issue regarding the term ‘economic cluster’. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper describes the process of adapting the Stanford Coreference resolution module to the Basque language, taking into account the characteristics of the language. The module has been integrated in a linguistic analysis pipeline obtaining an end-to-end coreference resolution system for the Basque language. The adaptation process explained can benefit and facilitate other languages with similar characteristics in the implementation of their coreference resolution systems. During the experimentation phase, we have demonstrated that language-specific features have a noteworthy effect on coreference resolution, obtaining a gain in CoNLL score of 7.07 with respect to the baseline system. We have also analysed the effect that preprocessing has in coreference resolution, comparing the results obtained with automatic mentions versus gold mentions. When gold mentions are provided, the results increase 11.5 points in CoNLL score in comparison with results obtained when automatic mentions are used. The contribution of each sieve is analysed concluding that morphology is essential for agglutinative languages to obtain good performance in coreference resolution. Finally, an error analysis of the coreference resolution system is presented which have revealed our system’s weak points and help to determine the improvements of the system. As a result of the error analysis, we have enriched the Basque coreference resolution adding new two sieves, obtaining an improvement of 0.24 points in CoNLL F1 when automatic mentions are used and of 0.39 points when the gold mentions are provided. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines and compares, in the light of French Discourse Analysis, four life stories - collected through interviews - that were produced by Brazilian migrants that live illegally in France or in England. The main objective is to find out the discursive representations (of themselves, of the others, of the world) constructed by such individuals in their narratives and, at the same time, verify if and how their irregular situation interferes with their routine in the new country. In order to analyze and compare the four stories, some categories that integrate Maingueneau's Global Semantics (2005) were used: themes, vocabulary, enunciative deixis and enunciation mode. If the results reveal differences in the way of telling and evaluating the migratory experience, they also allow us to apprehend similarities, such as the primarily economic motivation to migrate, the difficulties (cultural, linguistic etc.) faced especially when arriving in the destination country and the precarious working conditions to which Brazilian migrants are submitted due to being in an irregular situation. Even though two of the interviewed subjetcts have preferred to be silent on this issue, their opinions can be implicitly identified. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

National Qualifications Frameworks (NQFs) are a global phenomenon. This is evidenced by their scale, coverage and intrinsic link with education policy across Europe and beyond. Research into their impact has encompassed a number of perspectives; theoretical, practical and evaluative. Yet, despite the existence of critical literature related to the development, design and impact of NQFs, little research has questioned the actual feasibility of researching the ‘impact’ of NQFs per se. The arguments in this paper position such research as both unfeasible and futile: a dream for which it is impossible to identify a suitable yardstick to measure. We base our argument around three broad themes: linguistics and semantics; homogeneity; and methodological complexity. Around these themes, we aim to show why such research has proved problematic and, in doing so, contribute to the field as it explores the impact of NQFs in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Adverse drug events (ADEs) are common, costly and one of the most important issues in contemporary pharmacotherapy. Current drug safety surveillance methods are largely based on spontaneous reports. However, this is known to be rather ineffective. There is a lack of automated systems checking potential ADEs on routine data captured in electronic health records (EHRs); present systems are usually built directly on top of specific clinical information systems through proprietary interfaces. In the context of the European project "SALUS", we aim to provide an infrastructure as well as a tool-set for accessing and analyzing clinical patient data of heterogeneous clinical information systems utilizing standard methods. This paper focuses on two components of the SALUS architecture: The "Semantic Interoperability Layer" (SIL) enables an access to disparate EHR sources in order to provide the patient data in a common data model for ADE detection within the "ADE Detection and Notification Tool" (ANT). The SIL in combination with the ANT can be used in different clinical environments to increase ADE detection and reporting rates. Thus, our approach promises a profound impact in the domain of pharmacovigilance.

Health literacy has gained momentum in the Western world, yet in Europe the concept of health literacy is only marginally integrated in research, policy and practice. The present paper presents how translation may act as an influential factor with regard to integration of the health literacy notion in Europe. This study has compared five data sources that provide translations of health literacy: The European Union's Health Strategy; the translations applied in the European Health Literacy Project; national health expert opinions and Google Translate. The comparison integrated Peter Fawcett's translation techniques as a framework for analysis. The results showed a total of 28 translations: 22 from the European Union Health Strategy; 6 from the HLS-EU project; 17 from experts; 25 from Google Translate. Some countries are consistent in translations of health literacy, other countries diverge, the reasons being that health literacy is not yet mainstreamed and the translations are primarily driven by a latent polarized discourse of the concept of literacy. The study showed that translations in general reveals enriched insights in the cohesion of health literacy as one notion and provides the European Health Literacy Glossary that can inform health professionals, academia and decision-makers to further advance health literacy across Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The negative bias accompanying the terms left and left-handers has long interested researchers. This paper examines a large number of languages of Indo-European and non-Indo-European origin for such biasing. One surprising outcome is that, within the Indo-European language family, the terms for right and left do not go back to one set of antonyms but have their etymological roots in a number of different core semantic concepts. As in the non-Indo-European languages, right is almost always thought of positively, whereas left is negatively connotated. This is interpreted as the outcome of a universal human evaluation process, partly based on the principle of embodiment. The terms for right never have, in any of the examined languages, a negative bias; the words for left, usually never positively biased, were turned into euphemisms in three language groups (Scandinavian, Greek, and Avestan). On one interpretation, this seems to be an act of historical political correctness, corroborating the negative attitude cultures have for left-handers, very likely an outcome of discrimination of minorities., (© 2013 New York Academy of Sciences.)

Nowadays, we are witnesses of a transformation in the e-learning arena. This transformation has different drivers involving all the actors in the learning value chain, from final users to learning institutions through technology providers. All those actors share a common goal: making the learning processes more effective through the information and communication technologies. This is happening through the promotion of a paradigm shift from content-centered to process-centered solutions. In this paper, we present the results from the European Learning Grid Infrastructure project concerning models, processes, and services supported by a service-oriented software architecture for creating dynamic and adaptive virtual organizations for learning using Grid technologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Language in Different Contexts / Kalba ir Kontekstai is the property of Vytautas Magnus University and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

An attempt at grasping the terminologic dimension of a specialized language involves not only the lexicologic investigation of the rules and models for building these terms, but most importantly, their integration and employment within the system of the language at a semantic level, as well as in relation to the context and background of this specialized language. As such, a concept can clearly be seen as distinct (in relation to other terms of the field), can be placed in a system that allows for the identification of the relationships with other elements of the system, while monitoring any shift or change of the term, according to the evolution of knowledge in the specialized field. The paper aims at investigating a pattern of the, evolution of specialized terms within the economic and agricultural specialized language of the Common Agricultural Policy of the EU with an emphasis on monosemantic terms- as most specialized terms are-, as well as rare examples of polysemantic specialized terms. This analysis attempts at revealing the evolution of the field of the agricultural policy reflected through language, as well as a tendency towards the europenization of terminologies residing in the employment of universal European terms that do not vary from one language to another. According to the sociological point of view, this is one dimension of a greater process of the europenization of law, policy, economy, society and the individual. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Interoperability has been identified as a major issue to be addressed by every egovernment initiatives. In order to tackle this issue, the egovernment agencies have developed tools to facilitate the interchange of information between departments when providing public services to citizens and businesses through internet. This paper surveys how the egovernment agencies in Europe and the United States have developed tools such as interoperability frameworks and enterprise architectures. It covers specifically how the semantic technologies and standards have been incorporated into the interoperability frameworks. The incorporation is a sign of maturity, because interoperability is to cover not only technical aspects, but also semantic and, in the end, organisational aspects. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Copyright of Res Rhetorica is the property of Polish Rhetoric Society and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Urban growth is a spatial process which has a significant impact on the earth's environment. Research on predicting this complex process makes it therefore especially fruitful for decision‐making on a global scale, as it enables the introduction of more sustainable urban development. This article presents a novel method of urban growth prediction. The method utilizes geospatial semantics in order to predict urban growth for a set of random areas in Europe. For this purpose, a feature space representing geospatial configurations was introduced which embeds semantic information. Data in this feature space was then used to perform deep learning, which ultimately enables the prediction of urban growth with high accuracy. The final results reveal that geospatial semantics hold great potential for spatial prediction tasks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The status of borderline personality disorder (BPD) as a diagnostic category is a matter of continuing controversy. In the United States, BPD is one of the most frequent diagnoses of psychiatric inpatients, and a similar tendency emerges in Europe. Nearly all theoretical aspects of BPD have been questioned, including its very position as a personality disorder. In this article, we trace the evolution of the borderline concept from the beginning of the 20th century to the current psychometric research. We argue that the status of BPD is fraught with conceptual difficulties, including an unrecognized semantic drift of major phenomenological terms (e.g., identity), a lack of general principles for the distinction of BPD and the major psychiatric syndromes (e.g., schizophrenia spectrum disorders), and insufficient definitions of key nosological concepts. These difficulties illustrate general problems in today's psychiatry that require consideration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While exploring the map of European family models, this essay aims to appraise the robustness of the category of “transitional zone,” that is, the intermediary area between Eastern and Western Europe, reinterpreting it as a typology of regions with a common transition period from monolithic complex forms to multifaceted societies, where the “simple”/“stem” family gradually prevails. While an intermediate value in a scale does not elucidate anything new, an “intermediate” type in a typology approach is endowed with its own semantic space. The author pinpoints some critical issues in a “gradient-dependent” approach. Gradients are not typologies, and reasoning by gradients generates unanticipated effects. Typologies of family patterns can be inserted into three-dimensional space, and a meta-analysis of narration can add precious value. Last but not least, a map of European family systems must have historical depth. As a consequence, the author draws two time-lagged fault lines and two corresponding “transitional zones” in between. From this standpoint, the idea of transition should be viewed within the historical period of change from “joint” to “simple” family systems, in the broad sense of the terms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Narratives are a pervasive form of discourse and a rich source for exploring a range of language and cognitive skills. The limited research base to date suggests that narratives generated using aided communication may be structurally simple, and that features of cohesion and reference may be lacking. This study reports on the analysis of narratives generated in interactions involving aided communication in response to short, silent, video vignettes depicting events with unintended or unexpected consequences. Two measures were applied to the data: the Narrative Scoring Scheme and the Narrative Analysis Profile. A total of 15 participants who used aided communication interacted with three different communication partners (peers, parents, professionals) relaying narratives about three video events. Their narratives were evaluated with reference to narratives of 15 peers with typical development in response to the same short videos and to the narratives that were interpreted by their communication partners. Overall, the narratives generated using aided communication were shorter and less complete than those of the speaking peers, but they incorporated many similar elements. Topic maintenance and inclusion of scene-setting elements were consistent strengths. Communication partners offered rich interpretations of aided narratives. Relative to the aided narratives, these interpreted narratives were typically structurally more complete and cohesive and many incorporated more elaborated semantic content. The data reinforce the robust value of narratives in interaction and their potential for showcasing language and communication achievements in aided communication. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The Developmental Coordination Disorder Questionnaire (DCDQ'07) is a Canadian-English instrument recommended for screening children aged 5 to 15 years who are at risk for developmental coordination disorder. While a Canadian-French version of the DCDQ'07 presently exists, a European-French version does not. Aims. To produce a cross-cultural adaptation of the DCDQ'07 for use in areas of Europe where French is spoken and to test its cultural relevance in French-speaking Switzerland. Methods. Cross-cultural adaptation was done using established guidelines. Cultural relevance was analyzed with cognitive interviews of thirteen parents of children aged 5.0 to 14.6 years (mean age: 8.5 years, SD = 3.4), using think-aloud and probing techniques. Results. Cultural and linguistic differences were noted between the European-French, the Canadian-French, and the original versions of the DCDQ'07. Despite correct translation and expert committee review, cognitive interviews revealed that certain items of the European-French version were unclear or misinterpreted and further modifications were needed. Conclusions. After rewording items as a result of the outcomes of the cognitive interview, the European-French version of the DCDQ'07 is culturally appropriate for use in French-speaking Switzerland. Further studies are necessary to determine its psychometric properties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Press items ( N = 1327) about addiction related problems were collected from politically independent daily newspapers in Finland, Italy, the Netherlands, and Poland from 1991, 1998, and 2011. A synchronized qualitative coding was performed for discerning the descriptions of the genesis to the problems in terms of described causes to and reasons for why they occur. Environmental explanations were by far the most common and they varied most between the materials. The analysis documents how the portrayals include traces of their contextual origin, relating to different media tasks and welfare cultural traditions. Meaning-based differences were also assigned to the kind of problems that held the most salience in the press reporting. A general worry over societal change is tied into the explanations of accumulating addiction problems and underpins the press reporting in all countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article delineates a number of conceptual-normative, analytical and political concerns, characterized as matters of (1) ‘semantics’, (2) ‘scales’ and (3) ‘solidarities’, in the ways in which we can approach an understanding of the relationships between antisemitism and Islamophobia. As such it takes its cue from Goldberg's (2009) insistence that in addition to comparativist methodologies employed in the study of race and racism, we also need relational methodologies. That is to say that where the former compares and contrasts, the latter also seeks to connect. In so doing, the article harnesses the explanatory power of long-established organizing concepts within the study of race and racism, to explore how racial categories of religious minorities continue to be formed. Taking its cue from the introduction to this special issue (Meer this issue), this article explores what purchase the ideas of ‘cultural racism’ and ‘racialization’ can bring to bear on our conceptualization of each. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Due to European agreements and policy expectations, national authorities are revising their formal curricula in line with an evidence-oriented policy. The article explores how new trends in formulating curricula can be regarded as an outcome of experts’ semantics and impact on education policy. The article reanalyses documentation from a project, where curricula were compared across countries according to their conceptualizations about schooling and reform. Throughout this project, we observed that curriculum documents merge professional semantics on the purposes, and content of schooling with a language formed by evidence-based policy on outcomes. To understand what the formal curricula express within contemporary policy, a research model is applied, which illustrates how semantics associated with curricula weight theory and evidence differently, all regarded as sources within curriculum making. From this point of view, the recognition or ignorance of schooling is dependent not only on political ideologies, as indicated in Tanners op-ed article, but on how experts provide semantics which might take professional-practical theories of schooling into regard. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Modern economies currently face rapid changes with regard to their social structure and work environment. Declining fertility rates and increasing life expectancy lead to the overall trend of the demographic change. As a consequence, domestic labor forces are ageing with the prospect of shrinking. The upcoming labor shortage cannot be compensated by immigration solely, but rather through lifelong learning and continuous development of competences to secure lifelong employability. Modern societies can no longer afford to exclude ageing workers from the labor market, e.g. through methods like early retirement policies. To cope with the demographic change and to face the shortage of skilled workers, the employability of ageing workers has to be secured through demographic-sensitive learning offers. Striking and alerting in this context is that the participation rate of low-skilled and ageing workers in further education lags behind other groups of learners, and nearly no learning offers exist which are directly targeted to this group and their special learning needs (cf. chapter 1). The learning and knowledge platform RELOAD, which was developed by IMA/ZLW & IfU of RWTH Aachen University, Germany and funded by the European Leonardo da Vinci program, is such a demographic sensitive learning offer especially dedicated to low-skilled and ageing workers in the Do-it-yourself sector (cf. chapter 2). The main innovations of the RELOAD learning and knowledge platform are short learning units, so called Microtrainings (cf. chapter 2.1) and the usage of a semantic net (cf. chapter 2.2). Thereby, they are individual, self-directed and continuous learning processes. Furthermore Microtrainings can be easily integrated into the work life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the past millennium, there have been thousands of polities in Europe and millions of laws. This article contributes to efforts by historians and sociologists to make some sense of this sprawl by constructing common types of law and legal change. Such types constitute distinctive patterns by which historical actors change names, ideas, and applications of rules of law under various circumstances. Three classic forms of change, namely legislation, mutation of custom, and judge-made law, were described by Max Weber. To Weber's model I add four new types or motifs of change, which I dub legal deeds, voice-supersession, legal fictions, and anthropological expansion. The major advance of the four motifs is that they each combine what could be called a semantic and a social view of legal change. That is, they take seriously the fact that law is often bound in a self-conscious tradition of thought and practice. But each motif of change is also characterized by a typified social configuration of legal operators and legal subjects, who apply competing ideas to one another in distinctive ways. The paradigm of law in which the four motifs are embedded is evolutionary, pluralist, and liberal in that it posits creative social organization by multiple, independent, interacting individuals in society, weaving cumulative, complex orders. This theory makes several significant scholarly interventions. First, it attempts to reconcile outstanding semantic and social theories of legal change. Second, it historicizes legal pluralism while giving evolutionary theory a healthy dose of contingency. Third, the four motifs should also be serviceable to intellectual historians as tools for describing how historical actors interact with traditions generally. Tradition need not be viewed as conservative or even overwhelmingly static. This paradigm may help historians and social scientists assess how the force of the status quo balances against the power of individuals to innovate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The encoding of direction (place, goal, source, route) in systems of adpositions and local cases is not uniformly distributed over different locations (at, in, under), but can be shown to follow a hierarchical pattern. This pattern is compared with similar hierarchies proposed in the literature about the acquisition and typology of spatial language. Differences in semantic complexity and pragmatic salience between locations might explain why such a hierarchy exists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we introduce a new concept in HERMES, the FP7 funded project in Europe, in developing technology innovations towards computer aided memory management via intelligent computation, and helping elderly people to overcome their decline in cognitive capabilities.In this project, an integrated computer aided memory management system is being developed from a strong interdisciplinary perspective, which brings together knowledge from gerontology to software and hardware integration. State-of-the-art techniques and algorithms for image, video and speech processing, pattern recognition, semantic summarisation are illustrated, and the objectives and strategy for HERMES are described. Also, more details on the software that has been implemented are provided with future development direction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses the role of educational opportunity in a time of globalisation, a new economy and life in a multicultural society, and gives an epistemological and semantic account of the concept 'intercultural education', distinguishing it from multicultural and transcultural education. Starting with a historic overview of various conceptualisations of meetings/clashes among people with different linguistic, religious, cultural or ethnic features, distinctive theoretical elaborations are reviewed, above all in a European context and in the educational field. After outlining the development of intercultural education (main contents, methods and objectives, as well as limits), this article supports the thesis that education, in an intercultural sense, is currently the most appropriate answer to globalisation and interdependence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

1997 was a good year for typology. It marked the inauguration of Linguistic Typology, the occasion of this decennial retrospective. 1997 also witnessed the publication of the first volume of the EUROTYP series by Mouton de Gruyter (Siewierska (ed.) 1997). These volumes represent the culmination of the European Typology Project, which in addition to producing the research contained in the EUROTYP volumes, brought European typologists together on a regular basis, and created the sense of community that, among other things, led to the establishment of the Association for Linguistic Typology. 1997 also witnessed the publication of the first two volumes of the Oxford Studies in Typology and Linguistic Theory monograph series. Haspelmath's Indefinite Pronouns (Haspelmath 1997), the first volume, represents one of the best classical typological studies and brought wider attention to the semantic map model, of which more below. Stassen's Intransitive Predication (Stassen 1997) is awesome in scope and accomplishment, representing the largest crosslinguistic survey outside of phonology and word order up to that time, and providing many profound insights into the syntax and semantics of predication. Finally, 1997 witnessed the founding of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, with a Department of Linguistics directed by Bernard Comrie and devoted to typological research, language documentation, and related activities. This institute has provided resources and a focus for important new research in typology, such as The World Atlas of Language Structures (Haspelmath et al. (eds.) 2005), as well as a new locus for bringing together typologists, field linguists, and native speaker consultants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses, from a systems theoretical perspective, ‘cultural dialogue’ in the context of the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership. It proceeds in four steps. First, the article looks from a perspective of symbolic bordering processes into the semantics of identity that shape the observation of two distinct cultures in the Euro-Mediterranean area. Second, it takes a closer look at Self/Other distinctions on which these semantics of cultures are based, thereby addressing in particular the valorization of identities. Third, it discusses the politics of de-paradoxification, which become institutionalized through ‘cultural dialogue’, thereby focusing on its structural conflictual disposition. Finally, the article proposes a world societal perspective on symbolic bordering processes in the Euro-Mediterranean area that might avoid some of the pitfalls of ‘cultural dialogue’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Non-synchronous events are constitutive for the social. Every society has to institutionalize synchronicity over time to make a social order of the present possible. A social world of discontinuity (i.e. a non-synchronized world) is amended by a semantics of simultaneity (i.e. a synchronized world) which makes the non-synchronous appear as synchronous. From this follows that synchronicity is a necessary illusion. Cultures of synchronicity are powerful symbolic representations. The case of the New Europe is a particularly striking case. It synchronizes by standardization and by the timing of standardization which generates non-synchronicity at increasing speed. This is called the first face of Europeanization. The New Europe has to legitimate its non-synchronicity and make it appear as synchronicity. This is called the second face of Europeanization. Thus a culture emerges in which non-synchronicity and synchronicity are constructed simultaneously. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The signature of the 2019 Declaration of Cooperation on advancing the digitization of cultural heritage in Europe shows the important role that the 3D digitization process plays in the safeguard and sustainability of cultural heritage. The digitization also aims at sharing and presenting cultural heritage. However, the processing steps of data acquisition to its presentation requires an interdisciplinary collaboration, where understanding and collaborative work is difficult due to the presence of different expert knowledge involved. This study proposes an end-to-end method from the cultural data acquisition to its presentation thanks to explicit semantics representing the different fields of expert knowledge intervening in this process. This method is composed of three knowledge-based processing steps: (i) a recommendation process of acquisition technology to support cultural data acquisition; (ii) an object recognition process to structure the unstructured acquired data; and (iii) an enrichment process based on Linked Open Data to document cultural objects with further information, such as geospatial, cultural, and historical information. The proposed method was applied in two case studies concerning the watermills of Ephesos terrace house 2 and the first Sacro Monte chapel in Varallo. These application cases show the proposed method's ability to recognize and document digitized cultural objects in different contexts thanks to the semantics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a report on the European research on Semiotic Textology. By the term semiotic textology, the author indicates a complex branch of research directed towards texts which, so far, has no generally accepted name. The textology component of the term indicates the domain of the research objects, while the semiotic component of the term refers to the spectrum of aspects which involves both the formal, the semantic, and the pragmatic aspects of texts. In the survey, the author has tried to comment on monographs on different aspects of text constitution and text processing from an integrative theoretical perspective.

The article discusses motif indexes broadly. Much of the theory and practice of European folkloristics has focused on repertoires within individual national frames, with increasing recognition of the limitations of that focus. The author had created various ad hoc motif catalogues to help answer specific problems dealing with genres and themes which have enabled preliminary generalizations. He had been particularly fascinated by the variety of indicators, the geographical distribution, and the identification of certain semantic cores that exist across genres.