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This article takes up film and imagination via the problem of empathy. Proposing a different entry into contemporary polemics over empathy, the ‘empathic imagination’ is reconceptualized as a problematic of form rather than psychological experience. That is, instead of adopting a pre-given notion of empathy to illuminate the relation between film and the spectator's moral imagination, this article considers how that imagination is constituted in and through the image to begin with. After tracing the genealogy of empathy ( Einfühlung) in German aesthetics, the concept is put into play through readings of ‘#Look Beyond Borders’, an online video produced by Amnesty International, and two documentaries by Johan van der Keuken – Face Value (1991) and Herman Slobbe (1966). In these works, the facial image is read as the imaginary terrain in which to explore very different notions of what might count as empathy and the empathic imagination in film and media.

Considerable variability has been observed in sentence comprehension abilities in both native speakers and second language (L2) learner populations. While it has long been established that, in native speakers, this variability is closely linked to individual differences (IDs) in verbal working memory (vWM), previous research on the role of vWM in L2 sentence comprehension has produced mixed results. Moreover, there is an accumulating body of evidence demonstrating that the relationship between vWM and native language comprehension abilities is mediated by language experience. However, to our knowledge, until now, no attempt has been made to integrate language experience measures into the vWM-L2 sentence comprehension relationship. The goal of the present study is twofold: (1) to determine whether and to what extent vWM – as gauged by a reading span (RSPAN) task – correlates with IDs in two proxy estimates of L2 experience and (2) to investigate the effects of vWM on L2 comprehension of three different types of complex sentences. Thirty-four German advanced learners of English participated in this study. Significant positive correlations were found between the RSPAN scores and both proxy estimates of L2 experience. Mixed-effects modeling revealed that vWM exerted a significant effect on L2 sentence comprehension that was not modulated by sentence type. Taken together, these results provide additional evidence in support of the involvement of vWM in L2 sentence comprehension and, to our knowledge, first evidence for the contribution of L2 experience to RSPAN task performance.

Item does not contain fulltext Taking Deliberate Metaphor Theory (Steen, 2015) as a starting point, this chapter investigates the way in which co-text influences the identification and analysis of potentially deliberate metaphor in discourse. While co-text plays a role in the identification and analysis of the linguistic and conceptual dimensions of metaphor, its role in the identification and analysis of metaphor as metaphor at the communicative dimension is more complex. In a series of analyses, we first examine metaphors in relative isolation (at utterance level), and subsequently take additional textual information into consideration. We demonstrate how co-text can play an indispensable role in the identification and further analysis of potentially deliberate metaphor, thereby providing important new insights into the complexity of deliberate-metaphor analysis.

Impartiality is one of the core values underlying the administration of justice. A complaint about a judge’s supposed lack of impartiality may be filed on the grounds of the judge’s verbal behavior. In this article I will analyze complaints that concern the judge’s use of rhetorical questions during court hearings. I will explore what role these complaints may play in the strategic maneuvering of a party who seeks the judge’s disqualification.

Human language shows combinatoriality in its phonology (both in speech and in sign language) and its grammar, while both types appear to be absent in the communication systems of our closest evolutionary relatives. In this article, we observe that productive combinatoriality is difficult to evolve, because it requires multiple components to be put in place simultaneously for it to function. To understand how it nevertheless evolved in human language, we focus on combinatoriality in phonology, for which most evidence is available. We discuss findings and theories from three domains: linguistics (descriptive, experimental and corpus linguistics), comparative biology (including some fossil indicators) and (computer) models. We tentatively conclude that many of the biological prerequisites for combinatorial phonology and compositional semantics are shared with other animals, but that a uniquely human pressure for large vocabularies and uniquely human processes of cultural evolution are key in understanding the origins of combinatoriality in language.

Despite the weight of his work and his prominence in Arabic public debate, the Egyptian public intellectual ʿAbd al-Wahhab Elmessiri (1938–2008) has not been the subject of much serious study. In this article, I show that Elmessiri's oeuvre offers a rich and creative perspective on both Judaism and Zionism. Studying Elmessiri from the perspective of identity/alterity studies, I argue that his representation of Judaism qualifies as what Gerd Baumann and André Gingrich call “encompassment by hierarchical subsumption.” The article offers an analysis of the discursive logic behind this image of Judaism and its connection to Elmessiri's anti-Zionist agenda, rejection of anti-Semitism, and critique of Western modernity.

This article analyses Russian elements in the texts of Said Buriatskii (1982–2010), who in the late 2000s was one of the main ideologists and symbols of the internationalist Islamist resistance in the North Caucasus. Trying to explain the importance and validity of jihad, Buriatskii referred to the concepts of the famous Soviet historian and anthropologist Lev Gumilev and brought Islamic radicalism closer to a Russian-speaking audience by using Gumilev’s terminology. Indeed, he found some appreciation among Russian radical journalists, and even among oppositionists from a background close to the Russian Orthodox Church. This article therefore argues that, in spite of his Islamic rhetoric, Buriatskii can also be understood as aspiring to achieve the status of a Russian public intellectual, particularly as a representative of a broader movement that emphasizes values such as sincerity and passion.

Since 2016, when the Facebook/Cambridge Analytica scandal began to emerge, public concern has grown around the threat of “online manipulation”. While these worries are familiar to privacy researchers, this paper aims to make them more salient to policymakers—first, by defining “online manipulation”, thus enabling identification of manipulative practices; and second, by drawing attention to the specific harms online manipulation threatens. We argue that online manipulation is the use of information technology to covertly influence another person’s decision-making, by targeting and exploiting their decision-making vulnerabilities. Engaging in such practices can harm individuals by diminishing their economic interests, but its deeper, more insidious harm is its challenge to individual autonomy. We explore this autonomy harm, emphasising its implications for both individuals and society, and we briefly outline some strategies for combating online manipulation and strengthening autonomy in an increasingly digital world.

One of the key concepts of the MIME (Mobility and Inclusion in Multilingual Europe) project is, obviously, ‘inclusion’. However, precisely describing what the concept means is not as straightforward as it may seem. It has been used in different contexts in scientific literature. This paper attempts to contribute to the enfolding MIME-framework by critically reflecting upon the definition of ‘inclusion’. Drawing upon theories of acculturation, three core concepts in minority literature, namely ‘assimilation,’ ‘integration,’ and ‘inclusion’ will be examined, and their differences demarcated. In the light of recent developments, such as transnationalism, it will be determined which concept is best suited to analyse contemporary accommodation processes of minorities in their countries of residence. After examining the trade-off between mobility and inclusion, a central topic in all MIMErelated research, some general conclusions about ‘inclusion’ and diversitymanagement will be drawn.

While classical theories on rhetoric cluster figurative devices like metaphor, hyperbole, and irony under the encompassing category of tropes, current theories and research typically focus on one of the tropes in isolation. To determine how these different tropes are used in combinations, we conducted a large-scale corpus analysis of Dutch printed news discourse (54,851 words). For metaphor and hyperbole, we find that typical combinations are found in nouns and adjectives, showing that such combinations differ from the use of either trope in isolation. For hyperbole and irony, we find a relation between the two tropes in that ironic clauses contain more hyperbole than non-ironic clauses. In contrast, for metaphor and irony, we find no empirical evidence that the use of metaphors differs between ironic and non-ironic clauses. Analysis of clauses containing the three tropes of metaphor, hyperbole and irony shows that these may not always reflect novel and creative word use. Instead, various cases seem to contain conventional uses of metaphor and hyperbole.

In this paper, we describe the conditions under which the manipulation of the verbal and the visual elements or of the visual elements alone in the genre of subvertisements can be considered as an act of objecting or rebutting in an implicit argumentative discussion. We thus consider the cognitive and pragmatic aspects of communication while paying serious attention to the interaction of semiotic modes in order to analyse a number of images produced by anti-consumerist groups such as Adbusters. We identify four different ways in which image-text relations or the visuals alone can cue an incongruity between the message of the original ad and the message of the subvertisement in such a way that the latter functions as an objection or rebuttal of the claim advanced by the original advertisement.

One of the main assumptions of usage-based constructionist approaches is that linguistic knowledge is best conceived of as a repository of constructions, which emerge from experience with language and whose strength of mental representation (entrenchment) is a function of their usage frequency. On the basis of a multistep statistical procedure geared to identify patterns of adverbial clause constructions in two distinct registers, we argue that a model of language that generalizes over situational contexts is implausible. Instead, a more adequate model of linguistic knowledge comprises a set of subrepositories that are adapted to the discourse-functional needs of situational contexts, in which constructions have register-specific entrenchment values.

In his lecture entitled ‘The University without Condition’(2002), Jacques Derrida puts forward the claim that the public university, and within it the Humanities, must remain unconditional in their autonomy, free of any national, ideological or economic affiliations, able to profess and set free any thought. Rather than being understood as safeguarding a privilege or entitlement, this unconditionality is formulated as a pledge of responsibility, a status that is affirmed and maintained by a profession of faith. Derrida evokes in this essay three notions that are of central importance to this volume: the critical role of the Humanities in the organization of what he terms mondialisation or worldwide-ization; the performative, embodied nature of knowledge production; and the order of the ‘as if’, the training of the imagination not only to make sense of the present, but also to generate the ferment from

Enculturation is known to shape the perception of meter in music but this is not explicitly accounted for by current cognitive models of meter perception. We hypothesize that the induction of meter is a result of predictive coding: interpreting onsets in a rhythm relative to a periodic meter facilitates prediction of future onsets. Such prediction, we hypothesize, is based on previous exposure to rhythms. As such, predictive coding provides a possible explanation for the way meter perception is shaped by the cultural environment. Based on this hypothesis, we present a probabilistic model of meter perception that uses statistical properties of the relation between rhythm and meter to infer meter from quantized rhythms. We show that our model can successfully predict annotated time signatures from quantized rhythmic patterns derived from folk melodies. Furthermore, we show that by inferring meter, our model improves prediction of the onsets of future events compared to a similar probabilistic model that does not infer meter. Finally, as a proof of concept, we demonstrate how our model can be used in a simulation of enculturation. From the results of this simulation, we derive a class of rhythms that are likely to be interpreted differently by enculturated listeners with different histories of exposure to rhythms.

A high degree of topical diversity is often considered to be an important characteristic of interesting text documents. A recent proposal for measuring topical diversity identifies three elements for assessing diversity: words, topics, and documents as collections of words. Topic models play a central role in this approach. Using standard topic models for measuring diversity of documents is suboptimal due to generality and impurity. General topics only include common information from a background corpus and are assigned to most of the documents in the collection. Impure topics contain words that are not related to the topic; impurity lowers the interpretability of topic models and impure topics are likely to get assigned to documents erroneously. We propose a hierarchical re-estimation approach for topic models to combat generality and impurity; the proposed approach operates at three levels: words, topics, and documents. Our re-estimation approach for measuring documents’ topical diversity outperforms the state of the art on PubMed dataset which is commonly used for diversity experiments.

The purpose of this study was to investigate texting and textese, which is the special register used for sending brief text messages, across children with typical development (TD) and children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI). Using elicitation techniques, texting and spoken language messages were collected from 55 children with TD and 15 children with SLI between 10 and 13 years old. The results show that text messages in the two groups were of equal length, but the children with TD used more textisms (alternative ways of spelling words) than the children with SLI. Both groups omitted words in their texting messages with similar frequencies, but while the SLI group omitted words equally frequently in texting messages and spoken language messages, omissions in the TD group were more specific to texting. This suggests that TD children omit words in texting because it is a register-specific convention, whereas children with SLI omit words regardless of the register. Socio-emotional reasons to use texting were found to be relatively important for children with SLI. This may be related to their higher level of shyness.

There is an accumulating body of evidence that knowledge of the statistics of multiword phrases (MWP) facilitates native language learning and processing both in children and adults. However, less is known about whether adult second language (L2) learners are able to develop native-like sensitivity to the statistics of MWP, and more importantly up until now no attempt has been made to determine to what extent variation in this ability is related to individual differences (IDs) in cognitive and affective factors. Using a within-subject design embedded in an individual-differences framework, the aim of the present study was twofold: (1) to replicate the MWP frequency effect reported in Hernandez et al. [1] with another sample of L2 learners, and (2) to determine to what extent variation in online L2 processing of MWP can be accounted for by two IDs measures, working memory (WM) and personality. We could replicate the frequency effect for MWP from the high frequency band but not for MWP from the low frequency band. Our findings revealed that while there was no main effect of WM, the Openness personality trait had a statistically significant impact on online L2 processing of MWP. However, subsequent analyses yielded three significant two-way interactions indicating that the relationship between WM, personality and online L2 processing of MWP is a complex one. Taken together our findings underscore the importance of further investigation of L2 learners’ ability to keep track of and build up knowledge of the statistics of MWPs as well as the interrelationships between the cognitive and affective IDs that impact the development of such ability.

This article explores bottom-up grassroots ordering in internet governance, investigating the efforts by a group of civil society actors to inscribe human rights in internet infrastructure, lobbying the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. Adopting a Science and Technology Studies (STS) perspective, we approach this struggle as a site of contestation, and expose the sociotechnical imaginaries animating policy advocacy. Combining quantitative mailing-list analysis, participant observation and qualitative discourse analysis, the article observes civil society in action as it contributes to shape policy in the realm of institutional and infrastructure design.

This contribution focuses on Lope's conquest of Amsterdam's grand theater in the 40s and 50s of the seventeenth century. Focusing on creative industries, we analyze the producer's side for Lope's "invasion" in the Netherlands, and the channels that were developed in order to faciltate the new Spanish productions for the Amsterdam theater. Focusing on the consumer's side, we measure, both qualitatively and quantitatively, the successes (and some failures) of Lope's plays. In our new data base ONSTAGE, that gathers information about plays, performances and companies' revenues, we show convincing evidence that Lope was the most popular playwright in those years in Amsterdam, even more popular than our local playwrights. The article is completed with an inventory of all of Lope's plays adapted for the Amsterdam stage. We hope these new findings may contribute to a more complete picture of Lope's European career., Esta contribución se centra en la conquista del gran teatro de Ámsterdam en los años 40 y 50 del siglo XVII por parte de Lope. En una aproximación a las industrias creativas, se analiza el lado del productor para entender la invasión de Lope en los Países Bajos, y los caminos de transferencia que se desarrollaron con el fin de facilitar las nuevas producciones españolas para el teatro de Ámsterdam. Por el lado del consumidor, medimos, de forma tanto cualitativa como cuantitativa, los éxitos (y algunos fracasos) de las obras de Lope. En nuestro nuevo sistema de datos ONSTAGE, sobre obras de teatro, puestas en escena e ingresos, evidenciamos que Lope fue el dramaturgo más popular en esos años en Ámsterdam, aún más popular que nuestros propios dramaturgos. Al final, el artículo tiene un inventario de todas las obras de teatro de Lope redefinidas para la etapa de Ámsterdam. Esperamos que estos nuevos hallazgos puedan contribuir a una imagen más completa de la carrera global de Lope.

Is there a notion of contradiction—let us call it, for dramatic effect, "absolute"— making all contradictions, so understood, unacceptable also for dialetheists? It is argued in this paper that there is, and that spelling it out brings some theoretical benefits. First it gives us a foothold on undisputed ground in the methodologically difficult debate on dialetheism. Second, we can use it to express, without begging questions, the disagreement between dialetheists and their rivals on the nature of truth. Third, dialetheism has an operator allowing it, against the opinion of many critics, to rule things out and manifest disagreement: for unlike other proposed exclusion-expressing-devices (for instance, the entailment of triviality), the operator used to formulate the notion of absolute contradiction appears to be immune both from crippling expressive limitations and from revenge paradoxes—pending a rigorous nontriviality proof for a formal dialetheic theory including it. Nothing is, and nothing could be, literally both true and false. (. . . ) That may seem dogmatic. And it is: I am affirming the very thesis that (the dialetheists) have called into question and—contrary to the rules of debate—I decline to defend it. Further, I concede that it is indefensible against their challenge. They have called so much into question that I have no foothold on undisputed ground. So much the worse for the demand that philosophers always must be ready to defend their theses under the rules of debate.

This research is published within the project ‘The Logic of Conceivability’, funded by the European Research Council (ERC CoG), grant number 681404. A counterpossible conditional is a counterfactual with an impossible antecedent. Common sense delivers the view that some such conditionals are true, and some are false. In recent publications, Timothy Williamson has defended the view that all are true. In this paper we defend the common sense view against Williamson’s objections. Publisher PDF

In their first year, infants’ perceptual abilities zoom in on only those speech sound contrasts that are relevant for their language. Infants’ lexicons do not yet contain sufficient minimal pairs to explain this phonetic categorization process. Therefore, researchers suggested a bottom-up learning mechanism: infants create categories aligned with the frequency dis- tributions of sounds in their input. Recent evidence shows that this bottom-up mechanism may be complemented by the semantic context in which speech sounds occur, such as simultaneously present objects. To test this hypothesis, we investigated whether discrimi- nation of a non-native vowel contrast improves when sounds from the contrast were paired consistently or randomly with two distinct visually presented objects, while the distribution of speech tokens suggested a single broad category. This was assessed in two ways: compu- tationally, namely in a neural network simulation, and experimentally, namely in a group of 8-month-old infants. The neural network, trained with a large set of sound–meaning pairs, revealed that two categories emerge only if sounds are consistently paired with objects. A group of 49 real 8-month-old infants did not immediately show sensitivity to the pair- ing condition; a later test at 18 months with some of the same infants, however, showed that this sensitivity at 8 months interacted with their vocabulary size at 18 months. This interaction can be explained by the idea that infants with larger future vocabularies are more positively influenced by consistent training (and/or more negatively influenced by inconsistent training) than infants with smaller future vocabularies. This suggests that con- sistent pairing with distinct visual objects can help infants to discriminate speech sounds even when the auditory information does not signal a distinction. Together our results give computational as well as experimental support for the idea that semantic context plays a role in disambiguating phonetic auditory input.

There is an increasing volume of semantically annotated data available, in particular due to the emerging use of knowledge bases to annotate or classify dynamic data on the web. This is challenging as these knowledge bases have a dynamic hierarchical or graph structure demanding robustness against changes in the data structure over time. In general, this requires us to develop appropriate models for the hierarchical classes that capture all, and only, the essential solid features of the classes which remain valid even as the structure changes. We propose hierarchical significant words language models of textual objects in the intermediate levels of hierarchies as robust models for hierarchical classification by taking the hierarchical relations into consideration. We conduct extensive experiments on richly annotated parliamentary proceedings linking every speech to the respective speaker, their political party, and their role in the parliament. Our main findings are the following. First, we define hierarchical significant words language models as an iterative estimation process across the hierarchy, resulting in tiny models capturing only well grounded text features at each level. Second, we apply the resulting models to party membership and party position classification across time periods, where the structure of the parliament changes, and see the models dramatically better transfer across time periods, relative to the baselines.

In Shakespeare’s Richard II, the language of absent hospitality refracts the dire economic and food crises facing mid-1590s England, and it interrogates the contemporary response to the problem of dearth through its use of images of desolation, dearth, and grief. As absent hospitality proves to be a consequence of tyranny, the idealised past is invoked as a model for political action, to reclaim what is lost for the future. The respective future-oriented nostalgias of Gaunt and Northumberland articulate that possibility of reclamation, which Richard II ultimately rejects in its suspicion of past, present, and future .

Over the past decade, scientists and journalists have prominently utilizedthe metaphor of a tipping point for drastic, irreversible and dangerousclimate change. This paper shows how the tipping point metaphorbecame a multi-purpose bridge between science and the news media,describing how its meaning and use developed and diversified ininteraction between these two domains. Within the scientific domain,the metaphor developed from a rhetorical device conveying a warningof drastic, irreversible and dangerous climate change to a theoreticalconcept driving empirical research. The news media soon picked up thetipping point metaphor for abrupt and dangerous climate change,turning it into a common part of the journalistic lexicon. Moreover, bothscience and the news media developed another, societal use of thetipping point metaphor, calling for radical societal change to avoidclimate change catastrophe. The tipping point metaphor is hence not amonolithic notion but a highly versatile concept and expression,allowing it to be used for various communicative purposes by distinctstakeholders in different contexts.

Contains fulltext : 149750.pdf (Publisher’s version ) (Open Access) Music similarity is known to be a multi-dimensional concept, depending among others on rhythm similarity and timbre similarity. The present study aims to investigate whether such sub-dimensions of similarity can be assessed independently and how they relate to general similarity. To this end, we performed a series of web-based perceptual experiments on timbre, rhythm and general similarity in electronic dance music. Participants were asked to rate similarities of music pairs on a 4-point Likert scale. The results indicated that the ratings in the three types of similarity did not completely overlap and that participants showed slight to fair agreement in their ratings in all conditions. Together, the results suggest that it is possible to assess sub-dimensions of similarities independently to some extent. Interestingly, general music similarity was not completely explained by the summation of timbre and rhythm similarity. Based on this, a novel hypothesis of how general music similarity follows from its contributing sub-similarities is proposed. 18 p.

The aim of this chapter is to give an overview of how the perception of a regular beat in music can be studied in humans adults, human newborns, and nonhuman primates using event-related brain potentials (ERPs). Next to a review of the recent literature on the perception of temporal regularity in music, we will discuss in how far ERPs, and especially the component called mismatch negativity (MMN), can be instrumental in probing beat perception. We conclude with a discussion on the pitfalls and prospects of using ERPs to probe the perception of a regular beat, in which we present possible constraints on stimulus design and discuss future perspectives.

Item does not contain fulltext This paper is a report of ongoing research on the computational modeling of beat induction which aims at achieving a better understanding of the perceptual processes involved by ordering and reformulating existing models. One family of rule-based beat induction models is described (Longuet-Higgins and Lee, 1982; Lee, 1985; Longuet-Higgins, 1994), along with the presentation of analysis methods that allow an evaluation of the models in terms of their in- and output spaces, abstracting from internal detail. It builds on work described in (Desain and Honing, 1994b). The present paper elaborates these methods and presents the results obtained. It will be shown that they can be used to characterize the differences between these models, a point that was difficult to assess previously. Furthermore, the first results of using the method to improve the existing rule-based models are presented, by describing the most effective version of a specific rule, and the most effective parameter settings.

This article gives the results of a study among 685 students in grades 6, 8 and 10 in the Netherlands to whom we administered grade-appropriate measures of reading comprehension and vocabulary knowledge in their native language (NL), Dutch, as well as, in grades 8 and 10, in English as a foreign language (EFL). All students answered the same questionnaire on (4 components of) metacognitive knowledge of reading. The aim was to explore the relative contributions to NL and FL reading comprehension of a language-specific predictor (vocabulary knowledge) and of general metacognitive knowledge. Results of analyses of covariance structure show that metacognitive knowledge was not entirely implicated in vocabulary knowledge. For older students (grades 8 and 10), metacognitive knowledge appeared to play a significant role in both NL and FL reading comprehension. These findings suggest that, in the educational setting investigated, poorer students in grades 6 to 8, not having spontaneously acquired metacognitive knowledge of reading, stand a good chance of profiting from instruction in this type of knowledge. Furthermore, we found evidence for the so-called threshold hypothesis, according to which (metacognitive) knowledge of reading strategies, reading goals and text characteristics cannot compensate for a lack of language-specific knowledge if the latter remains below a certain threshold level. The limited FL knowledge "short-circuits" the transfer of reading skills to the FL.

It is often observed that minority children's lexical proficiency in the majority language lags behind that of majority children. This observations is substantiated by scores on vocabulary tests. However, in these (traditional) tests words are generally treated as having one meaning, while most words are polysemous, i.e. they have multiple meanings. A new test was designed to measure the knowledge of multiple word meanings of minority and majority children. Results pointed to a rather high correlation between the scores on a traditional vocabulary test and the newly developed test for the minority children. Furthermore, the minority children scored lower on the new test than the majority children, which suggests that they not only have a lexical deficit in their second language with respect to the number of words known, but also with respect to the number of meanings attached to each word.

Contains fulltext : 122751.pdf (Publisher’s version ) (Open Access) Multivariate pattern classification methods are increasingly applied to neuroimaging data in the context of both fundamental research and in brain-computer interfacing approaches. Such methods provide a framework for interpreting measurements made at the single-trial level with respect to a set of two or more distinct mental states. Here, we define an approach in which the output of a binary classifier trained on data from an auditory mismatch paradigm can be used for online tracking of perception and as a neurofeedback signal. The auditory mismatch paradigm is known to induce distinct perceptual states related to the presentation of high- and low-probability stimuli, which are reflected in event-related potential (ERP) components such as the mismatch negativity (MMN). The first part of this paper illustrates how pattern classification methods can be applied to data collected in an MMN paradigm, including discussion of the optimization of preprocessing steps, the interpretation of features and how the performance of these methods generalizes across individual participants and measurement sessions. We then go on to show that the output of these decoding methods can be used in online settings as a continuous index of single-trial brain activation underlying perceptual discrimination. We conclude by discussing several potential domains of application, including neurofeedback, cognitive monitoring and passive brain-computer interfaces. 21 p.

This chapter confines to the legal aspects of Islam, i.e. the Sharia. It looks at the classical doctrine of the Sharia and then at Sharia inspired present-day legislation of Muslim states and their policies regarding the international human rights covenants. It also addresses some prominent Muslim views on the relationship between Islam and human rights. The chapter explores possibilities to enhance greater human rights compliance in the Islamic world. It outlines in what fields the Sharia is applied now-a-days and identify the conflicts with human rights standards. The chapter illustrates these conflicts by reference to Egypt, whose legal system is fairly representative for most of those in the Muslim world. It presents the idea of Islamic human rights, using as sources the influential fundamentalist thinker Mawdudi on the subject and the Cairo Declaration of Islamic Human Rights. Keywords: Cairo Declaration of Islamic Human Rights; Egypt; human rights; Islam; Mawdudi; Muslim world; Sharia

International audience; The goal of the INEX 2011 Books and Social Search Track is to evaluate approaches for supporting users in reading, searching, and navigating book metadata and full texts of digitized books. The investigation is focused around four tasks: 1) the Social Search for Best Books task aims at comparing traditional and user-generated book metadata for retrieval, 2) the Prove It task evaluates focused retrieval approaches for searching books, 3) the Structure Extraction task tests automatic techniques for deriving structure from OCR and layout information, and 4) the Active Reading task aims to explore suitable user interfaces for eBooks enabling reading, annotation, review, and summary across multiple books. We report on the setup and the results of the track.

Information retrieval systems require human contributed relevance labels for their training and evaluation. Increasingly such labels are collected under the anonymous, uncontrolled conditions of crowdsourcing, leading to varied output quality. While a range of quality assurance and control techniques have now been developed to reduce noise during or after task completion, little is known about the workers themselves and possible relationships between workers' characteristics and the quality of their work. In this paper, we ask how do the relatively well or poorly-performing crowds, working under specific task conditions, actually look like in terms of worker characteristics, such as demographics or personality traits. Our findings show that the face of a crowd is in fact indicative of the quality of their work.

By the nature of a legal proceeding which deals with individual criminal responsibility, the trial record contains a comprehensive—and possibly the largest—collection of materials pointing to the political and criminal responsibility of Milošević in the disintegration of Yugoslavia and the subsequent wave of violence. In the scholarly literature on the role of history in ascribing guilt to individuals, some argue that the question of guilt or innocence belongs exclusively in the courtroom. Other scholars, however, such as Charles Maier, see mass atrocities trials as dealing with the responsibility of individuals—which is what historians do as well. According to Maier, a historian confronts responsibility precisely because it helps to measure the degree of freedom of choice within a given institutional context. Maier asserts that “doing justice” and “doing history” are related activities. A historian endeavours to “do justice” by voicing the aspirations of the protagonists and exploring their choices. In literature that addresses the collapse of Yugoslavia, as well as in the writings of journalists and policymakers involved in the wars, there is a near consensus on the centrality of the role played by Slobodan Milošević in the violent processes of disintegration. However, the exact nature of Milošević’s role and strategy, as well as the roles and strategies of the other actors involved, remain a matter of dispute. The record left by the Milošević trial will inevitably contribute to a more comprehensive historical record from which historians, legal, and other scholars will be able to explore.

(1993). Tel Quel et la Chine: L'orient comme mythe de l'intellectuel occidental. History of European Ideas: Vol. 16, No. 4-6, pp. 431-439.

In two experiments we studied the prediction that majority support induces stronger convergent processing than minority support for a persuasive message, the more so when recipients are explicitly forced to pay attention to the source's point of view; this in turn affects the amount of attitude change on related issues. Convergent processing is the systematic elaboration on the sources position, but with a stronger focus on verification and justification rather than falsification. In Exp 1 with 108 students (aged 14-19 yrs) it was found that numerical support is related to information processing as predicted. The greater the support, the more convergent the processing. Exp 2 with 111 students (aged 14-18 yrs) replicated this result, and furthermore confirmed expectations regarding attitude change: The more convergent processing occurs, the less Ss change their attitude on related issues.

At the risk of reducing cultural history, in this paper I assume that in Western culture, at least since the Middle Ages, the two cultural activities of looking at images and reading texts have been disciplined through the promotion of realism as the basic mode of reading. Realism is, then, reading for a content that is modeled on reality at the expense of awareness of the signifying system of which the work is constructed. The problem with realism as the proper way of reading and looking is that it encourages ideological manipulation as it passes content off as natural. Yet realism has succeeded in becoming so "natural" a mode of reading that denying or ignoring its pervasiveness will not help us move beyond it. In this paper, I will discuss one way of countering realism's disciplining effects by opposing realistic to textual reading and by maintaining, rather than resolving, the tension between the two. I will do so through the analysis of a painting by Rembrandt and its literary pretext.

By the accidents of life, I started out in the literary profession as a narratologist, having French as my foreign language and structuralism as my training. By another accident, I started in Israel. As one of the young, unknown invitees of the Synopsis 2 Conference where an unusual number of established stars were mixed with a good number of beginners like myself, with the most fortunate result, I optimistically brought a formalist, quite technical paper written in French to a conference where most people tended to speak English and some to suspect formalism. My feeling awkwardly out of place was to be combatted by actively participating in the debates, and that this was possible, that within half a day I felt excited and encouraged while having completely revised my views of narratology, was due to the exceptional intellectual and humane qualities of this conference. I have been to a large number of conferences since, but just as childhood bliss is irretrievably lost in later life, so did I never feel the same deep satisfaction again. What was so special about this conference that it deserves memorialization? First of all, it was intellectually open and yet focused enough: a wide variety of topics and attitudes toward narratology and its assumptions made for lively and serious debates. In retrospect, the conference really gave an overview of narratology as a field, neither taking it for granted nor rejecting it a priori. It also marked a turning-point in the discipline. Looking at what the field is today, it seems hard to tell if the conference was at the vanguard or the core of the development; if it announced what was going to happen or demonstrated what was

Foreignness is a given factor in Esther. It is also one of its main themes. Which is to say that, in Esther, foreignness is both an a priori condition and a problematised issue. Indeed, foreignness must be present in an empire of 'one hundred and twenty-seven' spatial, social and political components. It cannot be overlooked in a plot that foregrounds otherness. The ethnic, gender, political, religious and cultural admixture is present from the first chapter onwards: in the nomenclature, the language, the plot lines, the issues addressed. Although the story is a comedy at least if we take the side of the victorious Jews, which is certainly the readerly response expected of us the question remains: Is the problem of foreignness resolved at the end of the story? If it is then how? To what extent? For whom? How is it dealt with?

1. Introduction 2. Part 1. The Functional-Lexematic Model 3. Methodological criteria for the elaboration of a functional lexicon-based grammar of the semantic domain of cognitive verbs (by Faber, Pamela) 4. A functional-lexematic description of the verbal core lexicon of the German language (by Calanas Continente, Jose-Antonio) 5. The compilation of a Spanish verbal lexicon based on functional-lexematic principles (by Felices Lago, Angel M.) 6. Cognitive abilities from a functional-lexematic perspective (by Fernandez Sanchez, Eulalio) 7. Meaning definitions and grammatical properties of predicates: Russian verbs of possession (by Rozina, Raissa) 8. Part 2. Predicate formation 9. Support verb constructions as predicate formation (by Baron, Irene) 10. Predicate formation for French pseudo-reflexive constructions?: With special reference to the verbs referring to an affective process (by Francois, Jacques) 11. Causatives in Dutch and Swedish (by Tweehuysen, Rolandt) 12. Part 3. Collocations 13. Enriching the Functional Grammar lexicon (by Butler, Christopher S.) 14. Treatment of senses and collocations in dictionaries: an issue for lexicology and lexicography (by Corda, Alessandra) 15. Part 4. Transitive verbs and the typology of States of Affairs 16. A prototype approach to transitivity: its implications for the FG typology of SoAs (by Guerrero Medina, Pilar) 17. On some semantic, pragmatic and formal issues in the study of causative constructions (by Podolski, Ludmilla) 18. Part 5. The lexicon and the underlying structure of the clause 19. The lexicon in FG and SFG: on the relation between syntax and semantics (by Garcia Velasco, Daniel) 20. Pronouns, adpositions, 'adverbs' and the lexicon (by Samuelsdorff, Paul O.) 21. The Dynamic Lexicon from a functional perspective (by Weigand, Hans) 22. List of contributors 23. Index of names 24. Subject index

In publications on language acquisition in formal and informal settings it is often assumed that utterances are addressed to one co-present other: the dyadic metaphor for communication which has 'conversation' as its paradigmatic format. Hymes (1972), Ochs (1983), and especially Goffman (1981) - among others - have emphasized that more complex participant roles are involved. In this paper structural features of the production of teacher and learner turns will be investigated. The data derive from a first English lesson, an 'action research' project and a longitudinal school diary co-authored by two teenage girls in the Netherlands. Their insider view of what happens in (language) classes corroborates the view that descriptive models of classroom talk underanalyze the notion of what are 'the' data that need to be accounted for. A more sophisticated tool is needed. It is suggested that Polanyi and Scha's Dynamic Discourse Model (Polanyi, 1988) - with modifications - could provide such a tool.

The importance of lexical skills in language development and school achievement is widely recognised. Migrant children in the Netherlands lag far behind their Dutch classmates with respect to vocabulary in Dutch. To speed up the acquisition of vocabulary by migrant children in the first four grades of primary school an experimental programme was designed. This article presents the results of the evaluation of this programme. In a longitudinal experiment which tracked both an experimental and a comparison group (n = 57, resp. 53), both groups of children were pre-tested and post-tested each year with curriculum-dependent and-independent lexical tests. In addition, their vocabulary and text reading abilities were tested in 5th and 7th grade to examine whether the programme had broader and long-term effects. The outcomes suggest that it is possible to increase the rate at which minority children acquire second language vocabulary. In each grade, the children in the experimental group outperformed those in th...

This chapter offers an analysis of majority vs. minority influence using the Heuristic-Systematic Model of persuasion (HSM). We evaluate evidence for and against leading perspectives such as Conversion Theory. Next, research and theory is reviewed suggesting that majority vs. minority influence differentially affect the processing of persuasive arguments. A dual-role interpretation of majority and minority influence is presented. First, numerical support for discrepant messages affects the decision to engage in systematic processing. Majority support is motivating in itself, whereas minority messages are processed systematically only when neglecting the message is difficult. Second, we propose that majority-supported arguments most probably elicit convergent processing, while minority-supported arguments may elicit divergent processing. Convergent processing may lead to focal change accompanied by change on related issues, whereas divergent processing at best elicits related change.

Although it initially encountered suspicion and distrust, today the psychology of religion holds a prominent place in The Netherlands. A brief review of its history shows the increasing integration of the psychology of religion into Dutch departments of theology. One of the main factors in the process seems to have been psychology's assumed practical applicability: Psychology was deemed helpful in understanding the religious subject and equipping pastors with appropriate techniques. This article deals briefly with a number of internal developments in the psychology of religion in The Netherlands and offers observations on whether the process described can be regarded as a "psychologizing" of theology.

At issue in the present research is whether native speakers' “simplified” or modified utterances, as in foreigner-talk (FT), actually facilitate comprehension for nonnative speakers hearing such utterances. It was hypothesized that (grammatical) Dutch inversion sentences (AdvVSO) that have proven to be problematic in studies on Dutch second language (L2) acquisition - as reflected both in the (ungrammatical) output of L2 learners and in the (ungrammatical) FT input to L2 learners - would not be problematic in terms of comprehension, when compared with modified, ungrammatical AdvSVO and AdvSOV sentences, as long as such sentences do not express an implausible state of affairs. Three subject groups participated in the experiment: 20 English and 22 Turkish L2 learners of Dutch and 30 Dutch native speakers (control group). Subjects heard and interpreted declarative Dutch sentences, in which word order (NVN, VNN, NNV) and animacy configurations (Al [i.e., animate/inanimate], AA, LA) were systematically manipulated. Subjects had to name the noun (first or second) that functions as actor/subject of the sentence. Positive evidence was found for the hypotheses. It is concluded from the present study, as well as from a previous study (Issidorides, 1988), that linguistically more complex input will not necessarily impede comprehension. The fact that normative speakers have difficulties in producing a certain grammatical structure (e.g., the AdvVSO structure) does not imply that such a structure is also more difficult to understand in the speech of others.