Linguists and other animals

Book reviewed in this article:
Joan Dunayer, Animal Equality: Language and Liberation     

A sociolinguistic application of Bakhtin's authoritative and internally persuasive discourse

Through the use of two central Bakhtinian concepts, authoritative and internally persuasive discourse (word), this paper examines the tension between the ideology of linguistic hegemony as a source of power in the Greek public sphere and the condition of language shift faced by the Albanian‐speaking communities of modern Greece. I argue here that a cautious application of these two notions, which are relevant to linguistic ideology, can reveal crucial aspects of two processes: that of subordination to and that of questioning of the dominant linguistic ideology by local Albanian‐speaking communities. Thus, in language shift contexts, it is possible that no simple relations obtain that place social agents in unquestionable and easily predictable positions. Such an approach proves useful for the sociolinguistic study of threatened language communities.     

反思全球化背景下的“传统”和“话语霸权”

传统不是器物遗迹,也不是一成不变的精神规定,传统是在现代文化运行中生成的事实和意义的复合,是由不同时代的变异体组成的连续体。传统在中国现当代文艺和文艺学中并不存在截然的断裂。所谓话语霸权在当代中国也只具有十分有限的意义。中国当代文艺中也有在全球化背景下化全球的典范。传统的生成类似于基因的生成,但基因制约性在当代条件下的受到限制,为我们敲响了警钟。应对全球化冲击,我们的文艺学应具有无为和有为相统一的智慧和策略。     

An Interview with Georg Lind

Georg Lind is being interviewed by Helen Haste about his work in moral psychology. In the interview, he discusses the meaning and measurement of moral competencies, which he sees as crucial to bridge the gap between moral ideals and action, and to maintain modern democracies, which rely on the enactment of shared moral ideals. Lind has carried out and inspired one of the largest research programs in moral psychology, including longitudinal, cross-cultural, intervention, and experimental studies. His new methodology, the Moral Judgment Test, has been translated and adapted into many languages. Lind has also contributed much to the improvement and dissemination of educational methods to foster moral competencies. The intellectual and biographical roots of his interests are explored.     

Hearts and Minds and Morality: Analyzing Moral Vocabularies in Qualitative Studies

A strategy of analyzing the moral vocabulary of a social movement or subculture is proposed by which ethnographies and other qualitative works may place the moral and ethical concepts used by respondents into a broader sociological context. Through examining the moral resources, the status hierarchy which the specific moral resources within a given moral vocabulary form, and the historical and cultural contexts within which these moral resources exist, it is argued that it becomes possible to analyze and anticipate the moral claims and form of discourse which will be produced by a specific movement and/or subculture. It is also argued that this method may be used to predict how the opposition to a movement and/or subculture is perceived through the formation of an antithetical moral vocabulary.     

“受事+施事+vp”型主谓谓语句的句法、篇章功能考察

"受事 施事 vp"型主谓谓语句的形成和使用受到句法、篇章的制约.在句法上有强调、突出受事主语和强调、突出补语成分的作用.在篇章中,受事主语有衔接连贯、对比和开启下文的作用,衔接连贯的受事主语能够使文气顺畅;对比的受事主语带有话题焦点的性质;开启下文的受事主语可以使主题统一;施事主语有对比强调和开启下文的作用,对比强调的施事主语带有对比焦点的性质;开启下文的施事主语起到主题统一的作用.     

Is there a field of social work?: Trainees evaluating social problems and social work

My aim was to study the experiences and priorities of two age groups of social work students practicing in client-centered social work. This article is based on the research on rationality and language games in social work. The target groups of the research project as a whole were the actors: the heads and social workers or activists in public social welfare and health care agencies and institutions and in voluntary associations and action groups, and finally, two subsequent classes of students from a school of social work, during their practicing periods. This article concentrates on the trainees. At first, the trainees wrote essays and kept diaries. Secondly, they marked their standings on graphs visualizing different types of information contents and social relation structures. Thirdly, they made their choices of reasons for and solutions to social problems on a problem wheel. The trainees' study, using different data gathering techniques, partly confirms the results of the research of the other actor groups, in which the data were derived using questionnaires and interviews. The trainees' study shows variation in the respondents' priorities within and between specified social problem categories. Qualitatively analyzed, however, the characterizations of social work, both those who currently act in and those aiming to enter this field, resemble one another.     

Coherent decision analysis with inseparable probabilities and utilities

This article explores the extent to which a decision maker's probabilities can be measured separately from his/her utilities by observing his/her acceptance of small monetary gambles. Only a partial separation is achieved: the acceptable gambles are partitioned into a set of belief gambles, which reveals probabilities distorted by marginal utilities for money, and a set of preference gambles, which reveals utilities reciprocally distorted by marginal utilities for money. However, the information in these gambles still enables us to solve the decision maker's problem: his/her utility-maximizing decision is the one that avoids arbitrage (i.e., incoherence or Dutch books).     

Comparative probability for conditional events: A new look through coherence

We study, from the standpoint of coherence, comparative probabilities on an arbitrary familyE of conditional events. Given a binary relation ·, coherence conditions on · are related to de Finetti's coherent betting system: we consider their connections to the usual properties of comparative probability and to the possibility of numerical representations of ·. In this context, the numerical reference frame is that of de Finetti's coherent subjective conditional probability, which is not introduced (as in Kolmogoroff's approach) through a ratio between probability measures.Another relevant feature of our approach is that the family & need not have any particular algebraic structure, so that the ordering can be initially given for a few conditional events of interest and then possibly extended by a step-by-step procedure, preserving coherence.