A fundamental goal of linguistic theory is to explain how natural languages are acquired. This paper describes some recent findings on how learners acquire syntactic knowledge for which there is little, if any, decisive evidence from the environment. The first section presents several general observations about language acquisition that linguistic theory has tried to explain and discusses the thesis that certain linguistic properties are innate because they appear universally and in the absence of corresponding experience. A third diagnostic for innateness, (...) early emergence, is the focus of the second section of the paper, in which linguistic theory is tested against recent experimental evidence on children's acquisition of syntax. (shrink)

Cet article vise à définir précisément la forme que prend l’action quand elle fait l’objet d’une mise en intrigue par un récit, de manière à éviter certaines dérives dans l’interprétation du phénoméne de la narrativité et de sa fonction anthropologique. Deux formes de dérives ou de réductionnisme sont d’abord envisagées : d’une part, la narratologie structuraliste a eu tendance à analyser de manière autonome les structures actionnelles formant la ‘fable’ des récits, ce qui l’a amenée à perdre de vue la (...) fonction que remplissaient ces actions au niveau de l’interaction narrative et à généraliser la théorie de l’action ainsi dégagée ; d’autre part, les travaux d’orientation cognitiviste, bien qu’ils aient ‘décloisonné’ l’analyse des structures narratives, ont eu tendance à se fonder sur un modèle schématique de l’action planifiée à la fois trop général et trop simpliste pour parvenir à cerner la fonction proprement narrative que remplissent les actions narrées. L’auteur propose de mettre en évidence, au niveau de l’interaction discursive, la fonction que remplissent certaines formes d’action narrées dans la mise en intrigue, notamment par le biais des effets de suspense et de curiosité qu’elles contribuent à produire. La mise en évidence du rôle fondamental que jouent les actions polémiques dans la dynamique du récit permet de conclure en opposant deux points de vue complémentaires sur l’action : alors que les approches ‘narratives’ mettent en évidence la singularité de l’événement narré, son caractère inédit, surprenant ou sous-déterminé, d’autres formes d’analyse ou de textualisation de l’action cherchent au contraire à cerner la règle ou la régularité derrière l’apparente ‘nouveauté’ de l’événement. (shrink)

The paper discusses the limitations of engineering ethics as implemented in practice, with a focus on the fact that engineering and other activities are carried out without any consideration of whether the activities are themselves ethical, and on the gap between legality and ethics. This leads to the following three central ideas of the paper. The first is the need for engineers to both be aware of and critique their own values and be able to widen their perspective to that (...) of the ‘other’, i.e., marginalised and minority groups and the environment. This understanding of the ‘other’ and values is also applied to the discussion of ethical issues relating to minority world (‘developed’) country engineers working in majority world (‘developing’) countries. The second central idea is the fact that structural and contextual factors in the form of barriers and enablers affect ethical values and practices. Individuals are not necessarily unethical in themselves, but the context and organisational ethos may present barriers to ethical behaviour and encourage the development of unethical values. These barriers and enablers are investigated through a pilot survey. The third central idea is the relationship between individual and collective responsibility and the need for support to enable engineers to think and behave ethically. (shrink)

General theory of law (general jurisprudence, allgemeine Rechtslehre) has often claimed to deal with general or universal concepts, i.e., concepts which are deemed to be common to any legal system whatsoever. At any rate, this is the classic determination of such a field of study as provided by John Austin in the nineteenth century—a determination, however, which deserves careful analysis. In what sense, indeed, can one assert that some legal concepts are common to different legal systems? And, above all, in (...) what sense can one assert that some concepts are common to different languages and cultures? My paper sets out to discuss such questions—although, obviously, they are too complicated to be answered in a single paper. The first section reconstructs the Austinian argument for general jurisprudence by placing it in its historical context. The second section tries to apply to legal concepts some suggestions derived from the contemporary debate on conceptual relativism. The third section, returning to the Austinian problem, comes to the following conclusion: Even if conceptual relativism were true and there were no general or universal legal concepts, this would not invalidate in any way the didactic and scientific value of (general) theory of law. (shrink)

This study introduced a phenomenological approach to the study of the companies that committed corporate crimes. The author first developed the epistemology of normative control which is based on the philosophical ground of phenomenology, sociology of knowledge, ethnomethodology, Habermas's normative theories, and Foucault's normalizing discourse in the context of organizations. He, then, showed the procedures for conducting a qualitative and phenomenological empirical case study of an aggressive Japanese company whose name appeared in the media for its scandal in Tokyo. The (...) inquiry revealed the generative mechanism of normative control and the patterns of constructing social reality of workplaces in a Japanese company. (shrink)

During the past decades, research collaboration between researchers from different disciplines has become more frequent. However, there is a need to look into the generic modalities and challenges. The article explores a series of potential obstructions to cross-disciplinary collaboration of methodological and epistemological nature. Furthermore, a number of contextual, inhibiting factors are outlined. As means of overcoming the obstacles, the importance of mutual knowledge, allocation of adequate time and conducive research management is emphasised. New teams may benefit from tutoring by (...) facilitators, who can help to make problem areas explicit and negotiate solutions. Owing to the training background of the author, most of the examples are drawn from the interface between biomedicine/natural science and applied medical anthropology. However, the issues raised basically apply to all sorts of cross-disciplinary research collaboration in various combinations. (shrink)

The article considers the nature of descriptive statements and the ontological status of descriptive constructs in linguistics, taking the example of a phoneme of English. It is argued that descriptive statements should be seen as expressions of the content of descriptive models or as hypotheses. Furthermore, it is argued that descriptive models and constructs in linguistics have a purely explanatory function in relation to speech events and without ontological commitment to corresponding entities in the real world.

Dance anthropologists and ethnomusicologists are trained to treat the labels ‘dance’ and ‘music’ with caution, because the terms carry preconceptions that may mask significant aspects of the structured movement/sound systems they study. Yet many talk about ‘the body’ – the medium through which these systems come into being – as something given and ‘true’, without investigating its emic conceptualizations or looking into the implications these may have in terms of how music and dance are experienced. The article investigates the dancing (...) bodies of western ballet dancers and of Tiwi dancers of northern Australia. The latter have an extensive vocabulary for body parts, but no word for ‘body’ as a bounded entity, comparable to the ‘body’ conceptualized by ballet dancers. The article argues that for the Tiwi landscape and human bodies are unavoidably tied together and that the dancers incarnate both land and cosmology. While specific parts have a concrete practical existence, the whole body expands into the landscape so that the landscape becomes flesh. Through the aesthetic transformation of dancing, dancers and land become one, and life is sustained and the land revitalized. (shrink)

The reflexive character of enactive theory is spelled out, in an effort to make explicit that which is usually implicit in debate: that we are responsible for the distinctions we draw, and that ultimately, the world that we collectively characterize is a joint production. Enaction, as treated here, is not a positivist scientific field, but an epistemologically self-conscious way to ground our understanding of the value-saturated lives of embodied beings. This stance is seen as entirely congruent with the scientific field (...) of ecological psychology, which is itself then cast as a specific example of the kind of science that can be done in an enactive mode. (shrink)

The dualism of emic and etic plays a crucial role in the emergence of three culturally informed approaches of psychology: cross-cultural psychology , cultural psychology and indigenous psychologies , a distinction largely accepted nowadays. Similarities and/or differences between these positions are usually discussed either on the level of phenomena or theory. In this paper, however, the discussion takes place on a meta-theoretical or epistemological level, which is also emerging elsewhere. In following several earlier papers of the author, first, four perspectives (...) are distinguished that underlie present day psychology. Second, these are used as a framework for linking them to the three “camps”. This analysis will show that these perspectives are characterized by different underlying worldviews, interests as well as methodical preferences. Third, it is claimed that this level of discussion is quite fruitful for the ongoing discourse on the three camps, but also helps one to understand, why the duality between emic and etic approaches is—implicitly or explicitly—at the core of these discussions, because their relevance turns out to differ in the three camps. In that sense, the emic/etic duality is used here as a “litmus test” to exemplify these deeper differences between the camps, thereby highlighting them. Fourth, in order to overcome not only the dilemma between the unique and general in psychology, but also to clarify the relation between the individual and culture it is proposed that psychology should take human action as its unit of analysis, thereby connecting historically to the early beginnings of psychology at the end of the 19th century. It will be argued that a culture inclusive action theory may overcome this tension and may help to integrate western and other indigenous psychologies, and hence it could be advantageous to integrate CP and IPs as well. This is possible because the proposed theory hopefully provides a universal framework for psychological concepts, yet allows for their culture specific expression. (shrink)

Increasingly, it is accepted wisdom for agricultural scientists to get feedback from indigenous peoples—peasants—about new improved seeds and biotechnologies before their official release from the experiment station. What is not yet accepted wisdom is the importance of cognitive science to research on farmer decision making, especially of the type “Why don't they adopt.” In this paper, the impact of the cognitive revolution on models of farmer decision making is described, and decision making models before and after the cognitive revolution are (...) contrasted. An example of a decision model after the cognitive revolution is given by the Malawi farmer's decision whether to use chemical fertilizers or organic fertilizers or both. Results of testing the model show that in Malawi, smallholders' lack of capital and credit are more important factors constraining use of chemical fertilizers than are indigenous beliefs in organic fertilizers or fears of a future dependency on chemicals. (shrink)

This article presents recent developments in the Geneva modular and interactionist approach to discourse organization. The first section analyses the main epistemological, theoretical and methodological properties of the Geneva Model by examining its relationship to data, communicative action, complexity and discourse organization, and then outlines the Geneva Model's modular methodology. The second section of the article focuses on a text extract from a service encounter and applies some aspects of the modular methodology to the analysis of request sequences. The authors (...) argue that requests cannot be reduced to the utterance of single speech acts but are best described as complex discourse practices linking praxeological information, conceptual knowledge and textual competence. (shrink)

This paper presents the notion that verbal discourse is structured, in form and contents, by metaphorical reasoning. It discusses the concept of “metaphorical network” as a framework for relating the parts of a speech act to each other, since such an act seems to cohere into a meaningful text on the basis of “domains” that deliver common concepts. The basic finding of several research projects on this concept suggest that source domains allow speakers to derive sense from a verbal interaction (...) because they interconnect the topic of discussion to culturally-meaningful images and ideas. This suggests, in turn, that language is intertwined with nonverbal systems of meaning, reflecting them in the contents of verbal messages. Overall, the concept of metaphorical networks implies that human cognition is highly associative in structure. (shrink)

This paper presents a new line of inquiry into when and how music as a semiotic system was born. Eleven principal expressive aspects of music each contains specific structural patterns whose configuration signifies a certain affective state. This distinguishes the tonal organization of music from the phonetic and prosodic organization of natural languages and animal communication. The question of music’s origin can therefore be answered by establishing the point in human history at which all eleven expressive aspects might have been (...) abstracted from the instinct-driven primate calls and used to express human psycho-emotional states. Etic analysis of acoustic parameters is the prime means of cross-examination of the typical patterns of expression of the basic emotions in human music versus animal vocal communication. A new method of such analysis is proposed here. Formation of such expressive aspects as meter, tempo, melodic intervals, and articulation can be explained by the influence of bipedal locomotion, breathing cycle, and heartbeat, long before Homo sapiens. However, two aspects, rhythm and melodic contour, most crucial for music as we know it, lack proxies in the Paleolithic lifestyle. The available ethnographic and developmental data leads one to believe that rhythmic and directional patterns of melody became involved in conveying emotion-related information in the process of frequent switching from one call-type to another within the limited repertory of calls. Such calls are usually adopted for the ongoing caretaking of human youngsters and domestic animals. The efficacy of rhythm and pitch contour in affective communication must have been spontaneously discovered in new important cultural activities. The most likely scenario for music to have become fully semiotically functional and to have spread wide enough to avoid extinctions is the formation of cross-specific communication between humans and domesticated animals during the Neolithic demographic explosion and the subsequent cultural revolution. Changes in distance during such communication must have promoted the integration between different expressive aspects and generated the basic musical grammar. The model of such communication can be found in the surviving tradition of Scandinavian pastoral music - kulning. This article discusses the most likely ways in which such music evolved. (shrink)

Tagmemic theory as a semiotic theory can be used to analyze multiple systems of logic and to assess their strengths and weaknesses. This analysis constitutes an application of semiotics and also a contribution to understanding of the nature of logic within the context of human meaning. Each system of logic is best adapted to represent one portion of human rationality. Acknowledging this correlation between systems and their targets helps explain the usefulness of more than one system. Among these systems, the (...) two-valued system of classical logic takes its place. All the systems of logic can be incorporated into a complex mathematical model that has a place for each system and that represents a larger whole in human reasoning. The model can represent why tight formal systems of logic can be applied in some contexts with great success, but in other contexts are not directly applicable. The result suggests that human reasoning is innately richer than any one formal system of logic. (shrink)

Este artículo pretende realizar un análisis semiótico del rito dancístico del pascol, el cual se distingue por ser una de las prácticas culturales más importantes de los indígenas rarámuri que radican en la región de barrancas de la sierra occidental del noroeste de México. A través del análisis de la semiosis de este rito dancístico intentaremos mostrar cómo es el proceso de significación interpretativa que le otorgan los rarámuri para explicar su cosmovisión. Se tendrá como finalidad dar cuenta que esta (...) práctica cultural es un símbolo esencial del proceso de la asociación de signos cuya acción o influencia compone una parte sustantiva de la cosmovisión de este grupo étnico, que tiene entre sus principales funciones mantener algunos preceptos socioculturales para la estabilidad futura de las familias y la comunidad. (shrink)

Throughout its history the Game was closely allied with music, and usually proceeded according to musical or mathematical rules. One theme, two themes, or three themes were stated, elaborated, varied, and underwent a development quite similar to that of the theme in a Bach fugue or a concerto movement.… Experts and Masters of the Game freely wove the initial theme into unlimited combinations [p. 30].