RESUMO O artigo discute os princípios fundamentais de elaboração do projeto e anotação de corpora de fala no âmbito da Escola Fonológica de São Petersburgo e fornece os exemplos de utilização de dados de vários corpora na pesquisa em fonética. Um dos princípios fundamentais é analisar as amostras em todos os níveis: desde o segmento até a entoação, incluindo as disfluências da fala. Durante a anotação fonética, sugerimos ouvir cada som isoladamente e confiar nos dados do espectrograma. Na (...) anotação silábica, é crucial considerar a ressilabificação. Durante a anotação prosódica, sugerimos confiar na percepção do ouvinte e analisar as curvas melódicas. Um corpus de fala que segue esses princípios é uma fonte valiosa de dados fonéticos, uma vez que os fatores segmentais e prosódicos estão em constante interação e não se pode analisar as unidades de um nível de anotação sem fazer referência aos outros. (shrink)

The European Summer Schools in Logic, Language and Information (ESSLLI) have been organised every year since 1989 under the auspices of the Association for Logic, Language and Information (FoLLI) in different cities around Europe. The 24th European Summer School in Logic, Language and Information (ESSLLI 2012) took place at the University of Opole, Poland, during August 6-17, 2012. The organisation committee was chaired by Janusz Czelakowski and Urszula Wybraniec-Skardowska (Institute of Mathematics and Informatics, University of Opole) and the programme (...) committee was chaired by Andreas Herzig (University of Toulouse and CNRS). During two weeks, over 340 participants from 36 countries were offered a rich academic program of their choice from 9 foundational, 16 introductory and 17 advanced courses and 6 workshops. Just as in the previous years, the 17th conference on Formal Grammar collocated with ESSLLI. Besides the regular courses, a traditional highlight of the summer school were the 4 evening lectures by distinguished academics: - Johan van Benthem (Institute for Logic, Language & Computation (ILLC), Amsterdam and Department of Philosophy, Stanford University), "Computation as Agency''; - Melvin Fitting (Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, City University of New York), "Reasoning About Games''; - Jonathan Ginzburg (UFR Études anglophones, Université Paris-Diderot (Paris 7)), "False starts, jokes, and music:semantics in the 21st century''; - Adam Przepiórkowski (Institute of Computer Science, Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw), "Secret life of corpora''. Another traditional event was the student session, organised by a student programme committee chaired by Rasmus K. Rendsvig (University of Copenhagen): master and doctoral students presented 16 papers and 5 posters, and Michał Zawidzki obtained the best paper award and Raul Fervari obtained the best poster award. Moreover, the Beth Dissertation Prizes were announced at the FoLLI General Meeting and went to Andreas Kapsner (University of Barcelona) and Daniel R. Licata (Carnegie Mellon University). Apart from the busy academic programme, participants of the summer school were offered an exciting social program as well. In addition to the traditional ESSLLI Party and the famous Students vs. Lecturers Soccer Match (also called `Johan van Benthem Cup'), kayaking, and excursions to Kraków and Wrocław were offered. -/- . (shrink)

Le travail présenté dans cet article s’inscrit dans une recherche qui a pour but la constitution d’un corpus scolaire et le développement d’un outil d’aide à son exploitation à partir de l’annotation de phénomènes linguistiques saillants. Nous nous concentrerons ici sur les écrits produits en fin de classe de CP par des scripteurs encore débutants. L’objet de ce travail est d’explorer les possibilités qu’offre le traitement automatique des langues pour appréhender ces écrits particulièrement éloignés de la norme. L’hypothèse est que (...) la connaissance du contexte de production facilite ce processus. Nous mesurons cet apport au travers d’un exemple de traitement, à savoir le développement d’un outil d’aide à l’annotation de certaines erreurs orthographiques. Après une rapide présentation du projet et des caractéristiques du corpus élaboré, l’article propose un exposé détaillé du module d’annotation de ces erreurs. Il en expose la méthode d’identification et de correction au moyen d’une ressource lexicale de formes phonologiques ainsi que le modèle d’annotation élaboré. (shrink)

The Digital Dictionary of Buddhism [DDB] (http://buddhism-dict.net/ddb), now on the Web for more than 15 years, has become a primary reference work for the field of Buddhist Studies. Containing over 53,000 entries, it is subscribed to by more than 30 university libraries (http://www.buddhism-dict.net/ddb/subscribing_libraries.html), and supported by the contributions of over 70 specialists, many of these recognized leaders in the field. It can perhaps be described as example of the type of web resource that has reached a degree of status and (...) sustainability such that it has been able to grow and thrive as a collaborativelydeveloped online reference—despite having little funding or the support of a major organization or team of programmers—in the age where such resources are so readily washed away by the combination of Wikipedia and Google. Thus, the field of Buddhist Studies has its own reliable, scholarly-edited, fully documented and responsible resource that has developed a center of gravity sufficient for it to continue to grow as the resource that specialists turn to first without hesitation, and to which they may contribute knowing that they will be clearly accredited, and that what they write will not be deleted or changed in the following moment by, for example, a junior high school student. Recently, the technical advisor to the DDB, Michael Beddow, has completed a full overhaul of the supporting structure of the DDB and CJKV-E dictionaries, which will include a broad range of enhanced functions, both internal to the dictionary and in terms of interoperation with other lexicons and web corpora. This presentation will start off with a demonstration of the most advanced functions of the DDB, to be followed by a brief overview of its technical framework (P5-influenced XML, delivered through XSL and Perl). We will then outline the key factors of the management of the DDB that we believe have most directly contributed to its success. (shrink)

Large language models (LLMs) produce sequences learned as statistical patterns from large corpora. Their emergent status as representatives of the advances in artificial intelligence (AI) have led to an increased attention to the possibilities of regulating the automated production of linguistic utterances and interactions with human users in a process that computer scientists refer to as ‘alignment’—a series of technological and political mechanisms to impose a normative model of morality on algorithms and networks behind the model. Alignment, which can (...) be viewed as the superimposition of normative structure onto a statistical model, however, reveals a conflicted and complex history of the conceptualisation of an interrelationship between language, mind and technology. This relationship is shaped by and, in turn, influences theories of language, linguistic practice and subjectivity, which are especially relevant to the current sophistication in artificially produced text. In this paper, we propose a critical evaluation of the concept of alignment, arguing that the theories and practice behind LLMs reveal a more complex social and technological dynamic of output coordination. We examine this dynamic as a two-way interaction between users and models by analysing how ChatGPT4 redacts perceived ‘anomalous’ language in fragments of Joyce’s Ulysses. We then situate this alignment problem historically, revisiting earlier postwar linguistic debates which counterposed two views of meaning: as discrete structures, and as continuous probability distributions. We discuss the largely occluded work of the Moscow Linguistic School, which sought to reconcile this opposition. Our attention to the Moscow School and later related arguments by Searle and Kristeva casts the problem of alignment in a new light: as one involving attention to the social regulation of linguistic practice, including rectification of anomalies that, like the Joycean text, exist in defiance of expressive conventions. The “problem of alignment” that we address here is, therefore, twofold: on one hand, it points to its narrow and normative definition in current technological development and critical research and, on the other hand, to the reality of complex and contradictory relations between subjectivity, technology and language that alignment problems reveal. (shrink)

The realism-social constructionism debate has been consequential over the last several decades. Silverstein’s vocabulary of micro-/macro-contexts aids in understanding why the tension can be a useful epistemological heuristic for discourse analysts. Narratives were collected in focus groups of Ethiopian-Israeli college students. Five narratives were selected for ethnic mentions and found to have a particular ‘iterative’ ‘emplotment scenario’ – recurrent storylines and settings – across tellers and telling events. ‘the only Ethiopian’ is an IES of being sent away to a majority-White (...) elementary/secondary school, socially isolated and denigrated. How are we to understand it when a particular plotline and setting recur in our corpora? I argue that although each story and storytelling is unique, they all borrow from a larger-than-single-telling, already existent trope, that is, a budding master narrative. Taken together, a unique view of a particular socio-cultural process – in this case, something of what it means to be an Ethiopian Israeli – emerges. (shrink)

The present research study carries out a contrastive analysis between two corpora of legal opinion columns as special types of genres, with a view to assess their opposing patterns of impersonality—authorial detachment—and attitude—emotion, judgment, appreciation, taking as a point of departure appraisal theory, or the interpretation of Halliday's Systemic-Functional Linguistics by the so-called Sydney School. The long-established perspective is that legal genres are highly impersonal; authoritative instruments representing an intentional exercise of elitist and exclusionary practices. However, the hypothesis (...) embedded in the present study is that some texts, such as news editorials and op-eds, constitute hybrid genres where the writer makes use of all kinds of inducement devices to support his/her theses with effectiveness and credibility, nonetheless retaining one of the basic traits of monogloss legal discourse: impersonality. However, it is hypothesized that this hybridity is to take place in different degrees, in tune with the influence exerted by legal system that constitutes the background of each corpus. To prove such a point, 40 legal op-eds—roughly, a thirty-five-thousand-word corpus in English and Spanish overall—were scrutinized, having been extracted from the specialized legal sections of two national newspapers of undisputed prestige as opinion-formation media. Through a contrastive study, the purpose of the present work was set to describe, explain and assess how lexicogrammar devices unveil interesting differences between the expression of impersonality and attitude in legal opinion columns as genres in either language, hence reflecting different ways in which the law is envisioned in each of the particular legal systems they belong to. (shrink)

Volume 24, Issue 10, October 2024, Page 80-82.

Volume 24, Issue 11, November 2024, Page 1-3.

This book provides an intellectual biography of Max Horkheimer during the early and middle phases of his life and analyzes his model of early Critical Theory.

Volume 24, Issue 11, November 2024, Page 24-26.

In the Confucian tradition, sages are moral reference points. They may serve as models against which we measure our own behaviours, and help us imagine how we can improve the quality of our moral lives. This defining feature of Confucian philosophy has persisted though the subsequent development of the tradition to the present. Yet, little has been said about the important epistemological issues that underlie the Confucian modelling process. In order to uphold sages as moral reference points, people need to (...) recognize sages as sages and to deem the ways in which their lives embody virtue as desirable. This paper draws on a form of knowing, namely, knowing-as, to illuminate the process of learning from sages in the Confucian tradition. It will also help us better understand the process of modelling more generally. (shrink)

This is not a work of mine. For some reason, I am unable to remove it from my page. It is a list of Dr. Reiner Schürmann's lecture notes for courses that he taught at the New School for Social Research (aka The New School).

This article seeks to critically question the internal logic and coherence of ‘anti-doping’ through the case study of advantage-seeking practices in the sport of Brazilian Jui-Jitsu (BJJ). We provide an analysis of the recent controversy between high-profile fighters Gordon Ryan and Nicky Rod involving the relative morality of image and performance enhancing drug (IPED) use compared with ‘greasing’, whereby BJJ athletes apply substances, such as oil or lubricants, to the body to make it harder for opponents to establish a grip (...) or maintain control during grappling exchanges. We employ this case study to highlight the impasse between the World Anti-Doping Agency’s (WADA) ethical foundation of the ‘spirit of sport’ and the anti-doping industry’s ‘anti-policy’ stance. We then query why a host of non-chemical advantage-seeking practices are normalised and overlooked within the rigid and constrictive systems. Ultimately, we characterise WADA as a myopic compliance system that stifles moral debate around advantage-seeking in sport and is hamstrung by an ethical discord between anti-policy and the neo-Aristotelian ideal of the spirit of sport. We close with a call for a holistic ethical understanding of advantage-seeking in sport and the need to encourage stakeholders to ‘think institutionally’ in order to establish a malleable and reactive response to doping. (shrink)

This paper sketches the antilogism of Christine Ladd-Franklin and historical advancement about antilogism, mainly constructs an axiomatic system Atl based on first-order logic with equality and the wholly-exclusion and not-wholly-exclusion relations abstracted from the algebra of Ladd-Franklin, with soundness and completeness of Atl proved, providing a simple and convenient tool on syllogistic reasoning. Atl depicts the empty class and the whole class differently from normal set theories, e.g. ZFC, revealing another perspective on sets and set theories. Two series of Dotterer (...) and the theorem proved by Russinoff are re-characterized in antilogistic formulas corresponding to the square of opposition and twenty-four moods of syllogism. Then the restricted equivalence between two forms of antilogism and minimal inconsistency is built up, implying the internal connection between antilogisms and minimal inconsistency and leaving two related conjectures not proved. Besides, this paper provides a new explanation for the reason why contrariety, subcontrariety, and subalternation and the nine special moods require the non-empty assumption. (shrink)

This article demonstrates the importance of making explicit different conceptions of movement for the philosophy of sport. In addition to the mechanistic and the Aristotelian approaches, this article presents a third, underexplored view of movement, namely that of Lucretius as interpreted by Karl Marx and Michel Serres. By exploring the similarities between Marx’s motion of repulsion and Serres’s turbulent flux, it will be argued that a Lucretian view offers a philosophy of movement that uniquely does not rely on stasis. This (...) Lucretian perspective is illustrated through Serres’s elaborations on the body and sport. It is concluded that sport is not primarily a rational, rule-guided practice but arises from moving and sensuous bodies that are always deviating from their standard trajectory. (shrink)

Volume 39, Issue 4, October-December 2024, Page 295-295.

In this article, I examine the inversion of essential cultural values, such as physical perfection and the sports spirit, in 20th-century Europe. Periods emerged when physical perfection, once celebrated, morphed into tools for eugenics, racial theories, and ideological segregation. Similarly, the sports spirit became entangled in political and ideological conflicts. I approach this through the Marxist lens of ‘base—superstructure’ relations, focusing on the biological ‘base’, often misinterpreted through social Darwinism. This base is not subject to dialectical changes, does not develop (...) spirally but remains a constant fundament of human existence. It anchors pre-human and human interactions centered on physical fitness and interpersonal competition rooted in sexual selection. From this premise, I propose a philosophical model progressing from the general to the specific, built on four levels. At its foundation lies the unchanging physicality-agonistic ‘base’. From this base emerge three enduring cultural ‘structures’: physical culture, agonistic culture, and the uniting of these two sports cultures. These structures produce two cardinal values—physical perfection and sports spirit—while also giving rise to inversive superstructures that veer toward cultural distortions. I connect these inversions to the influence of elite groups shaping public opinion, aligning this analysis with Antonio Gramsci’s theory of hegemony. In this last stage, this perspective finds synergy with traditional Marxism, highlighting the role of elites in steering societal values and cultural frameworks. (shrink)

The U.S. military is developing augmented reality (AR) capabilities for use on the battlefield as a means of achieving greater situational awareness. The superimposition of digital data—designed to expand surveillance, enhance geospatial understanding, and facilitate target identification—onto a live view of the battlefield has important implications for virtuous conduct in war: Can the soldier exercise practical wisdom while integrated into a system of militarized legibility? Adopting a virtue ethics perspective, I argue that AR disrupts the soldier’s immersion in the scene (...) such that he is blinded to features beyond those identified in advance by the military’s system of cybernetic judgment. I turn to Michael Walzer’s classic account of the “naked soldier” dilemma to illustrate how AR capabilities radically shrink the bounds within which the soldier can cultivate the capacity for right conduct. By transforming the ambiguous ethical matter of killing an enemy combatant into the straightforward application of a rule, AR hollows out the soldier’s potential for virtuous action. The “smart battlefield” leaves no space for deliberative judgments that transcend the technical and legal determinations already written into the soldier’s view of the scene. (shrink)

The problem of intentional identity, as originally offered by Peter Geach, says that there can be an anaphoric link between an indefinite term and a pronoun across a sentential boundary and across propositional attitude contexts, where the actual existence of an individual for the indefinite term is not presupposed. In this paper, a semantic resolution to this elusive puzzle is suggested, based on a new quantified intensional logic and game-theoretic semantics (GTS) of imperfect information. This constellation leads to an expressive (...) intensional language with a property of informational independence, argued to produce a purely semantic explication to intentional identity statements. One consequence is that various extra-logical and pragmatic factors become of secondary concern; it is possible to solve the puzzle by logico-semantic methods, albeit somewhat radically renewed ones. (shrink)

Volume 30, Issue 1, February 2025, Page 104-111.

One of the greatest philosophical disputes in Germany in the latter half of the nineteenth century concerned the value of life. Following Arthur Schopenhauer, numerous philosophers sought to defend the provocative view that life is not worth living. A persistent objection to pessimism is that it is not really a philosophical theory at all, but rather a psychological state; a mood or disposition which is the product of socio-economic circumstance. A developed and influential version of this view was advanced in (...) the 1870s by the English psychologist James Sully. Yet, as important as Sully's critique was for the pessimism dispute, it has been almost entirely overlooked in the history of philosophy. With some growing recent attention to nineteenth-century pessimism, this paper aims to reconstruct Sully's view, and what I argue is his primary argument for it in terms of the best explanation for an alleged historical correlation between pessimistic belief and social hardship in the form of frustrated ideals. The paper then presents and analyses some challenges to this argument, some of which are argued to have been at least partially anticipated in the nineteenth-century by the likes of Schopenhauer and Olga Plümacher. (shrink)

Volume 18, Issue 2, May 2024, Page 123-125.

No detailed description available for "Berkeley's American Sojourn".

Following the Gaza events of 2023/24, this study examines how Palestinians understand mass death and mass destruction, exploring how can such a humanitarian catastrophe be framed within a coherent narrative. The focus is on the concept of sacrifice, analysed through a theoretical framework that distinguishes between meaningful sacrifices and absurd, meaningless deaths that categorises the victims as homo-sacer. Hence, this study aims to investigate the language and literature of the Palestinian people that regards to the 2023/24 Gaza events, and the (...) way it re-conceptualises the mass death and destruction and its victims, between the concepts of sacrifice and homo-sacer. A sample of 120 literary and creative texts from the cultural magazine ‘Fusha for Palestinian Culture,’,Footnote1 was examined using the methodology of thematic analysis. Four primary themes emerged from the texts: the active documentation, the speed and intensity of death and destruction, the form of death, namely handling of bodies and burial rituals, and lastly the implementation of myths from various traditions, including the duality of mythologising and demythologising Gaza and its inhabitants. I conclude that these four themes were elemental in the rhetoric process of sanctification of the mass and random death and destruction. (shrink)

Congress's national-security legislation will often require clear and specific congressional authorization before the executive can undertake certain actions. The War Powers Resolution, for example, prohibits any law from authorizing military hostilities unless it "specifically authorizes" them. And the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 required laws to amend FISA or repeal its "exclusive means" provision before they could authorize warrantless electronic surveillance. But efforts to legislate clear-statement regimes in national-security law have failed to induce compliance. The Clinton Administration inferred congressional (...) "authorization" for the 1999 Kosovo War from an appropriations statute that failed to specifically authorize the conflict. And the Bush Administration inferred congressional "authorization" for the NSA surveillance program from ambiguous language in the post-September 11th Authorization to Use Military Force. In both situations, executive-branch lawyers employed expansive theories of implied repeal and constitutional avoidance to evade the codified clear-statement requirements, and Congress and the courts acquiesced to the President's actions. Recent proposals to strengthen the clear-statement requirements in Congress's national-security framework legislation are unlikely to be effective without institutional mechanisms, such as points of order, that can deter future legislators from enacting vague or ambiguous legislation from which the executive might claim implicit congressional "authorization," and that can induce Congress to confront Presidents that act without specific congressional authorization. Simply enacting more narrow or explicit clear-statement requirements, or adding funding restrictions to Congress's framework legislation, fails to counter the aggressive interpretive doctrines that executives of both political parties have used to concoct congressional "authorization" from vague or ambiguous statutory language. (shrink)