Deixis, information structure and clause linkage in Yafi’ Arabic (Yemen)

2010 ◽  
pp. 333-354 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martine Vanhove
Keyword(s):  
Information Structure

A Political Economy Model of a Research University

2009 ◽  
pp. 132-143
Author(s):  
K. Sonin ◽  
I. Khovanskaya
Keyword(s):  
Organizational Structure ◽  
Information Structure ◽  
Research University ◽  
Hiring Decisions ◽  
Voting Rules ◽  
Economy Model ◽  
Trade Offs ◽  
Political Economic ◽  
Optimal Incentives

Hiring decisions are typically made by committees members of which have different capacity to estimate the quality of candidates. Organizational structure and voting rules in the committees determine the incentives and strategies of applicants; thus, construction of a modern university requires a political structure that provides committee members and applicants with optimal incentives. The existing political-economic model of informative voting typically lacks any degree of variance in the organizational structure, while political-economic models of organization typically assume a parsimonious information structure. In this paper, we propose a simple framework to analyze trade-offs in optimal subdivision of universities into departments and subdepartments, and allocation of political power.

On the Information Structure of the Hungarian Sentence

2005 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 255-265 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ferenc Kiefer
Keyword(s):  
Information Structure

Informed consent: Towards improved lay-friendliness of patient information sheets

2014 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 201-211
Author(s):  
Morten Pilegaard ◽  
Hanne Berg Ravn
Keyword(s):  
Informed Consent ◽  
Information Structure ◽  
Language Use ◽  
Ethical Standards ◽  
Structured Interviews ◽  
Explorative Study ◽  
Microsoft Word ◽  
Text Production ◽  
Linguistic Intervention ◽  
Set Up

Regional research ethics committee (REC) members have voiced a need for the linguistic improvement of informed consent documents to ensure duly informed consent and to ease committee deliberation. We have little knowledge of what elements of language use hamper comprehension, or of the extent of medical researchers’ appreciation of this problem and their willingness to accept intervention. This qualitative, explorative study proposes an intervention design and tests its feasibility and acceptability. Semi-structured interviews with potential REC applicants informed a linguistic intervention benchmarked against existing guidelines, mandated locally and nationally, and then evaluated quantitatively in a semi-controlled set-up and qualitatively via questionnaires. Potential applicants professed the psychological acceptability of linguistic intervention. The intervention comprised a downloadable Microsoft Word template outlining information structure, a detailed guideline offering advice for each move and self-selected linguistic screening. It was used by 14 applicants and had a measurable effect on REC deliberation time and approval rates. The intervention instruments overall made it easier for applicants to produce informed consent documents meeting prescribed ethical standards concerning lay-friendliness. In conclusion, it was found that linguistic intervention is relevant, feasible and psychologically acceptable to REC applicants; it aids their text production process and seems to enhance the lay-friendliness of these texts.

Finding Missing Objects in Biblical Hebrew (with an Appendix on Missing Subjects)

2020 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
John Cook
Keyword(s):  
Information Structure ◽  
Biblical Hebrew ◽  
Syntactic Status ◽  
Object Marking

Missing object complements are significant for the grammar and the lexicon. An explanation is called for of their syntactic status, the basis for their “recovery” or interpretation in discourse, constrictions on what type of objects may be missing, and their information-structure status in the context of object marking more generally. In this essay I present a taxonomy of missing complements in Biblical Hebrew from the perspective of information structure, focusing especially on the syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic bases of their interpretation in the discourse. In an appendix I briefly explore the applicability of this taxonomy of missing objects to explain the interpretation of missing subjects in Biblical Hebrew discourse.

Pragmatics for Latin

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. M. Devine ◽  
Laurence D. Stephens
Keyword(s):  
Noun Phrase ◽  
Word Order ◽  
Information Structure ◽  
Descriptive Analysis ◽  
Informational Content ◽  
Compositional Process ◽  
Association With Focus ◽  
Narrow Scope ◽  
Order Language ◽  
Free Word

Latin is often described as a free word order language, but in general each word order encodes a particular information structure: in that sense, each word order has a different meaning. This book provides a descriptive analysis of Latin information structure based on detailed philological evidence and elaborates a syntax-pragmatics interface that formalizes the informational content of the various different word orders. The book covers a wide ranges of issues including broad scope focus, narrow scope focus, double focus, topicalization, tails, focus alternates, association with focus, scrambling, informational structure inside the noun phrase and hyperbaton (discontinuous constituency). Using a slightly adjusted version of the structured meanings theory, the book shows how the pragmatic meanings matching the different word orders arise naturally and spontaneously out of the compositional process as an integral part of a single semantic derivation covering denotational and informational meaning at one and the same time.

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