Word order and information status in child language

In expressing rich, multi-dimensional thought in language, speakers are influenced by a range of factors that influence the ordering of utterance constituents. A fundamental principle that guides constituent ordering in adults has to do with information status, the accessibility of referents in discourse. Typically, adults order previously mentioned referents ("old" or accessible information) first, before they introduce referents that have not yet been mentioned in the discourse ("new" or inaccessible information) at both sentential and phrasal levels. Here we ask whether a similar principle influences ordering patterns at the phrasal level in children who are in the early stages of combining words productively. Prior research shows that when conveying semantic relations, children reproduce language-specific ordering patterns in the input, suggesting that they do not have a bias for any particular order to describe "who did what to whom". But our findings show that when they label "old" versus "new" referents, 3- to 5-year-old children prefer an ordering pattern opposite to that of adults (Study 1). Children's ordering preference is not derived from input patterns, as "old-before-new" is also the preferred order in caregivers' speech directed to young children (Study 2). Our findings demonstrate that a key principle governing ordering preferences in adults does not originate in early childhood, but develops: from new-to-old to old-to-new.     

Bootstrapping word order in prelexical infants: a Japanese-Italian cross-linguistic study

Learning word order is one of the earliest feats infants accomplish during language acquisition [Brown, R. (1973). A first language: The early stages, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.]. Two theories have been proposed to account for this fact. Constructivist/lexicalist theories [Tomasello, M. (2000). Do young children have adult syntactic competence? Cognition, 74(3), 209-253.] argue that word order is learned separately for each lexical item or construction. Generativist theories [Chomsky, N. (1995). The Minimalist Program. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.], on the other hand, claim that word order is an abstract and general property, determined from the input independently of individual words. Here, we show that eight-month-old Japanese and Italian infants have opposite order preferences in an artificial grammar experiment, mirroring the opposite word orders of their respective native languages. This suggests that infants possess some representation of word order prelexically, arguing for the generativist view. We propose a frequency-based bootstrapping mechanism to account for our results, arguing that infants might build this representation by tracking the order of functors and content words, identified through their different frequency distributions. We investigate frequency and word order patterns in infant-directed Japanese and Italian corpora to support this claim.     

Prototypicality in sentence production

Three cued-recall experiments examined the effect of category typicality on the ordering of words in sentence production. Past research has found that typical items tend to be mentioned before atypical items in a phrase—a pattern usually associated with lexical variables (like word frequency), and yet typicality is a conceptual variable. Experiment 1 revealed that an appropriate conceptual framework was necessary to yield the typicality effect. Experiment 2 tested ad hoc categories that do not have prior representations in long-term memory and yielded no typicality effect. Experiment 3 used carefully matched sentences in which two category members appeared in the same or in different phrases. Typicality affected word order only when the two words appeared in the same phrase. These results are consistent with an account in which typicality has its origin in conceptual structure, which leads to differences in lexical accessibility in appropriate contexts.     

Continuous representability of semiorders

In the framework of the analysis of orderings whose associated indifference relation is not transitive, we study the structure of a semiorder, paying attention to the problem of its continuous representability through a real-valued function and a positive threshold. For the case of connected topological spaces, we obtain a full characterization of the continuous representability of semiorders without extremal elements.     

NONEMPIRICAL REALITY: TRANSCENDING THE PHYSICAL AND SPIRITUAL IN THE ORDER OF THE ONE

I describe characteristic phenomena of quantum physics that suggest that reality appears to us in two domains: the open and well‐known domain of empirical, material things—the realm of actuality—and a hidden and invisible domain of nonempirical, non‐material forms—the realm of potentiality. The nonempirical forms are part of physical reality because they contain the empirical possibilities of the universe and can manifest themselves in the empirical world. Two classes of nonempirical states are discussed: the superposition states of microphysical entities, which are nonempirical because observation destroys them, and the virtual states of material systems, which are nonempirical because they are empty. The non‐empirical part to physical reality represents a predetermined and hidden order that exists before it is empirical, and the visible world is an emanation out of it. I discuss consequences for our understanding of human nature, the origin of life, and human values. Reality is an indivisible wholeness that is aware of its processes, like a Cosmic Spirit, and it reveals its awareness in the mindlike properties of elementary processes as well as in the human consciousness. Thus, one is led to G. W. F. Hegel's thesis that the Cosmic Spirit is thinking in us.     

Zhu Xi’s Spiritual Practice as the Basis of His Central Philosophical Concepts

This article attempts to connect three aspects of Zhu Xi’s 朱熹 (1130–1200) life and work: (1) the “spiritual crisis” he experienced in his thirties; (2) his identification of Zhou Dunyi 周敦頤 (1017–1073) as the first true Confucian sage since Mencius; and (3) his concepts of taiji 太極 and li 理. The argument is that (1) the spiritual crisis that Zhu Xi discussed with Zhang Shi 張栻 (1133–1180) and the other “gentlemen of Hunan” from about 1167 to 1169, which was resolved by an understanding of what we might call the “interpenetration”of the mind’s stillness and activity (dong-jing 動靜) or equilibrium and harmony (zhong-he 中和), (2) led directly to his realization that Zhou Dunyi’s thought provided a cosmological basis for that resolution, and (3) this in turn led Zhu Xi to understand (or construct) the meaning of taiji in terms of the polarity of yin and yang; i.e. the “Supreme Polarity” as the most fundamental ordering principle (li 理).     

Dwelling in the Nearness of Gods: The Hermeneutical Turn from M<Emphasis Type="SmallCaps">ou</Emphasis> Zongsan to T<Emphasis Type="SmallCaps">u</Emphasis> Weiming

This article argues that, as far as the problem of Confucian religiosity is concerned, there is an interpretative turn from Mou Zongsan’s moral metaphysics to Tu Weiming’s religious hermeneutics. Some concluding remarks are made: First, Tu’s hermeneutics is rooted in the ontology of self as interrelatedness, which is completely different from Mou’s theory of true self as transcendental subjectivity. Second, Tu’s hermeneutics of self can be better illuminated with the help of Heidegger’s notion of Dasein as Being-with (Mitsein). For Tu and Heidegger, self cannot be seen as something separate from community. This article also points out that the paradigmatic shift is evidenced in another similarity between the four categories of self, community, nature, and the transcendent in Tu’s hermeneutics on the one hand, and the four symbols of earth, sky, divinities, and mortals employed by Heidegger to interpret the meaning of dwelling, on the other. In such a primordial situation of dwelling, gods are not supposed to be intellectually known; they are rather to be neighbors in community.     

阶段转移事件对公平稳定性的影响

摘要：目前,组织公平的研究多集中于组织公平与组织结果变量之间关系,较少关注组织公平的稳定性。本文采取4（公平模式：公平控制/初始公平/不公平控制/初始不公平）×2（实验阶段：阶段1/阶段2）混合实验设计,探讨阶段转移事件对被试公平反应稳定性的影响。研究结果显示,公平对待导致积极的公平反应,不公平对待导致消极的公平反应;公平程序向不公平程序的转移导致对实验者信任和组织公民行为意向的评价显著降低;而不公平程序向公平程序的转移并没有导致对实验者信任和组织公民行为意向评价的显著增加,从而说明了公平反应的有限稳定性。     

楚竹书《周易》中的特殊符号与卦序问题

濮茅左先生通过对战国楚竹书<周易>中出现的独特红、黑符号的分析,提出了竹书<周易>卦序是一种与今本、帛本等都不相同的另一种卦序.其分析虽然不无道理,可以作为竹书卦序的一种可能的方案,但其分析也有致命的弱点,就是他不能合理解释竹书中的红、黑符号在今本卦序中为什么具有如此强的规律性,甚至具有比其确立的所谓竹书卦序更有对称性.为此,我们通过分析认为,竹书卦序运用的很可能就是今本卦序,是运用今本卦序来表达宇宙天地、万物与人类的演化与发展阶段.如果这一分析成立,那么,我们将会进一步发现一种前所未见的在阴阳学说统摄下的包含"三段论""四段论"和"七段论"为一体的丰富、系统而又独特的事物发晨阶段论.     

Action negation and alternative reductions for dynamic deontic logics

Dynamic deontic logics reduce normative assertions about explicit complex actions to standard dynamic logic assertions about the relation between complex actions and violation conditions. We address two general, but related problems in this field. The first is to find a formalization of the notion of ‘action negation’ that (1) has an intuitive interpretation as an action forming combinator and (2) does not impose restrictions on the use of other relevant action combinators such as sequence and iteration, and (3) has a meaningful interpretation in the normative context. The second problem we address concerns the reduction from deontic assertions to dynamic logic assertions. Our first point is that we want this reduction to obey the free-choice semantics for norms. For ought-to-be deontic logics it is generally accepted that the free-choice semantics is counter-intuitive. But for dynamic deontic logics we actually consider it a viable, if not, the better alternative. Our second concern with the reduction is that we want it to be more liberal than the ones that were proposed before in the literature. For instance, Meyer's reduction does not leave room for action whose normative status is neither permitted nor forbidden. We test the logics we define in this paper against a set of minimal logic requirements.