The Stacks (Library of Anglo-American Culture & History - FID AAC, Göttingen State and University Library)
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The Ups and Downs of Ignorance
No full textPlain disjunctive sentences, such as The mystery box contains a blue ball or a yellow ball , typically imply that the speaker does not know which of the two disjuncts is true. This is known as an ignorance inference. We can distinguish between two aspects of this inference: the negated universal upper bound part (i.e., the speaker is uncertain about each disjunct), which we call uncertainty , and the existential lower bound part (i.e., the speaker considers each disjunct possible), which we call possibility . In the traditional approach, uncertainty is derived as a primary implicature, from which possibility follows. In this paper, we report on two experiments using a sentence-picture verification task based on the mystery box paradigm that challenge the traditional implicature approach. Our findings show that possibility can arise without uncertainty , and we thus call for a reevaluation of the traditional view of disjunction and ignorance inferences. Our experimental findings are related to similar results involving disjunction in embedded contexts and pave the way for alternative theories that can account for the observed patterns of inference derivation in a unified fashion. We discuss how recent implicature and non-implicature theories can account for the derivation of existential lower bound inferences without the presence of negated universal upper bound inferences.ILLC - Formal Semantics and Philosophical Logic Uni
Teaching Mindsets and Motivation to Teach
No full textTeachers differ in the extent to which they support their students’ basic psychological needs. To better understand these differences, we investigated how mindsets and motivation to teach English relate to their need-supportive teaching practices. Data was gathered from 348 EFL instructors (261 female, 87 male; Mage = 38.47, SD = 9.22) working at state and private universities in Turkey through the following self-report questionnaires: the Implicit Theories of Intelligence Scale (ITIS; Dweck et al., 1995), the Comprehensive Relative Autonomy Index (C-RAI; Sheldon et al., 2017), and the Teacher as a Social Context Questionnaire (TASC-Q; Belmont et al., 1988). Results of structural equation modeling revealed that language instructors’ fixed teaching mindset beliefs had both direct and indirect relationships with their need-supportive teaching through quality of teaching motivation. The direct relationships suggest that instructors who believe their teaching ability is a fixed trait are less likely to teach for autonomous reasons, such as personal interest and values, and more inclined to teach out of external reasons, such as pressure from supervisors. The indirect relationships suggest that autonomous teaching motivation mediates the negative relationships between fixed teaching mindset and provision of involvement and structure. These findings highlight the important role of teaching mindsets and motivation in promoting need-supportive learning environments.Open access funding provided by the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Türkiye (TÜBİTAK).Bilkent Universit
MAZE, Life on the Swerve
No full textThe Medea Project: Theater for Incarcerated Women/HIV Circle is a San Francisco institution with an international reputation. The group is made up of formerly incarcerated women, women living with HIV, theater professionals and community women. Founded in 1989 by Rhodessa Jones, based on Jones’ workshops in the San Francisco county jail, Medea Project productions have often used ancient myth as the framework for their modern shows. In the jails, in the clinic for women living with HIV, and in community settings, Rhodessa starts by asking participants to write in response to questions she asks; in some cases, she tells one of the old stories—the “classic” stories—and then asks the women to make connections between these stories and their own lives. Together, they then create a piece for public performance
Postwar U.S. Tourism to West German Concentration Camps and Beyond
No full textFor a long time since the end of the Second World War, the memory of concentration camps influenced U.S. public views on Germany. When in the late 1940s Americans could travel to West Germany again, a new tourist industry brought West Germany, and with-it Germany’s recent past, closer to the U.S. American public. This article investigates the renewed travel interest of Americans in West Germany with a special focus on former concentration camp sites. It demonstrates the importance of tourism in creating new cultural ties, the ways in which U.S. tourism to the camps established a memory of the Second World War, and how these narratives influenced German-American relations. In newspaper articles, visitors to West Germany shared their experiences, attitudes, and challenges upon visiting the former concentration camp sites and through those interactions made sense of the war and their own position in the postwar world order.Open Access funding enabled and organized by Projekt DEAL.Freie Universität Berlin (1008
The Effectiveness of ChatGPT as a Lexical Tool for English, Compared with a Bilingual Dictionary and a Monolingual Learner’s Dictionary
No full textTraditionally, language learners have relied on dictionaries when trying to read or write in a foreign language. However, new LLM-based chatbots may offer an alternative to traditional dictionaries as lexical tools. This study assesses the effectiveness of ChatGPT versus the monolingual Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English (LDOCE, 2024 ) and the bilingual Diki.pl (Diki.pl, 2024 ) online dictionaries in supporting English language learners in receptive and productive lexical tasks. With a sample of 166 university students at B2 to C1 proficiency levels and forty uncommon English phrasal verbs, we investigate whether a leading AI-driven chatbot, a high-quality learners’ dictionary, or a popular free bilingual dictionary offers better support in accurately understanding and producing English. The results reveal ChatGPT to be more effective than either dictionary in production, and better than the monolingual dictionary, but not the bilingual dictionary, in reception
The Case of the Bilderberg Group
No full textIn the early 1950s, the Bilderberg Group became one of the first high-level informal transatlantic elite networks of the cold war. This article examines how the discussions at the Bilderberg Meetings were affected by the emotional nature of anti-communism on both sides of the Atlantic. On the one hand, ‘negative’ emotions resulting from the fear of communist infiltration and aggression could lead to the strengthening of transatlantic bonds. On the other hand, differences in political responses to communism could also lead to emotionally charged disagreements, as the first Bilderberg Conference in 1954 showed. As a result, the transatlantic discourse about anti-communism shifted towards the search for a strategy of positive anti-communism. The most important expression of this shift was the project of European integration.Open Access funding enabled and organized by Projekt DEAL.Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen (1020
Text Augmentation for Semantic Frame Induction and Parsing
No full textSemantic frames are formal structures describing situations, actions or events, e.g., Commerce buy , Kidnapping , or Exchange . Each frame provides a set of frame elements or semantic roles corresponding to participants of the situation and lexical units (LUs)—words and phrases that can evoke this particular frame in texts. For example, for the frame Kidnapping , two key roles are Perpetrator and the Victim , and this frame can be evoked with lexical units abduct, kidnap , or snatcher . While formally sound, the scarce availability of semantic frame resources and their limited lexical coverage hinders the wider adoption of frame semantics across languages and domains. To tackle this problem, firstly, we propose a method that takes as input a few frame-annotated sentences and generates alternative lexical realizations of lexical units and semantic roles matching the original frame definition. Secondly, we show that the obtained synthetically generated semantic frame annotated examples help to improve the quality of frame-semantic parsing. To evaluate our proposed approach, we decompose our work into two parts. In the first part of text augmentation for LUs and roles, we experiment with various types of models such as distributional thesauri, non-contextualized word embeddings (word2vec, fastText, GloVe), and Transformer-based contextualized models, such as BERT or XLNet. We perform the intrinsic evaluation of these induced lexical substitutes using FrameNet gold annotations. Models based on Transformers show overall superior performance, however, they do not always outperform simpler models (based on static embeddings) unless information about the target word is suitably injected. However, we observe that non-contextualized models also show comparable performance on the task of LU expansion. We also show that combining substitutes of individual models can significantly improve the quality of final substitutes. Because intrinsic evaluation scores are highly dependent on the gold dataset and the frame preservation, and cannot be ensured by an automatic evaluation mechanism because of the incompleteness of gold datasets, we also carried out experiments with manual evaluation on sample datasets to further analyze the usefulness of our approach. The results show that the manual evaluation framework significantly outperforms automatic evaluation for lexical substitution. For extrinsic evaluation, the second part of this work assesses the utility of these lexical substitutes for the improvement of frame-semantic parsing. We took a small set of frame-annotated sentences and augmented them by replacing corresponding target words with their closest substitutes, obtained from best-performing models. Our extensive experiments on the original and augmented set of annotations with two semantic parsers show that our method is effective for improving the downstream parsing task by training set augmentation, as well as for quickly building FrameNet-like resources for new languages or subject domains.Open Access funding enabled and organized by Projekt DEAL.Universität Hamburg (1037
Contemporary Australia and Emerging Challenges
No full textAustralia is a country where many culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) communities reside, with more than 300 languages spoken. In order to bridge language barriers
in the nation, the provision of language services has received ample attention from scholars. However, different cultural and linguistic backgrounds are not the only contributing factors to a communication barrier. According to the 2011-2012 Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC), about 44 per cent of Australians are reported to have literacy level two and below. Against this backdrop, researchers, especially in the UK and Australasia, have recently shown an increased interest in accessible information. ‘Accessible information’, ‘easy-to-read’ or ‘easy-read’ are interchangeable terms commonly used to describe information specifically designed for people with literacy needs. Despite a growing body of literature on the accessibility of information, the research to date has tended to focus on health information accessibility and there is still insufficient data for accessibility of fire risk reduction information. This paper seeks to fill the research gap by measuring the level of accessibility of existing online fire and rescue information in NSW, collected in 2023, revising texts that do not score an ideal reading level and suggesting key strategies to improve the readability of information. Linguists reviewing community-targeted fire risk reduction information produced by authorities in the country will help assess community accessibility of current information, provide a practical writing style guideline to different stakeholders and create a cost-effective
approach to writing future fire risk reduction information in Australia
Pedagogical Ideas for Language Teachers
No full textAn increasing body of research has explored patterns of interaction and peer support among young learners. Although some studies suggest that young learners can engage in collaboration when interacting on tasks, other studies indicate the opposite. Moreover, despite the claims that peer collaboration is conducive to learning, studies have not paid enough attention to the “how” to enhance peer collaboration on tasks. This article proposes that enhancing peer collaboration is a powerful pedagogical tool that promotes communication among peers and mutual support, thus positively affecting learners' performance during classroom work. At the heart of the article, it discusses some practical pedagogical ideas for teachers which focus on teaching collaborative principles and strategies during classroom work. Although it pays particular attention to the context of primary school English foreign language teaching, its content may also be relevant to primary school teachers of other foreign and second languages
Contemporary Australia and Emerging Challenges
No full textThis paper discusses Language Maintenance and Revitalisation as Linguistic Justice with two community-initiated and -led Language Documentation Projects on the Indigenous Sign Language and Creole language used in the Miriwoong community in Kununurra, Western Australia. The paper explores how the ‘Two-Way’ collaboration is important in shaping the process and outcomes of Language Documentation (here Maintenance and Revitalisation). We argue that ‘Ground-up’ and community-led research is vital to the successful implementation of Language Maintenance and Revitalisation in which Indigenous Methodologies (Yarning, Storytelling, among others) together with methods of Western Sciences are applied. Depending on the needs of the community Language Documentation (as Language Maintenance, Revitalisation or Reclamation) is a way to achieve Linguistic Justice