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The universe of discourse in a virtual world : triangulating discourse syntax with VR-mediated corpora, sensory schemata, and cognitive simulation
Get PDFIn the universe of discourse and its text-internal and text-external worlds, information flows in and out of consciousness, shaping linguistic information structure. This thesis directs its scope to the central roles of cognition and text-external context in the syntactic construction of information structure. Following a comprehensive review of rationalist and empiricist research that identifies a range of context-sensitive constructional phenomena, the thesis presents an innovative simulationist exploration of these phenomena in discourse syntax. A two-phase mixed-method triangulation pipeline is designed and implemented to seek novel insights supported by the parallelism of language, cognition, and computation.
In the pipeline’s documentary phase, a virtual reality staging paradigm is applied to collect audiovisual data from thirty native speakers of Peninsular Arabic through utilizing virtual-reality-mediated fieldwork, immersive stimulus content, and participant psychological priming. The data is compiled into an egocentric embodiment corpus, systematically annotated by processing visual captures from virtual reality into spatiotemporal units and visual schema domains, which categorize text-external sensory-modality input based on patterns of visibility and actuation.
In the pipeline’s analytical phase, the quantitative component examines occurrence probabilities in the context of visual schema domains through a text-external abstraction linkage. The probabilistic results indicate that exposure to domain patterns triggers statistically significant effects of large magnitude associated with discourse-syntactic marking. A continuum mapping informed by these findings estimates trajectories of cognitive activation, reactivation, and deactivation. The results further guide the qualitative component, enabling an empirical-theoretical integration into models of discourse and common ground in functional linguistics; attentive/preattentive processing and mental simulation in cognitive science; mental spaces in cognitive linguistics; and optimality in formal linguistics.
The empirical findings of this work offer an explanatory account of the domain-general cognitive basis of information structure and support new theoretical proposals on sensory schemata, common ground simulation, activation equilibrium, ecosystemic marking inventory, and compensatory constructional optimization
David joins Goliath. The role of the institutional infrastructure in centre-periphery dynamics between subfields
Get PDFThis study explores how Australian winemaking, once considered peripheral, came to influence the entire field and reshape its shared meanings and practices. Although subfields are often assumed to remain at the margins of their fields, our historical analysis shows how Australia drew on elements of its institutional infrastructure – such as professional networks, wine competitions and critics – to reconfigure the centre-periphery order of the field. We identify three mechanisms driving this process: camouflaged deviance, encroachment and integration. These findings highlight the role of subfield dynamics in driving field evolution, the role of the institutional infrastructure in that process and how we understand subfields.Peer reviewe
The consultative meetings of heads of state of Central Asia : local norms, institutions, and the fundamentals of regional order
Get PDFFunding: Royal Society of Edinburgh for the generous funding that made this work possible (grant no. 2905).Since 2018, the presidents of the five central Asian republics of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan have gathered annually to participate in the Consultative Meetings of Heads of States of the region. This institutional development has been hailed as a new step towards integration and cooperation in central Asia. Yet several scholars and commentators describe this format as mostly a ‘talking shop’ that pays lip service to the idea of regional integration. To challenge this view, this article offers an emic and idiographic analysis of the Consultative Meetings from the analytical perspective of the English School, positing a twofold argument. First, it considers such meetings as an institution, i.e., a durable practice imbued with normativity and a sense of legitimacy and appropriateness that serves specific functions. Second, it maintains that the Consultative Meetings embody a regional cultural code in which consensus and informality are structuring elements of order, as opposed to representing weaknesses or failure thereof; and by which specific indigenous and political norms such as personal connections between presidents, seniority, respect and prestige affect the operations of fundamental regional primary institutions such as sovereignty, international law and diplomacy. The analysis relies on official materials and news items available online, unpublished documents provided to the author by central Asian diplomats, and interviews with foreign ministry staff members and officials from the region familiar with the workings of the meetings. The arguments offered in this article have implications for understanding processes of central Asian regionalism and non-western logics of order and legitimacy.Peer reviewe
From clicks to connections : applying activity theory to multimodal materials design for GTA development
Get PDFGraduate Teaching Assistants (GTAs) often occupy a liminal space in higher education, tasked with delivering high-quality teaching while receiving limited formal training or pedagogical development. This uneven provision, often shaped by departmental discretion, intersects with the pressures GTAs face to progress in their research, develop their teaching practice, and manage time and wellbeing. In response to this gap, I designed a series of multimodal units, delivered asynchronously, to offer more accessible, flexible, and supportive professional learning opportunities. These units drew on the best principles of online learning (Nilson & Goodson, 2018) and were underpinned by a commitment to personalisation, accessibility, and community-building. To evaluate the impact and limitations of this intervention, I draw upon Carabantes’ (2024) Activity Theory framework to critically analyse and design contextually relevant materials, moving beyond static curricular prescriptions toward dynamic, need-responsive pedagogies. In this reflection, I critically examine the contradictions and affordances, ranging from institutional constraints (limited training, time, and recognition) to the mediating tools employed (e.g., Rise, ChatGPT-generated visuals, Padlet). I argue that Activity Theory not only makes visible the tensions in GTA learning contexts but also supported design choices that enhanced engagement and agency through personalisation, accessibility, and community-oriented tasks. This reflection situates material development as a deeply relational and political act, one that demands awareness of power, equity, and evolving identities in higher education. By focusing on multimodal learning design as a third-space intervention (Whitchurch, 2008), I suggest that GTAs’ professional learning can be enriched when self-study material design is treated not as an afterthought, but as a central, theory-informed element of pedagogical practice. I conclude with implications for the professionalisation of postgraduate teachers and a call to reimagine materials development training within GTA programmes.Peer reviewe
Design for a 1 K pot for a low-temperature ultra-high vacuum scanning tunneling microscope
Get PDFFunding: We acknowledge funding from the Leverhulme Trust through Research Project Grant No. RPG-2022-315 and from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council through Grant Nos. EP/X015556/1 and EP/T031441/1.Knowledge of the electronic structure of quantum materials in the vicinity of the Fermi energy is key to understanding and tuning their properties and to making them useful for applications. While for bulk materials in single crystal form, spatially averaging techniques, such as angular resolved photoemission, now routinely reach sufficient energy and momentum resolution to achieve this, for thin film samples, intrinsic structural variation and inhomogeneity make it more challenging to gain a full understanding from spatially integrating techniques. Quasiparticle interference (QPI) provides a route to obtaining information about the electronic structure on a sub-millielectronvolt energy scale, with an energy resolution primarily limited by temperature. Efficient acquisition of QPI maps requires long hold times and low temperatures, ideally below 4 K in an ultra-high vacuum environment. Here, we introduce a 1 K-pot design that achieves efficient cooling with continuous feeding while not adding to the noise level and demonstrate its performance in scanning tunneling microscopy measurements.Peer reviewe
Glossary for research on human crowd dynamics - 2nd edition
Get PDFAll authors contributed to the project by suggesting concepts, voting on them, writing definitions, and revising the written entries. Authors are listed in alphabetical order. The organizers were responsible for coordinating and overseeing the project, including process design, internal coordination, and communication with all contributors. Corresponding authors from the organizational committee may be contacted for any inquiries.Pedestrian and crowd dynamics involves multiple disciplines, including computer science, engineering, mathematics, physics, bio-mechanics, psychology, social science and more. For effective collaboration between disciplines, researchers need a common understanding of key concepts. To address this challenge, A Glossary for Human and Crowd Dynamics was published six years ago, providing researchers with a valuable reference for cross-disciplinary communication. We now present the second version, which includes 53 new concepts and 12 revisions from the first glossary, collaboratively developed by 65 contributors from various disciplines and regions around the world through a multi-stage process. This process involved identifying new concepts not covered in the first glossary and suggesting revisions to existing entries, voting on proposed additions and modifications, writing definitions for the selected concepts, and collaboratively revising and editing the entries. By introducing new terms and refining existing definitions, this glossary aims to facilitate clearer communication, improve conceptual consistency, and support collaboration among researchers working within the field of human and crowd dynamics from diverse perspectives.Peer reviewe
Distinct intraseasonal oscillation modes over the tropical Indo-Pacific oceans
Get PDFFunding: This work was supported by the National Key Program for Developing Basic Science (Grants 2022YFF0801702 and 2022YFE0106600), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grants 42175060 and 42175021), the Jiangsu Province Science Foundation (Grant BK20250200302). The authors are thankful for the support of the Jiangsu Provincial Innovation Center for Climate Change.In boreal winter, the Madden-Julian Oscillation (MJO) is the dominant mode of tropical intraseasonal oscillation (ISO), which bridges weather and climate. In addition to the dominant eastward propagating MJO mode, this study identifies the existence of the westward propagating and stationary oscillating ISO modes according to the spatio-temporal evolution of large-scale precipitation. At the pentad timescale, each ISO mode tends to suppress the occurrence of the other two. The diagnostic of column-integrated moist static energy (MSE) tendency anomalies reveals the dominant contribution from horizontal MSE advection to each ISO mode. Synthesis results indicate that vertical zonal wind shear anomalies exhibit opposite distributions between the propagating and stationary oscillating ISO events over the tropical Indo-Pacific Oceans. Subsequent simulations prove that the easterly (westerly) wind shear anomalies could suppress the eastward (westward) propagating convection of the ISO, thus favoring a stationary oscillating ISO.Peer reviewe
Isolation and identification of cis-2,5-diketopiperazine from a novel Bacillus strain and synthesis of its 4 stereoisomers
Get PDFFunding: We acknowledge the support from the European Commission Seventh Framework Programme, Collaborative project “Bluegenics” (Grant No. 311848), the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007–2013/ERC Grant No. 614779 GenoChemetics to RJMG), BBSRC Follow on Fund (Grant No. BB/Y513738/1, BBT017058/1), Equitable access to Quality Antibiotic Therapies in Africa (Grant No. EP/T020237/1), and for funding. AMCO received funding from EPSRC CRITICAT, EP/L016419/1.The Bacillus horneckiae-like strain 2011SOCCUF3 was isolated from the marine sponge Spongia officinalis and its metabolome was studied for secondary metabolites with antimicrobial activity. Culturing in the presence of Diaion HP-20 resin and purifying the culture extract identified cyclo-phenylalanine-proline (cyclo-(Phe-Pro)), a 2,5-diketopiperazine (2,5-DKP), isolated as a major metabolite. Further, LCMS analysis of the extract showed the presence of two isomers of the molecule in the culture broth. To confirm the stereochemistry of the isomers observed in the natural extract, all four stereoisomers of cyclo-(Phe-Pro) were synthesised. NMR and LCMS studies identified the presence of both cis- and trans-cyclo-(Phe-Pro) isomers. Stability and epimerisation studies on synthetic isomers and the effect of culturing conditions suggested that the less stable cis isomer was naturally produced, which epimerised in culture broth.Peer reviewe
There's a time and a place : temporal aspects of place-based stigma
Get PDFThis paper provides an overview of current debates and themes in literature relating to place-based stigma, including a reflection on terminology use. Generally, we rely on Loïc Wacquant's framing of territorial stigma as a feature of advanced marginality. In this paper, drawing on my own research in Toxteth, Liverpool, I offer a critique of the Wacquantian approach, highlighting the limits of the advanced marginality framing of place-based stigma. The paper considers the global reach of placed-based stigma and the temporal aspect of stigma that must be taken into consideration when we consider how stigma is currently applied to communities. A key feature of this paper is the foregrounding of the concepts of 'core' and 'event' stigma, which have generally been a feature of literature in business and management. I argue that our understanding of how communities become stigmatized can be enhanced by framing place-based stigma in this temporal sense. Understanding how stigma becomes adhered to particular spaces, places and landscapes is necessary if we want to comprehend how this stigma transfers to the communities inhabiting these geographies. This paper suggests that we must look to the past, and to the voices who shape the past, in order to understand the present and to plan for the future.Peer reviewe
The downfall of Caelestis : Salvian of Marseille and the end of public cult in Roman Carthage
Get PDFFunding: British Academy Postdoctoral FellowshipIn De gubernatione dei 8, Salvian claims that Carthaginian Christian noblemen worshipped Caelestis until the Vandalic conquest in 439. This article argues that Salvian’s account is fundamentally unreliable. Augustine and the anonymous Liber promissionum allow one to reconstruct the restrictions on Caelestis’ cult across 399-421. Salvian is ignorant of these developments, and his picture of Carthaginian society does not cohere with Augustine or post-Augustinian sermons. Salvian may not be engaging in outright fiction, but he is distorting cultural patterns attested in Augustine’s works, and so cannot be used as a source for Romano-African cult during its demise.Peer reviewe
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