1,721,500 research outputs found
[Review of] Theresa Biberauer, Anders Holmberg, Ian Roberts & Michelle Sheehan, Parametric Variation : Null Subjects in Minimalist Theory. Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2010. Pp. vi+368.
No full textThis volume is a collection of eight articles, part of the outcome of a five-year project funded by the British Arts and Humanities Research Council and entitled ‘Null subjects and the structure of parametric theory’. The introduction by Ian Roberts & Anders Holmberg is a thorough literature review of the pro-drop parameter, taking us as far back as Perlmutter (Reference Perlmutter1971), who was the first to link null subjects to the presence of person morphology on the verb. Roberts & Holmberg show that parameters as defined in generative grammar are powerful tools, which need to be constrained while maintaining their descriptive power. Contra Newmeyer (Reference Newmeyer and Pica2004), Roberts & Holmberg (and Theresa Biberauer and Michelle Sheehan too) promise to restore faith in the Government and Binding notion of parameters by refining these through the Minimalist framework.
In my view, this is a very thought-provoking volume with exceptional theoretical rigour. The authors not only propose typologies worth pursuing, but they also open up avenues for future research. For this review, I have decided to provide a summary of every article in this volume for the reasons that (i) the contributions are very different from each other and do not always entertain a coherent set of theoretical assumptions, and hence (ii) a detailed account of each chapter should provide signposting and navigation points for readers
The Wonders of Language
No full textIan Roberts offers a stimulating introduction to our greatest gift as a species: our capacity for articulate language. We are mostly as blissfully unaware of the intricacies of the structure of language as fish are of the water they swim in. We live in a mental ocean of nouns, verbs, quantifiers, morphemes, vowels and other rich, strange and deeply fascinating linguistic objects. This book introduces the reader to this amazing world. Offering a thought-provoking and accessible introduction to the main discoveries and theories about language, the book is aimed at general readers and undergraduates who are curious about linguistics and language. Written in a lively and direct style, technical terms are carefully introduced and explained and the book includes a full glossary. The book covers all the central areas of linguistics, including phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics and pragmatics, as well as historical linguistics, sociolinguistics and psycholinguistics.</jats:p
Antifibrinolytic agents in traumatic haemorrhage.
Full text linkAmong trauma patients who survive to reach hospital, exsanguination is a common cause of death. Could anti fibrinolytics reduce the death rate? Only a large randomized controlled trial can answer the questio
Wider use of tranexamic acid to reduce surgical bleeding could benefit patients and health systems
No full textIan Roberts and colleagues call for greater use of this inexpensive generic drug that can improve surgical outcomes, avoid unnecessary blood transfusion, and conserve blood stocks</p
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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