1,721,328 research outputs found
Universities: from knowledge to wisdom
Full text linkWe need a revolution in academic inquiry so that problems of living are put at the heart of the academic enterprise, and the basic aim becomes to seek and promote wisdom. There are signs that this revolution is beginning to occur, especially in connection with growing concern about environmental problems, and with the growth of policy studies. The Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, and University College London have all instigated changes in recent years which can be regarded as implementing the first steps towards the new kind of inquiry devoted to the pursuit of wisdom
Evolution of Sentience, Consciousness and Language Viewed From a Darwinian and Purposive Perspective
Full text linkIn this article I give a Darwinian account of how sentience, consciousness and language may have evolved. It is argued that sentience and consciousness emerge as brains control purposive actions in new ways. A key feature of this account is that Darwinian theory is interpreted so as to do justice to the purposive character of living things. According to this interpretation, as evolution proceeds, purposive actions play an increasingly important role in the mechanisms of evolution until, with evolution by cultural means, Darwinian evolution takes on a Lamarckian character. According to this view, as evolution proceeds, the mechanisms of Darwinian evolution themselves evolve
From Knowledge to Wisdom: The Need for an Academic Revolution
Full text linkAt present the basic intellectual aim of academic inquiry is to improve knowledge. Much of the structure, the whole character, of academic inquiry, in universities all over the world, is shaped by the adoption of this as the basic intellectual aim. But, judged from the standpoint of making a contribution to human welfare, academic inquiry of this type is damagingly irrational. Three of four of the most elementary rules of rational problem-solving are violated. A revolution in the aims and methods of academic inquiry is needed so that the basic aim becomes to promote wisdom, conceived of as the capacity to realize what is of value, for oneself and others, thus including knowledge and technological know-how, but much else besides. This urgently needed revolution would affect every branch and aspect of the academic enterprise
Evaluating Task Assignment Contributions: A Description of Participant Practices
No full textIn this study, we look at evaluation as an activity carried out jointly by participants in interaction. The perspective we take is that of conversation analysis, that is to say we analyse the recurrent and systematic features of sequences of talk in which evaluation is negotiated and produced by participants. The method we use is data-based in that we analyse audio and video recordings of naturally occurring talk with the help of detailed transcriptions, but not corpus-based in that we do not use concordancing tools. The study provides an initial characterization of two types of evaluative conversational sequence and offers the possibility of an improved understanding of evaluative expressions and lexical items. In this sense we suggest that the type of analysis we present here may possibly be seen as complementary to the more established corpus-based approach to the analysis of lexical or phraseological items.A further point of interest in this paper is that the data analysed are conversations in which Italian students of English work through a learning task assigned to them in class. So the language we look at is not native English but learner English spoken by Italian university students. Hyland (2002b) claims that evaluation is a feature of academic discourse that may affect students’ comprehension and that EFL teaching may underestimate its importance. By looking at how Italian EFL students produce evaluation in spoken interaction in English it may be possible, therefore, both to test this claim and to suggest ways for developing learning activities to improve student's awareness of the function and meaning of evaluation in discourse
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
Translating varieties of English in a cross-cultural perspective: lexical items and nominal groups in the translation of works by R.K. Narayan and V. Chandra into Italian
No full textThe paper aims at analysing linguistic problems and cross-cultural aspects in translating the Variety of ‘Indian English’, using insights from sociolinguistics and Systemic Functional Linguistics, Translation Studies and semiotics. In particular, the study tries to illustrate different kinds of ‘Indianization of English’ (Kachru 1983) and methods to cope with it when translating Indian literature in English, drawing illustrative examples from the novel Swami and Friends by R.K. Narayan (Madras, 1906-2001) and from the collection of short-stories Love and Longing in Bombay by Vikram Chandra (New Delhi, 1961-), translated into Italian by the author of this study.
If it is true that translation is not only a linguistic transcoding but also a cross-cultural transfer when dealing with closely related languages, this is even more evident when translating literary works from distant cultures, where the ‘Context of Culture’ (Malinowski 1935: 18) is even more different.
When translating Indian creative writing in English in particular, language is an integral part of culture not only because of the pragmatic cultural aspects of a distant setting, but also for the peculiarity of the literary context.
Thus when translating an Indian literary work in English into another language, the translator should consider language as both the result of a multilingual/multicultural contact and a writer’s personal option. Moreover, s/he should not forget that, as G.J.V. Prasad pointed out, Indian English writers “[...] use different strategies to make their works sound like translations” (Bassnett and Trivedi 1999: 14).
Indian writers ‘Indianize’ their English through various linguistic experiments at various levels: morphology, syntax, lexis. Without wanting to minimize the importance of grammar in cross-cultural translation, the focus in this paper is on lexical aspects only, in an attempt to demonstrate that, as R.R. Mehrotra remarked, words are really “the repository of culture” and “the carriers of sociocultural genes” (Mehrotra 1987: 104).
The core of the first part aims at offering an overview of the range of such linguistic devices in the two literary texts taken into consideration and of “[...] the interplay between semantic components, pragmatic functions and contextual features that determine the linguistic [...] choices” (Mehrotra 1989: 422).
The second part illustrates how these linguistic devices are used in such a way that their meaning can be inferred from the context, since they are interpolated in the text through a strategy referred to as “cushioning” (Young 1976, quoted in Sridhar: 1982/83). Seeking to demonstrate this, the study proposes an analysis of some examples based on a Hallidayan approach (Halliday 1994): through an examining of Nominal Groups, it is seen how Modifiers are often employed to suggest the meaning that the Indian word wants to convey.
These two aspects are investigated with a view to highlighting the necessity of a kind of translation whose purpose is respecting the cultural value of the source-language text. In this kind of translation of works from a very different cultural context and with a particular literary intent, the choice has been mostly oriented towards a so-called ‘foreignizing’ translation (Venuti 1995: 20). From a post-colonial perspective, the intended purpose has been to try to respect the cultural value of the source-language text and to consider translation as an experience of the Other
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
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