bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Vengeful Thinking and Moral Epistemology
Authors: Sinhababu Neil
Published: November 2023

Six years later, in On the Genealogy of Morality, Nietzsche traces the historical development of contemporary moral beliefs from their “origin in unreason.” While the Genealogy may have impressed the feelings of many readers as “wantonly offensive,” its import for moral theory has not been fully understood, and the focus of this essay will be to make clear the signiﬁcance of histories like Nietzsche’s for contemporary debates about whether belief in moral properties is justiﬁed. One might worry that arguments against believing something whose premises involve the ways that the belief originated will commit the Genetic Fallacy, mistakenly claiming direct logical connections between the circumstances of the belief ‘s origin and its truth. There are, however, good arguments connecting the origins of beliefs to their justiﬁcatory status, and I will present two such arguments in this essay.
Nigeria: Ethno-linguistic Competition in the Giant of Africa
Authors: Simpson Andrew , Akíntúndé Oyètádé B
Published: November 2023

Nigeria is a country with an immense population of over 140 million, the largest in Africa, and several hundred languages and ethnic groups (over 400 in some estimates, 510 according to Ethnologue 2005), though with no single group being a majority, and the three largest ethnic groups together constituting only approximately half of the country’s total population. Having been formed as a united territory by British colonial forces in 1914, with artificially created borders arbitrarily including certain ethnic groups while dividing others with neighbouring states, Nigeria and its complex ethnolinguistic situation in many ways is a prime representation of the classic set of problems faced by many newly developing states in Africa when decisions of national language policy and planning have to be made, and the potential role of language in nationbuilding has to be determined. When independence came to Nigeria in 1960, it was agreed that English would be the country’s single official language, and there was little serious support for the possible attempted promotion of any of Nigeria’s indigenous languages into the role of national official language. This chapter considers the sociopolitical and historical background to the establishment of English as Nigeria’s official language, and the development of the country over the subsequent post-independence era, and asks the following question. After five decades of experience of life with English as the nation’s sole official language, if people in Nigeria were to be given the opportunity to reformulate national language policy as they wished, might one expect a different official language structure to be requested, perhaps with one or a combination of indigenous languages as a replacement for English, or is the current English-centred structuring of officialdom felt to be satisfactory and appropriate given the ethnic configuration of the country? In approaching this question and the issues which relate to it, the chapter refers to the results of a range of revealing surveys carried out by sociolinguists in Nigeria in recent years which have attempted to probe public
Tanzania: The Development of Swahili as a National and Official Language
Authors: Topan Farouk
Published: November 2023

Tanzania is a multilingual nation of approximately 35 million people (2002 census), of whom nearly a million reside in the semi-autonomous islands of Zanzibar (Unguja and Pemba). As Polomé (1980: 3) has noted, listing the languages of Tanzania ‘is a rather difficult task’; prevalent figures are 124 languages (Batibo 2005: 155) and 127 (cited in Ethnologue 2005). When Tanganyika achieved its independence from British rule in 1961, at least two positive aspects of its legacy from the former colonial rule were the stability of its national borders (although externally imposed) and the firm acceptance of Swahili, not only as lingua franca, but also as an aspiring national language of the new nation. The linguistic map of the time, and the national aspirations underlying it, were seen as a model for an emerging African country where the scourge of ‘tribalism’ was largely absent. None of the ethnic communities was significantly large enough to assume a politically dominant position; nor, it seems, was there a wish to do so. This chapter will explore the factors that brought about this situation, including trade, the presence of colonial powers, the proselytizing and educational endeavours of the missionaries, and the attempts of Julius Nyerere (d.1999), the first President of Tanzania, to create a socialist state whose citizens identify themselves first and foremost as ‘Tanzanians’. Language, and more specifically, Swahili, played a major facilitating role in these phases.
Rational Fools, Rational Commitments
Authors: Peter Fabienne , Schmid Hans Bernhard
Published: November 2023

Skepticism about rational choice theory dates back to the subject’s very origins. One of the earliest predecessors of the theory was proposed by Thomas Hobbes. He defended the view that “all the voluntary actions of men tend to the benefit of themselves; and those actions are most reasonable, that conduce most to their ends” (Leviathan xv.4). Hobbes was aware, however, of the possible objection that this conception of practical reason neglects important aspects of human behavior, particularly the demands of morality.
Collective Intentions, Commitment, and Collective Action Problems
Authors: Gilbert Margaret
Published: November 2023

Towards the end of his famous 1977 article “Rational Fools,” the distinguished economist Amartya Sen wrote: “The main thesis has been the need to accommodate commitment as part of behavior” (Sen 1977: 344). He means, of course, human behavior. Since Sen published these words, my own work in philosophical social theory has brought me to a conclusion that could in broad terms be similarly phrased.
Normativity and the Will
Authors: Wallace R Jay
Published: November 2023

If there is room for a substantial conception of the will in contemporary theorizing about human agency, it is most likely to be found in the vicinity of the phenomenon of normativity. Rational agency is distinctively responsive to the agent’s acknowledgment of reasons, in the basic sense of considerations that speak for and against the alternatives for action that are available. Furthermore, it is natural to suppose that this kind of responsiveness to reasons is possible only for creatures who possess certain unusual volitional powers, beyond the bare susceptibility to beliefs and desires necessary for the kind of rudimentary agency of which the higher animals are arguably capable.
Normativity, Commitment, and Instrumental Reason
Authors: Wallace R Jay
Published: November 2023

There are two tendencies in our thinking about instrumental rationality that do not seem to cohere very well. On the one hand, the instrumental principle— enjoining us to take the means that are necessary relative to our ends—does not seem to apply indifferently to any end that we might be motivated to pursue. There is, for instance, no genuine requirement to take the means that are necessary for realizing ends that one merely happens to desire. This encourages what we might call a moralizing tendency in reflection about instrumental reason: the supposition that instrumental requirements come on the scene only in relation to ends that have themselves been endorsed in some way by the agent, as ends that it would be good or desirable to achieve.
Moral Responsibility and the Practical Point of View
Authors: Wallace R Jay
Published: November 2023

Moral responsibility, on the approach I favor, is a matter of normative competence. To be a morally accountable agent is to possess certain general capacities for moral reasoning, which we might refer to as powers of reflective self-control. These general powers include above all the capacity to grasp and apply moral principles, and the capacity to control one’s behavior by the light of such principles.1 Indeed, I would hope that proponents of many different views might agree with these abstract pronouncements. Disagreements, I believe, center not so much on the importance of the powers of reflective self-control as on their interpretation, in particular, whether and in what forms those powers presuppose freedom of the will.
Moral Reasons and Moral Fetishes: Rationalists and Anti-Rationalists on Moral Motivation
Authors: Wallace R Jay
Published: November 2023

Ethical rationalism, to a first approximation, is the thesis that moral requirements are requirements of practical reason. This thesis has a long tradition in moral philosophy, but it also has long met with philosophical resistance. A particular crux for thinking about ethical rationalism is the phenomenon of moral motivation. It has been argued, in particular, that rationalism alone can provide a plausible interpretation of the motivations characteristic of the virtuous agent, and that those who reject rationalism treat the concern to act morally as a kind of fetish. My aim in this paper is to consider and assess this charge.
A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs
Authors: Lepore Ernie , Ludwig Kirk
Published: November 2023

Rather than take for granite that Ace talks straight, a listener must be on guard for an occasional entrcnous and me or a long face no sec. In a roustabout way, he will maneuver until he selects the ideal phrase for the situation, hitting the nail right on the thumb. The careful conversationalist might try to mix it up with him in a baffle of wits. In quest of this pinochle of success, I have often wrecked my brain for a clowning achievement, but Ace’s chickens always come home to roast. From time to time, Ace will, in a jersksome way, monotonise the conversation with witticisms too humorous to mention. It’s high noon someone beat him at his own game, but I have never done it; cross my eyes and hope to die, he always wins thumbs down.
Inexpressible Properties and Propositions
Authors: Hofweber Thomas
Published: November 2023

Everyone working on metaphysical questions about properties or propositions knows the reaction that many non-philosophers, even non-metaphysicians, have to such questions. Even though they agree that Fido is a dog and thus has the property (or feature or characteristic) of being a dog, it seems weird, suspicious, or confused to them to now ask what that thing, the property of being a dog, is. The same reservations do not carry over to asking what this thing, Fido, is. There is a substantial and legitimate project to find out more about Fido, but is there a similar substantial and legitimate project to find out more about the property of being a dog? Metaphysicians know that there is a straightforward way to motivate such a project, and much of the contemporary debate in the metaphysics of properties is in the ballpark of carrying it out. If we agree that Fido has the property of being a dog, then there is something that is a property and that Fido has. Thus we can ask about what this thing is that he has. How does it relate to Fido? Is it concrete or abstract? Is it fully present in each object that has it? And so on and so forth. Maybe the nonphilosophers are merely not used to asking such questions about unusual entities such as properties, but they are equally legitimate for them as they are for any other thing.
Parental Choice and Expert Knowledge in the Debate about MMR and Autism
Authors: Sorell Tom
Published: November 2023

In democracies, conflicts between public opinion and expert opinion can be morally and politically charged. It is one thing for the public to be alienated from expert aesthetic opinion, as when millions in public funds are spent on an ‘artwork’ that ordinary observers dislike; in that sort of case, although the ‘artwork’ can appear to be to a waste of money, it is widely accepted, even by the general public, that aesthetic taste varies, and that different works of art should get exposure, even if they are unpopular. It is widely accepted, too, that exposure to new works widens aesthetic taste, rather than contributing to its deterioration. It is quite another matter where expert opinion supports a coercive policy that the public, or sections of the public, resist.
Vertical Transmission of Infectious Diseases and Genetic Disorder: Are the Medical and Public Responses Consistent?
Authors: Jacobson Jay A , Battin Margaret P , Botkin R Jeffrey , Francis Leslie , Mason James O , Smith Charles B
Published: November 2023

Transmissible infectious diseases differ from most other diseases, not only by their etiology but by the risk they pose to others. Public policy, law, and ethics acknowledge this distinction by limiting the autonomy and diagnostic and treatment choices of individuals who potentially threaten others. For example, we may require patients with tuberculosis to wear a mask in the hospital. We may insist that they take their daily medicine under direct observation. If they refuse treatment, we may limit their movements to reduce exposure to others. Similarly, we have isolated patients with SARS and quarantined individuals who were exposed to this infection.
Herd Protection as a Public Good: Vaccination and our Obligations to Others
Authors: Dawson Angus
Published: November 2023

Many contagious diseases can result in serious harm and even death for the affected individuals. However, several of these diseases can be prevented through vaccination. In developed countries routine childhood vaccination policies have been successful in reducing the incidence of such diseases.² The World Health Organization and other bodies are extending such benefits to the developing world (WHO 2002c). However, many individuals, especially children, die each year from vaccine-preventable illness. I would argue that there are many ethical issues that arise in relation to this topic.
The Battle of the Sexes Revisited
Authors: Cronin Helena
Published: November 2023

A fruit fly delivers his sperm in a toxic cocktail that consigns his consort to an early death. A female dung fly, caught in a scrum of eager suitors, is ignominiously drowned in a cowpat. A spider eats her mate in the very act of copulation. Dramas such as these epitomize the battle of the sexes. Or do they? What is that notorious battle really about? And how can we tell it from life’s many other conflicts? In The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins invites us to take a gene’s-eye view of these and other Darwinian questions. Like Einstein’s imagined ride on a beam of light, this is an invitation to journey into unreachable worlds for a clearer understanding of reality. It envisages the strategies of genes as they take their paths down the generations, over evolutionary time; the eloquent biographies speak to us of natural selection’s design.
The Selfish Gene as a Philosophical Essay
Authors: Dennett Daniel C
Published: November 2023

One critic complained that my argument was ‘philosophical’, as though that was sufficient condemnation. Philosophical or not, the fact is that neither he nor anybody else has found any flaw in what I said. And ‘in principle’ arguments such as mine, far from being irrelevant to the real world, can be more powerful than arguments based on particular factual research. My reasoning, if it is correct, tells us something important about life everywhere in the universe. Laboratory and field research can tell us only about life as we have sampled it here. Probably most scientists would shudder at the prospect of having a work of theirs described as a philosophical treatise. ‘You really know how to hurt a guy!
Selfish Genes and Family Relations
Authors: Daly Martin , Wilson Margo
Published: November 2023

What did research on human family relations look like before Richard Dawkins made the advantages of taking a ‘gene’s eye view’ clear and widely accessible? We’d like to say that it’s hard to remember but, alas, it’s all too easy, for this field is still largely pre-Dawkinsian, indeed pre-Darwinian. The result is not a pretty picture. Whereas true scientific theories are reductionistic efforts to predict and explain phenomena from more basic facts and principles, what passes for theory in family studies is often just re-description with a veneer of jargon. When mothers are seen to differ from fathers in behaviour or sentiments, for example, the differences are routinely attributed to distinct maternal and paternal ‘roles’, as if relabelling the observations in this way somehow explained them.
“I Don’t Believe in Word Senses”
Authors: Kilgarriff Adam
Published: November 2023

There is now a substantial literature on the problem of word sense disambiguation (WSD). The goal of WSD research is generally taken to be disambiguation between the senses given in a dictionary, thesaurus or similar. The idea is simple enough and could be stated as follows: Many words have more than one meaning. When a person understands a sentence with an ambiguous word in it, that understanding is built on the basis of just one of the meanings. So, as some part of the human language understanding process, the appropriate meaning has been chosen from the range of possibilities. Stated in this way, it would seem that WSD might be a well-defined task, undertaken by a particular module within the human language processor. This module could then be modelled computationally in a WSD program, and this program, performing, as it did, one of the essential functions of the human language processor, would stand alongside a parser as a crucial component of a broad range of NLP applications. This point of view is clearly represented in Cottrell (1989)
More Than One Way to Skin a Cat: Why Full-Sentence Definitions Have Not Been Universally Adopted
Authors: Rundell Michael
Published: November 2023

It is almost 20 years since the first COBUILD dictionary burst upon the scene and changed the face of lexicography. Its most important innovation – the systematic use of corpus data as the foundation of its description of English – has fundamentally altered the way dictionaries are compiled. Despite some initial resistance, corpus lexicography has become the norm, and few lexicographic enterprises in English would now be undertaken without a basis in primary linguistic data. The effects of the corpus revolution are still being felt, as corpora grow larger and more diverse and the software for exploring them becomes increasingly powerful (see e.g. Kilgarriff et al. 2004; see also in this volume – Ed.). Most importantly, corpora are now available (or being developed) for dozens, if not hundreds, of languages, bringing the benefits of data-driven lexicography to an ever widening circle. There is no going back – but no-one who has worked with corpus data would ever want to go back. Among COBUILD’s other innovations, the most striking is its use of ‘full-sentence definitions’ (FSDs). As the name implies, FSDs present defining information in the form of a complete sentence in which the definiendum is embedded. While this approach is not entirely original – FSDs can be found in early English dictionaries, from a time when lexicographic conventions had not yet hardened – its use in the COBUILD range is both coherently motivated and systematically applied.
Corpus-based versus Lexicographer Examples in Comprehension and Production of New Words
Authors: Laufer Batia
Published: November 2023

In most linguistic analyses a word is described as a set of properties, or features (Lado 1972; Chomsky 1965; Gibson and Levin 1975; Richards 1976). Thus knowing a word would ideally imply familiarity with all its properties, as is often the case with an educated native speaker. When a person ‘knows’ a word, he/she knows the following: the word’s pronunciation, its spelling, its morphological components, if any, the words that are morphologically related to it, the word’s syntactic behaviour in a sentence, the full range of the word’s meaning, the appropriate situations for using the word, its collocational restrictions, its distribution and the relation between the word and other words within a lexical set. (For a discussion of word knowledge see, for example, Nation 1990 and Laufer 1991). Unlike an educated native speaker of a language, the foreign language learner knows a much smaller number of words. In some European countries and Israel lexical knowledge is about 2,000–3,000 word families, in some Asian countries 750–1,500 (Laufer 1991). In many cases, word knowledge is only partial, i.e. the learner may have mastered some of the word’s properties but not the others. In fact, the plurality of word features to be learnt increases the probability of a word being only partially learnt. One possible source of information about a totally new word or a partially learnt word is the learner’s dictionary. The phonetic script shows the right pronunciation, the grammatical specifications provide information about the syntactic behaviour of the word, the derivatives in the entry show which words are morphologically related to the looked-up word. The definition explains the meaning, or meanings of the word, register specification adds information about the affective and pragmatic aspects of meaning.
Word Association Norms, Mutual Information, and Lexicography
Authors: Church Kenneth W , Hanks Patrick
Published: November 2023

It is common practice in linguistics to classify words not only on the basis of their meanings but also on the basis of their co-occurrence with other words. Running through the whole Firthian tradition, for example, is the theme that “You shall know a word by the company it keeps” (Firth, 1957). On the one hand, bank co-occurs with words and expression such as money, notes, loan, account, investment, clerk, official, manager, robbery, vaults, working in a, its actions, First National, of England, and so forth. On the other hand, we find bank co-occurring with river, swim, boat, east (and of course West and South, which have acquired special meanings of their own), on top of the, and of the Rhine. (Hanks, 1987: 127) The search for increasingly delicate word classes is not new. In lexicography, for example, it goes back at least to the “verb patterns” described in Hornby’s Advanced Learner’s Dictionary (first edition 1948). What is new is that facilities for the computational storage and analysis of large bodies of natural language have developed significantly in recent years, so that it is now becoming possible to test and apply informal assertions of this kind in a more rigorous way, and to see what company our words do keep. The proposed statistical description has a large number of potentially important applications, including: (a) constraining the language model both for speech recognition and optical character recognition (OCR), (b) providing disambiguation cues for parsing highly ambiguous syntactic structures such as noun compounds, conjunctions, and prepositional phrases, (c) retrieving texts from large databases (e.g., newspapers, patents), (d) enhancing the productivity of computational linguists in compiling lexicons of lexico-syntactic facts, and (e) enhancing the productivity of lexicographers in identifying normal and conventional usage.
Modal Logic
Authors: Portner Paul
Published: November 2023

Why are we so interested in the semantics of modal words? An easy answer for a linguist to give might be that we’re interested in the semantics of all kinds of words, and we might as well attend to the modal ones now rather than later. From this perspective, we could have just as well begun with words expressing family relations or describing protein sources. Surely there are perspectives on language according to which these portions of the vocabulary have as much of a claim on our attention as the modal expressions, but such perspectives do not motivate the vast majority of contemporary work in semantics. Instead, semanticists tend to think that modality is really very important. Why?
The Music of Life
Authors: Noble Denis
Published: November 2023

What is Life? Decades of research have resulted in the full mapping of the human genome - three billion pairs of code whose functions are only now being understood. The gene's eye view of life, advocated by evolutionary biology, sees living bodies as mere vehicles for the replication of the genetic codes. But for a physiologist, working with the living organism, the view is a very different one. Denis Noble is a world renowned physiologist, and sets out an alternative view to the question - one that becomes deeply significant in terms of the living, breathing organism. The genome is not life itself. Noble argues that far from genes building organisms, they should be seen as prisoners of the organism. The view of life presented in this little, modern, post-genome project reflection on the nature of life, is that of the systems biologist: to understand what life is, we must view it at a variety of different levels, all interacting with each other in a complex web. It is that emergent web, full of feedback between levels, from the gene to the wider environment, that is life. It is a kind of music. Including stories from Noble's own research experience, his work on the heartbeat, musical metaphors, and elements of linguistics and Chinese culture, this very personal and at times deeply lyrical book sets out the systems biology view of life.
The Organ of 30000 Pipes
Authors: Noble Denis
Published: November 2023

Over 2000 years ago, the story goes, a Chinese Emperor was saved in battle by the action of a lowly farmer. Perhaps it was the Emperor Qin-Shi-Huang, who is sometimes called the ‘First Emperor’ because he was the first to unite China into something resembling the huge country we know today, and he must have fought many bloody battles to do so. Anyway, the story continues that when the battle was over and the Emperor had returned to his palace, he decided to summon the farmer for him to be rewarded. ‘You saved my life.
Curtain Call: the Artist Disappears
Authors: Noble Denis
Published: November 2023

Suppose that we found life similar to ours on, say, one of the moons of Jupiter. The first humans to travel to this new world report back to earth the message that, against all expectations, the space travellers had found ‘God’ up there. For the people they find have what, to all intents and purposes, are cathedrals. There are ‘priests’ dressed in colourful robes. There are ceremonies of great spiritual importance for the big events in life and death. They practise a special form of ‘prayer’–– meditation –– that is of great psychological value.
The Minimalist Gamble
Authors: Boeckx Cedric
Published: November 2023

The goal of the present volume is to synthesize and clarify ideas that may seem to some to be more imaginative or more outrageous than anything to be found in the pages of modern novels; ideas that at first sound, in the words of Bill Bryson, ‘worryingly like the sort of thoughts that would make you edge away if conveyed to you by a stranger on a park bench’. The central idea to be discussed is that our human language capacity, our ‘language instinct’ as Pinker (1994) calls it, shows signs of optimal design and exquisite organization that may indicate the inner workings of very simple and general computational (physical and mathematical) laws in a mental organ. This idea was first formulated by Noam Chomsky in the early 1990s, and has been investigated systematically since then by linguists and other cognitive scientists under the rubric of the Minimalist Program. For now I want to refer to this enterprise as the minimalist gamble and tell you why a group of serious, professional, and well-informed scientists think their wild minimalist ideas have a chance of being true.
The Minimalist Core
Authors: Boeckx Cedric
Published: November 2023

The historical development discussed in the previous chapter highlighted the fact that until well into the 1980s, solving the acquisition problem was the paramount measure of theoretical success in linguistics. Once, however, this problem is taken as essentially understood, then the question is not how to solve it but how to solve it best. By its nature, this question abstracts away from the Poverty of Stimulus problem and points towards other criteria of adequacy (that is, going ‘beyond explanatory adequacy’, to use a popular phrase in the minimalist literature). Seen in this context, Minimalism emerges from the success of the Principles and Parameters (P&P) program. Because the P&P approach ‘solves’ the logical problem of language acquisition, more methodological criteria of theory evaluation can become more prominent. Such criteria revolve around simplicity, elegance, and other notions that are hard to quantify but, as we will see in Chapter 4, are extremely important. I cannot overstate the fact that minimalism presupposes the major findings from the early P&P period. In many ways, minimalism is but an attempt to find ways of gaining a better grasp of the same model. In this chapter I will examine the ingredients that were extracted from the P&P approach and show how these constitute the core of the minimalist program. This will allow me to discuss the nature of scientific programs as a whole.
The Minimalist Impact
Authors: Boeckx Cedric
Published: November 2023

Having clarified the context of emergence and essential logic of the minimalist program in the two preceding chapters, I would now like to expand on the ‘bigger’ picture and examine what it means to investigate the minimalist character of a natural object like the language faculty.
The Minimalist Highlights
Authors: Boeckx Cedric
Published: November 2023

Minimalism is animated by the belief that the old adage ‘Least is best’ is not only methodologically desirable but also true of the design of the language faculty. Ultimately, the success of the minimalist program ought to be measured by the range and depth of analyses it has helped generate. As they say, the proof of the pudding is in the eating. In the words of Epstein and Hornstein (1999: ix), ‘the proof of a program ultimately rests in how good the detailed products that result from taking its strictures seriously look.’
Introduction
Authors: Bostrom Nick , Savulescu Julian
Published: November 2023

Over the last decade, human enhancement has grown into a major topic of debate in applied ethics. Interest has been stimulated by advances in the biomedical sciences, advances which to many suggest that it will become increasingly feasible to use medicine and technology to reshape, manipulate, and enhance many aspects of human biology even in healthy individuals.
Toward a More Fruitful Debate About Enhancement
Authors: Parens Erik
Published: November 2023

Bioethical debates often seem to feature smart and decent people talking past each other. The debate about the enhancement of human traits and capacities is no exception. Too often we interlocutors seem keener on winning a point than on advancing our shared understanding of the question at hand. This chapter proceeds from the sanguine premise that if we get better at noticing the structure of the debate about enhancement, we might engage in a more fruitful debate.
Medical Enhancement and the Ethos of Elite Sport
Authors: Tännsjö Torbjörn
Published: November 2023

We should distinguish between negative medical interventions (intended to cure disease), positive interventions (intended to improve, within the normal range, functioning) and enhancement (where a person is pushed beyond species normal functioning). It seems that, within medicine in general, even if these distinctions can make a difference with respect to who shall pay for the service, they make no principled difference as to whether the services can be provided. However, in sports medicine, they do make a difference. In this chapter, I investigate what kind of difference. Negative interventions seem to be unproblematic, positive interventions problematic, and enhancement forbidden.
The meaning of lexical plurality
Authors: Acquaviva Paolo
Published: November 2023

The morphological overview in the previous chapter brought out the importance of lexemes as bases for inflection, and we have seen that every noun, as a lexeme, encapsulates a conceptualization of its reference domain in terms of its constituent parts. Inflectional number, in languages that have it, turns this lexeme-inherent information into a grammatically fixed set of function ally opposed features, primarily singular vs. plural. The content of this grammatical opposition appears in its pure form on pronouns, which have no lexemic content but consist entirely of grammatical information. With lexical nouns, on the other hand, the precise interpretation determined by number is sensitive to the conceptualities inherent in the lexeme: for example, exgs and wi11es are both plural, but their different countability preference implies that wines can mean ‘wine portions’ or ‘wine varieties’ much more readily than eggs can mean ‘egg portions’ or ‘egg varieties’. The interaction between grammatical and lexeme-inherent information is especially close when plurality brings about a distinct shade of meaning, or when a particular form of plural selects nouns with a specific lexical content. In these cases, plurality remains a grammatical category but its content shades into lexical semantics, determining or being determined by the information inherent in the lexeme. This chapter will chart the empirical content of this interaction between grammatical and lexical meaning.
Recovery and social inclusion
Authors: Callaghan Patrick , Playle John , Cooper Linda
Published: November 2023

In mental health services we are very used to thinking about ‘the patient in our services’. We usually think about what we do in terms of the things that services provide and the profession- als who provide them. We think about the people we work with in terms of their symptoms and what we need to do to reduce or get rid of their symptoms: the medication, inpatient care, community outreach services, the medical, nursing, psy- chological therapy, occupational therapy, and social care serv- ices that we consider might be effective. However, the UK government’s National Health Service (NHS) Plan (Department of Health [DH] 2000) and subsequent policy documents make it clear that this is the wrong place to start. The Plan states:
Breathing
Authors: Mccallum Jacqueline , Malcolm Ellen
Published: November 2023

This chapter introduces the fundamental skills of assessing the patient’s respiratory status and using different techniques to aid breathing. This includes the observational and clinical skills required in detecting change or abnormality in the patient’s ability to breathe normally, and related documentation. As with most aspects of healthcare, respiratory care is constantly evolving and changing. To ensure that patients get the best and most appropriate care, nurses need to be aware of current and new therapies that are available.
Eliminating
Authors: Ballentyne Mary , Ness Valerie
Published: November 2023

This chapter provides students with the fundamental skills of assessing and helping patients with elimination problems. Elimination is a basic human process, essential to life, which concerns itself with the excretion of waste from the bladder (urine) and evacuation of waste products from the bowel (faeces). The ability to control these processes is called continence. The maintenance of continence depends on many physiological factors, which will be discussed in this chapter. Problems with these processes affect other activities and can have devastating physical and psychological effects. Many of these problems can begin in childhood before the physiological processes have matured, for example, bedwetting (enuresis) and faecal soiling (encopresis), or can affect those with physical or learning disabilities.
Working and playing
Authors: Johnstone Peter
Published: November 2023

Working and playing are central to human development. Working is associated with paid employment, but not all jobs, occupations, or businesses are well paid, and some are even voluntary. It must also be remembered that work can also mean craft, diversion, hobby, interest, pursuit, or recreation; so work may have a therapeutic role, as does play.
Dying
Authors: Loftus Linda
Published: November 2023

This chapter introduces some fundamental skills related to caring for patients with advanced disease. These include communication, oral care, patient assessment on admission, pain assessment and management, and performing the last offices.
The Geologic Time Scale
Authors: Gradsteinand Felix M , G. James
Published: November 2023

Time is an indispensable tool for all of us. The time kept by innumerable watches and a great variety of clocks regulates our everyday life, while the familiar calendar governs our weekly, monthly, and yearly doings. theseeventually condense into the historical record of the events over centuries. The standard unit of modern time keeping is the second, defined by a precise number of vibrations of the cesium atomic clock. The atomic second is defined as the duration of 9.192.631.770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the Cesium 133 atom. 7is value was established to agree as closely as possible with the ephemeris second based on the Earth’s motion. The advantage of having the atomic second as the unit of time in the International System of Units is the relative ease, in theory, for anyone to build and calibrate an atomic clock with a precision of 1 part per 1011 (or better). In practice, clocks are calibrated against broadcast time signals, with frequency oscillations in Hertz being the “pendulum” of the atomic time-keeping device.
Archaebacteria
Authors: Battistuzzi Fabia U , Hedges S Blair
Published: November 2023

Extremophiles are common among species in the Super kingdom Archaebacteria (also called “Archaea”, Fig. 1) (1). For example, the species referred to as “Strain 121” can survive temperatures up to 121°C, higher than any other organism (2), and hyperacidophiles are found in the Family thermoplasmataceae, where two species (Picrophilus oshimae and Picrophilus torridus) are the only known organisms capable of living at a pH as low as zero (3, 4). Archaebacteria show many other phenotypes including the unique ability to produce methane (methanogenesis). 7ey have cell wall structures formed either by pseudopeptidoglycan (i.e., a material similar to the peptidoglycan of eubacteria), polysaccharides, or glycoproteins (S-layer) (5), which resemble the single-layer structure (i.e., cell membrane plus cell wall) present in gram-positive eubacteria. Furthermore, archaebacteria have a unique cell membrane structure composed of ether-linked glycerol diethers or tetraethers that confer a higher stability to extreme conditions (5). Chemotrophy is the most widely used metabolism, although phototrophic members of the Halobacteriaceae can use light to produce ATP (6). Six families also have the unique ability of obtaining energy by combining carbon dioxide (or other carbon compounds) and hydrogen into methane (5).
Arthropods (Arthropoda)
Authors: Pisani Davide
Published: November 2023

With more than 1 million described species (1), arthropods are a marvelous evolutionary success. 7is phylum of animals includes one extinct subphylum (Trilobita, 4000 described species) and four living subphyla: Myriapoda (e.g., centipedes and millipedes, 11,500 species), Chelicerata (e.g., spiders, mites, and horseshoe crabs, 70,000 species), Hexapoda (e.g., insects, 948,000 species), and Crustacea (e.g., shrimps and crabs, 68,000 species). thePhylum Arthropoda is characterized by species having an articulated chitinous exoskeleton divided into thick areas, corresponding to segments, joined by thin “rings” (2). Each segment typically carries a pair of articulated legs, and a number of anterior segments are fused into a cephalon. In most groups the cephalon carries eyes, and two or more pairs of limbs (2). Arthropods have been treated as a single animal group essentially since 1753, when Linnaeus called them Insecta in the Arst edition of the Systema Naturae (3). However, their monophyly has long been debated because of their morphological disparity (4–6). Molecular data eventually conArmed arthropod monophyly (7) and to date arthropods are classiAed into one extinct subphylum (the Trilobita) and four extant subphyla: Crustacea, Hexapoda, Myriapoda, and Chelicerata (Fig. 1). Each subphylum is further divided into classes (8). Here, I will review the relationships and divergence times among the arthropod classes and subphyla.
Holometabolous insects (Holometabola)
Authors: Wiegmann Brian M , Kim Jung-wook , Trautwein Michelle D
Published: November 2023

The insect clade Holometabola (850,000 species) includes 11 living orders that together comprise the vast majority of all insect diversity and therefore also represent a signiAcant fraction (>60%) of all terrestrial animals (1). Holometabola includes the four largest orders of insects: Coleoptera (beetles, Fig. 1), Hymenoptera (bees, ants, and wasps), Diptera (true Pies), and Lepidoptera (moths and butterPies), as well as the Neuroptera (lacewings), Megaloptera and Raphidioptera (dobsonPies and alderPies), Trichoptera (caddisPies), Mecoptera (scorpionPies), Siphonaptera (Peas), and Strepsiptera (twisted-wing insects). thename of the group rePects their deAning characteristic—they undergo complete metamorphosis. 7eir life history is divided into discrete developmental stages, including a distinct larval (feeding) and pupal (quiescent) stage. themajor developmental, morphological, and behavioral modiAcations that led to the holometabolous larva are thought to have arisen through extension of the prenymphal stage of hemimetabolous insects (2, 3). Metamorphosis from larval to adult morphology occurs in the pupal stage where the larval structures are broken down and adult features (legs, wings, antennae, genitalia) then develop from specialized internal regions of subcuticular epidermal cells called imaginal discs (4). thelarval cuticle is reduced or entirely lost and an adult cuticle is newly formed. theinternal development of the wings is denoted in the other common name of the group, the Endopterygota.
Advanced birds (Neoaves)
Authors: Tuinen Marcel van
Published: November 2023

Neoavian birds are included in the Subclass Neornithes, and most broadly can be deAned as those orders with advanced Pight capabilities. Such birds include the arboreal songbirds, cuckoos, parrots, and woodpeckers, the nocturnal owls and nightjars, aerial Piers such as swiJs and hummingbirds, as well as several other distinct lineages including pigeons, raptors, shorebirds, wading birds, and marine birds (Fig. 1). Excluded from Neoaves are the primitive Pightless paleognath landbirds (ratites), the primitive paleognath and neognath volant landbirds (tinamous and landfowl), and primitive neognath waterbirds (waterfowl). Approximately 9000 living species of Neoaves have been described and placed in 16–24 orders. Traditionally, neognath orders with limited aerial Pight capability (penguins, loons, grebes) were thought to be primitive and placed ahead of other bird orders in classifications (1–3). theunit Neoaves was Arst described from molecular data from the 1970s and 1980s (4, 5), and its monophyly continued to gain support from DNA sequence data (6–11).
Passerine birds (Passeriformes)
Authors: Cracrafta Joel , Barkerb F Keith
Published: November 2023

The Order Passeriformes is the largest clade of its rank in birds, encompassing from roughly 40–100 families depending on the classification. In recent years molecular systematic data have greatly clarified interfamilial relationships, although many nodes remain poorly supported and it is clear that numerous traditional families are not monophyletic. Passeriformes is an old group, and most molecular dating studies estimate its age of origin to be late Cretaceous (100–66 million years ago, Ma) on Gondwana, with early lineages being partitioned among New Zealand, Australasia, and South America. The major lineages arose in the Paleogene (66–23 Ma) and then diversified in the Neogene (23–0 Ma).
Whales and even-toed ungulates (Cetartiodactyla)
Authors: Gatesy John
Published: November 2023

Whales (Cetacea) and even-toed ungulates (“Artiodactyla,” not a natural group) are represented by 290 extant species (1), and have been grouped into 20–25 families within the placental Order Cetartiodactyla (Fig. 1). Extinct diversity is well represented in the clade, with about six extinct genera for every genus that contains extant species (2). 7is rich fossil record has facilitated molecular clock analyses (3–14), but phenotypic diversity in the group is extensive and has confounded systematic studies. Cetartiodactylans range in body size from the tiny 4 kg mouse deer, Tragulus javanicus, to the enormous 190,000 kg Blue Whale, Balaenoptera musculus (1). It is oJen di1cult to assess homology of structures in organisms that are as divergent as these in terms of anatomical organization, mass, and ecological specialization. Among taxa with living representatives, McKenna and Bell (2) recognized 11 families of Cetacea and 10 families of “Artiodactyla.” 7ree additional family-level groups (Eschrichtiidae, Neobalaenidae, and Kogiidae) are commonly accepted. Here I review the phylogenetic relationships and divergence times of the families of Cetartiodactyla (Fig. 2).
Contextual restrictions on indefinites: Spanish algunos vs. unos
Authors: Martÿ Luisa
Published: November 2023

In this chapter I argue that the Spanish plural indefinite algunos, an existential quantifier (see Martÿ (2008) and cf. Gutiérrez-Rexach (1999a), Gutiérrez-Rexach (1999b), Gutiérrez-Rexach (2001) and others), introduces a contextual variable. I blame alg-for the context dependence of algunos, absent with unos. The chapter builds on the analysis of unos and algunos that I propose in Martÿ (2008) and adds an additional layer to the ‘indefinite hierarchy’ defended there.
Nominalization – lexical and syntactic aspects
Authors: Bierwisch Manfred
Published: November 2023

The main tenet of the present chapter is the thesis that nominalization – like other cases of derivational morphology – is an essentially lexical phenomenon with well-defined syntactic (and semantic) conditions and consequences.
Nominal voices*
Authors: Siloni Tal , Preminger Omer
Published: November 2023

Two questions are prominent in modern minimalist discussions: how abstract are the principles which govern grammar, and how far do syntax and the lexicon penetrate one another? We argue that very sharp data reveal the presence of a passive operation for ability nominalizations which (a) entails covert phrasal movement, (b) a ‘long-distance’ connection to an Edge, (c) LF sensitivity, and (d) the Chain Condition (following Chomsky (2001), Pesetsky (2000), as well as Frampton & Gutman (2000), Fu et al.
The Successor Function + LEX = Human Language?
Authors: Hinzen Wolfram
Published: November 2023

What in syntax do so-called “interface conditions,” in current minimalist conceptions of the language faculty, explain? Virtually everything, to the extent that the Strong Minimalist Thesis (SMT) holds, which stipulates that language is an optimal response to interface conditions externally imposed on the language faculty prior to its insertion into a language-ready but prelinguistic brain. The idea is that prior to and independent of the evolution of language, systems of “thought” or semantics were in place that the emerging language system had to “interface” with. Clearly, then, the language system will have to satisfy certain minimal conditions on usability imposed by these non-linguistic systems (“bare output conditions”): conditions the language system has to satisfy to be usable at all.