bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Domestic Political Preconditions of US Trade Policy: Liberal Structure and Protectionist Dynamics
Authors: Nelson Douglas 
Published: November 2008

ABSTRACTThis paper examines the set of norms, rules and institutions (the regime) which regulate the domestic politics of international trade policy in the US. It is particularly concerned to explain the simultaneous occurrence of successful participation in multilateral trade liberalization in the GATT and rising levels of protection via the administered protection mechanisms (e.g. anti-dumping and countervailing duty, and escape clause). The explanation of this phenomenon is the development of a new institutional definition of trade policy that permitted executive dominance of trade policy, in conjunction with a changed perception of the role of trade policy by the executive branch. Specifically, it is argued that post-war executives (at least until Reagan) came to associate trade policy with broader foreign policy goals.
Aging, Savings, and Pensions in the Group of Seven Countries: 1980—2025
Authors: Heller Peter S. 
Published: November 2008

ABSTRACTIn the next 30 to 40 years, past changes in fertility and mortality will lead to a significant increase in the share of the elderly. This study suggests that these demographic trends may lead to a decline in the G–7 private savings rate after 2000, compounding the impact of social expenditure pressures on the government's deficit. Moreover, public pensions may decline as a share of the consumption needs of the elderly, leading to financial pressures to reduce their consumption. The reduced burden of child support on the working population will not offset the increased burden of societal support for the elderly.
Agendas, Alternatives, and Public Policy: Lessons from the U.S. Foreign Policy Arena
Authors: Durant Robert F. , Diehl Paul F. 
Published: November 2008

ABSTRACTThis essay extends John Kingdon's work on predecision policy processes in US domestic policy to the foreign policy domain. While Kingdon's insights have significantly improved our understanding of predecision processes, further development is necessary for extension across both domestic and foreign policy domains. Kingdon's incremental evolutionary metaphor for alternative specification has to be revamped to include both gradualist and nonincremental policy types. Scholars must also make more explicit, elaborate, and thorough use of Cohen, March and Olsen's ‘garbage can’ model of decision making. To these ends, we offer a typology of policy alternatives that incorporates alternative metaphors premised on recent developments in evolutionary theory. The essay concludes by suggesting a research agenda amenable to pursuit in both national and cross-national contexts.
Stars to Steer By: The Political Impact of Moral Values
Authors: Goodin Robert E. 
Published: November 2008

AbstractA contrast is often drawn between ethics and expediency in politics; however the contrast might be overdrawn. We can hold firmly to the classical notion that politicians should steer society according to some higher values, while retaining the notion of democratic accountability, just so long as electors see the same stars as political leaders do and are as keen to follow them. There are grounds for thinking that this may well be so, either for broadly utilitarian reasons or for basically idealistic ones.
Is Unemployment Insurable? Employers and the Development of Unemployment Insurance
Authors: Mares Isabela 
Published: November 2008

ABSTRACTIn order to shed light on the recent debates that are reinterpreting the role played by organized employers in the development of modern social policy, this paper examines the origin of the system of contributory social insurance during the Weimar period. Contrary to ‘laborist’ accounts of the origin of the modern welfare state that view the working class as the most important protagonist behind the transition from ‘assistance’ to ‘insurance’ policies, this paper argues that employers' dissatisfaction with the means-tested system of unemployment assistance and employers' endorsement of an insurance solution to the risk of unemployment remained the decisive factor leading to the introduction of the insurance system during the Weimar period. Drawing on employers' deliberations and archival material, the paper reconstructs the process of preference formation of German employers. The significance of a sectoral conflict between employers of large and small firms about the organization of the ‘risk pool’ within the system of unemployment insurance is also highlighted. While the existing literature fails to characterize employers' preferences towards social policies and to explain the variation in the degree of employers' support for particular social policies, this paper does so. Firms' preferences towards social policies can be analyzed along three dimensions: ability of social policies to redistribute risks, locus of control within alternative policy arenas and the costs imposed by different social policies.
National Macroeconomic Policy Preferences and International Coordination Issues
Authors: Willett Thomas D. 
Published: November 2008

ABSTRACTThis paper stresses the importance of taking domestic economic structures and political pressures into account when considering issues of international macroeconomic policy coordination. The existence of domestic biases can cause policy coordination to increase rather than reduce macroeconomic instability. The paper offers a survey of the literature on national macroeconomic policy preferences and inflation unemployment tradeoffs. While this research is still in its infancy, it is clear that there are important differences across countries which must be taken into account in designing coordination strategies.
Organization and Cooperation: International Institutions and Policy Coordination
Authors: Kahler Miles 
Published: November 2008

ABSTRACTSystems of policy coordination since 1945 may be classified as rule-governed systems relying on decentralized national decisions (a stylized Bretton Woods system) or discretionary bargaining in which coordination decisions are taken collectively at the international level (e.g. world economic summits). The European Monetary System combines elements of these two models. National attachments to rules cannot be explained solely by the strength of international institutions. A discretionary bargaining model of coordination is more likely to be successful when national leaders share a policy diagnosis that both cuts across economic issue areas and divides their own domestic political coalitions and governments. International organizations may facilitate policy coordination under a rule-based system through provision of resources to ease adjustment costs and rule clarification, and in a discretionary bargaining system by brokering, providing information and model building.
The rightward movement of complements and adjuncts in the Old English of Beowulf
Authors: Pintzuk Susan , Kroch Anthony S. 
Published: November 2008

ABSTRACTAlthough it has generally been recognized that Old English was a verb-final language with verb-seconding, the existence of clauses with main verb complements and adjuncts appearing after the otherwise clause-final verb seems to contradict the hypothesis that the language was strictly verb-final in underlying structure. There are three possible analyses to explain these clauses: variable word order in the base, leftward verb movement, and rightward movement of NPs and PPs. In this article, we demonstrate that only the third analysis adequately explains the data of the Early Old English poem Beowulf. Moreover, by investigating the mapping between syntactic structures and metrical units, we provide evidence for two types of rightward movement with two distinct structures: heavy NP shift, with a characteristic major intonational boundary between the main verb and the postposed NP, and PP extraposition, where the intonational boundary was much less common.
The intersection of s-aspiration/deletion and spirantization in Honduran Spanish
Authors: Amastae Jon 
Published: November 2008

ABSTRACTSpanish dialects may differ according to the behavior of voiced obstruents following r, l, s, and the glides. For most dialects, for example, Mexican, fricatives occur in these environments; in some, such as highland Colombian, stops tend to occur. Another feature distinguishing dialects is s-aspiration/deletion. Several Central American dialects are of particular interest because they are both s-aspirating/deleting and stop-conserving in the series of postconsonantal environments (Canfield, 1961/1981). Detailed examination of spirantization in these dialects, as well as of the particular question of what occurs after /s/ → [s] [z] [h] [Ø] has been nonexistent. Obviously, if s is deleted before a voiced obstruent, the resulting environment of the obstruent is intervocalic, which is a favored environment for spirantization. For this investigation, 14 Honduran speakers were interviewed using standard sociolinguistic interview techniques. Tokens were transcribed and categorized according to whether s-aspiration/deletion had applied, whether spirantization had applied, and by preceding/following environment. It is shown that (a) in Honduran Spanish the group r, l, glides, and s inhibit spirantization variably, much as they do in highland Colombian Spanish; (b) neither voicing, aspiration, nor deletion of (s) favor spirantization, despite the apparently favorable (surface) environment created when deletion applies; (c) even though an analysis of (b) that orders spirantization before deletion is apparently explanatory, a view that attributes spirantization to syllable structure offers a more comprehensive explanation of what happens when the two variable processes intersect by applying to adjacent segments.
Vowel harmony: A variable rule in Brazilian Portuguese
Authors: Bisol Leda 
Published: November 2008

ABSTRACTBrazilian Portuguese has a vowel harmony rule which consists of the optional raising of the pretonic e and o vowels to i and u, respectively, if there is a high vowel in the following syllable. This is an old rule, the origin of which can be traced back to the Latin of the 4th century a.d. Because the rule is subject to multiple conditioning by both linguistic and social factors, it can be treated as a variable rule.
Statistical evidence for rule ordering
Authors: Sankoff David , Rousseau Pascale 
Published: November 2008

ABSTRACTA set of ordered rules for generating variants of a variable determines (a) underlying/surface distinctions among some of the variants and (b) a hierarchical classification of the variants. In the analytical framework of variable rules, frequency data on variant occurrences in context bear only on (b) and not on (a). We provide a combinatorial characterization and enumeration of the set of classifications on n variants, the set of underlying/surface configurations, and the set of rule orders. We describe the statistical and computational techniques for generalizing variable rule analysis to the inference of rule order. These procedures are applied to the problems of the reduction of syllable-final consonants 
, <n>, and <r> in Caribbean Spanish (n = 3, 4, 6 variants, respectively). Previous analyses have tended to assume that successive weakenings occur in an intrinsic order determined by phonological strength. Our results show that aspiration and deletion can indeed be seen to be intrinsically ordered in both 
 and <r> reduction, though an unordered analysis is equally likely in the case of 
. On the other hand, velarization and deletion of <n> are unordered, while vocalization is a subsequent process, independent of the other two. Similarly, spirantization, aspiration, and lateralization of <r> are unordered, as confirmed by data sets from both Puerto Rican and Panamanian speakers. Furthermore, with both <n> and <r>, intrinsically ordered rule schemata proved to be extremely unlikely by statistical criteria. Syllable-final consonant reduction then consists of largely independent processes, most of which occur simultaneously.
The grammaticalization of the particlelein Mandarin Chinese
Authors: Shi Ziqiang 
Published: November 2008

ABSTRACTThis article investigates the grammaticalization process ofliaoas a main verb in 10th-century vernacular texts toleas an aspectual particle in modern Chinese. I propose that two processes are involved. First, with the “resultative construction” coming into existence in the language, some instances ofliaowere reanalyzed as the phase complement of the new morphological construction. Second, other instances of the verb began to lose their verbness by taking sentential subjects and occurring in temporal clauses only. These processes gave rise to the positional change ofliaofrom after the complement of the verb to before the complement of the verb ofle.
Reflexes of grammar in patterns of language change
Authors: Kroch Anthony S. 
Published: November 2008

ABSTRACTWhen one form replaces another over time in a changing language, the new form does not occur equally often in all linguistic contexts. Linguists have generally assumed that those contexts in which the new form is more common are those in which the form first appears and in which it advances most rapidly. However, evidence from several linguistic changes (most importantly the rise of the periphrastic auxiliarydoin late Middle English) shows that the general assumption is false. Instead, at least for syntactic cases, change seems to proceed at the same rate in all contexts. Contexts change together because they are merely surface manifestations of a single underlying change in grammar. Differences in frequency of use of a new form across contexts reflect functional and stylistic factors, which are constant across time and independent of grammar.
The whole woman: Sex and gender differences in variation
Authors: Eckert Penelope 
Published: November 2008

ABSTRACTSpeaker's sex has emerged as one of the most important social factors in the quantitative study of phonological variation. However, sex does not have a uniform effect on variables or even on variables that represent sound change in progress. This is because sex is not directly related to linguistic behavior but reflects complex social practice. The correlations of sex with linguistic variables are only a reflection of the effects on linguistic behavior of gender — the complex social construction of sex — and it is in this construction that one must seek explanations for such correlations. Sociolinguists generally treat sex in terms of oppositional categories (male/female), and the effects of sex on variation are generally sought in linguistic differences between male and female speakers. However, because gender differences involve differences in orientation to other social categories, the effects of gender on linguistic behavior can show up in differences within sex groupings. Data on sound changes in progress (the Northern Cities Chain Shift) among Detroit area adolescents show that gender has a variety of effects on variables and that the significance of gender in variation cannot be reduced to notions of male or female speech as “more or less conservative.”
Variation in subject-verb concord in Early Modern English
Authors: Bailey Guy , Maynor Natalie , Cukor-Avila Patricia 
Published: November 2008

ABSTRACTDetermining the function of verbal -s in the Black English Vernacular (BEV) has been a major problem in sociolinguistics. Linguists have offered four answers to questions about the feature's origins and function, with -s seen as a case of hypercorrection, as a marker of durative/habitual aspect, as a variable marker of present tense (with the variation stemming from dialect mixture), and as a marker of historical present regardless of person and number. This article argues that confusion about -s results largely from four mistaken assumptions about it: (1) that -s did not exist in earlier varieties of BEV, (2) that the use of -s in the plural bears no relation to its use in the singular or to other processes such as the use of is as a plural or copula and auxiliary absence, (3) that -s has always functioned simply as a person/number marker in white vernaculars, and (4) that any role white vernaculars may have played in the variability of -s was a consequence of regional variation brought to the United States. This article addresses these assumptions by examining the function of -s, both in the singular and plural, and of plural is in the Cely Letters, written between 1472 and 1488, and by comparing the results to similar data in black and white vernaculars. The analysis shows that in the Cely Letters the presence of an NP subject strongly favors the occurrence of both singular and plural -s and also plural is. The same constraint operates on the same forms in older black and white vernaculars, and it affects copula and auxiliary absence as well. In the speech of younger blacks and whites, this constraint has begun to disappear as -s has become solely a marker of person/number agreement in white speech and as -s itself has disappeared in BEV.
Linguistic change in El Pont de Suert: The study of variation of /3/
Authors: Alturo Nuria , Turell Ma. Teresa 
Published: November 2008

ABSTRACTCatalan sociolinguistics has investigated in depth the uses of Catalan and the attitudes toward it but has only analyzed very sporadically the mechanisms of linguistic change in this language. The study presented in this article is an attempt to describe an ongoing linguistic change that has been observed in a speech community (E1 Pont de Suert) of the Alta Ribagorça, a region in Catalonia (Spain) where the borderline between Catalan and Aragonese, a variety of Spanish, can be delimited. The purpose of this article is twofold. First, the article seeks to demonstrate that a gradual substitution of the autochthonous variant [t∫] by the normative [3] of the phoneme /3/ appears to be taking place in El Pont de Suert, and to determine, at the same time, the linguistic and social factors that favor this substitution. Second, its purpose is to analyze the variation of this phoneme in relation to not only geographic but also social and linguistic variables; this is because a study that considers only geographic factors would describe the characteristics that differentiate the Ribagorca speech from other Catalan speech varieties but would not account for the existing variation in the use of both the voiceless affricate and the voiced fricative.
Rules of stress assignment in Québec French: Evidence from perceptual data
Authors: Paradis Claude , Deshaies Denise 
Published: November 2008

ABSTRACTThis article seeks to contribute to the analysis of the prosodic system of Québec French in a variationist framework. However, major problems have to be resolved before one can give a comprehensive view of this system, one of these concerning stress assignment. In order to examine the validity of the traditional view claimed for French by most linguists, which states that stress is always superposed on the final syllable of lexical words, different perceptual tests were devised and carried out with two groups of students. The results of these tests show the effect of structural factors on the perception of stressed syllables in Québec French and demonstrate that this canonic rule does not always hold for varieties of Québec French. On the basis of these results, a subset of stress rules is then proposed and illustrated with examples of words tested in the perceptual tests. Counterexamples to these rules are thereafter discussed, and a reconsideration of the principles of syllabification that are usually taken for granted for French is proposed in light of variable rules.
The validity of phonetic transcription: Limitations of a sociolinguistic research tool
Authors: Kerswill Paul , Wright Susan 
Published: November 2008

ABSTRACTAuditory phonetic transcription is a stock-in-trade of sociolinguists; it is transcriptions, not actual speech, that form the raw data of much of sociolinguistics. Given its importance, it is surprising that phonetic transcription has rarely been examined by sociolinguists from the point of view of its validity and its reliability — despite the existence of a certain amount of discussion in the phonetic literature. Rather, it has been treated as a pretheoretical notion. In this article, we report an experiment that compares the auditory transcriptions of trained phoneticians with physiological data on the same utterances, using the technique ofelectropalatography. The experiment shows that (a) there are intervening factors of a psycho-acoustic nature that impinge on a phonetician's transcription, thus affecting validity; and (b) there is considerable inconsistency, both between phoneticians and between a single phonetician's different attempts at transcribing the same token. Both of these latter factors show that a high degree of reliability cannot be assumed.
Historical development ofbaandjiangin the Tang Dynasty
Authors: Her One-Soon 
Published: November 2008

ABSTRACTBased on evidence in Zen dialogues, Bianwen and Chuanqi texts in the Tang Dynasty (a.d.618–907), and other sources from earlier and later periods, this article, after dismissing the common misconception that during Tangba() was frequently used in the disposal and serial-verb constructions, proposes that the grammaticalization of thejiang() serial-verb construction was encouraged byyi(), butjiang's disposal characteristic was modeled after its passive counterpartbei, and that it is via the process of lexical replacement thatbareplacedjiang'sprepositional functions in instrumental and disposal constructions.Balater lost its instrumental function tona(). We thus resolve the debate between Huang (1986) and Bennett (1981). Moreover, from the recurring pattern of change in the historical development ofyi, jiang, ba, andna, we observe two counteracting principles at work: functional refinement, which forces a one-to-one correspondence between a form and its function, and analogous development, which does just the opposite to create a one-to-many relationship.