Search Results (522)

This article explores the concept of landscape through the lens of performativity, challenging the traditional visual-centric understanding rooted in Western art and culture but without denying the visual and representational character of landscape. It examines the evolution of landscape representation, from its origins in linear perspective and Cartesian dualism to contemporary approaches that integrate performative practices. The analysis highlights the dialectical tension between visual representation and immersive, multisensory experiences, arguing for a more integrated view that acknowledges the performative aspects of the visual. By re-evaluating the role of distance, vision, and representation, the article advocates for a nuanced understanding of landscape that balances the visual with embodied practices, ultimately proposing that landscape should be seen as a dynamic interplay between seeing and performing. Full article

Taking due account of users’ perspectives is crucial for improving the quality of healthcare services. This study aimed to analyse the representations and evaluation criteria that users of a public health agency express towards care and treatment services and to explore whether and how the content and meaning of their communications varied according to pre-pandemic, pandemic or post-pandemic periods. A total of 501 communications sent to the public relations office of an Italian health agency were collected. An automatic content analysis procedure was applied to the textual corpus. Four main thematic cores were identified concerning the request for care and respect, the value of the doctor–patient relationship and the difficulties in contacting services and accessing care. Two main latent dimensions of meaning were identified, which capture the dialectic between the demand for relationships and the demand for access to care, and between attention to the relational competence of health workers and attention to the needs and rights of users. Communications collected during the pre-pandemic and post-pandemic periods mainly concern the difficulty of access to care; those collected during the pandemic period mainly concern the doctor–patient relationship. Interpersonal aspects and timely access to care appear to be crucial in users’ assessment of the quality of care. Full article

Suprafixation (more specifically, tonal affixation) is a word-building strategy that is somewhat frequently employed in Cantonese. This article explores the development of the lexical suprafixes in Standard Cantonese from three perspectives: (a) earlier descriptions of the Cantonese suprafixes and the behaviour of the lexical suprafixes in some older Romanised Cantonese texts; (b) the behaviour of the lexical suprafixes in some non-standard Cantonese varieties; and (c) the behaviour of the suprafixes and diminutives in Yuè and Pínghuà dialects in general. A definite answer cannot be found to the question of what the origin of the Cantonese suprafixes is. Nonetheless, the theory that the Cantonese lexical suprafixes stem from the diminutive suffix *ɲi 兒 (Cantonese ji4, Mandarin ér) remains the most convincing. Full article

This study unpacks the Buddhist assimilation of Namsan (South Mountain) in Kyŏngju through the creation and aggregation of Buddhist sculptures and structures on its slopes during the seventh to tenth centuries. Though steeped in native lore regarding nature deities and efficacious rocks, auspicious geological features such as Namsan were recast as part of a Buddhist landscape filled with manifestations of the Buddha and his attendants. These images served to demarcate claims of Buddhism’s place in the peninsula and were situated within sites that were previously marked and claimed by indigenous systems of belief. Employing an approach that draws parallels with David Harvey’s concept of urban environments as palimpsests, this paper reveals that Namsan was a multifaceted site, with military fortifications, temples, and rock-carved sculptures augmenting its spiritual and political significance. The repeated installation of Buddhist imagery ‘recovered’ the mountain, subsuming indigenous beliefs under Buddhist practices. This research finds that Namsan’s landscape was purposefully layered, reflecting the dialectical relationship between various communities and their religious and social practices over time. Analyzing Namsan as a palimpsest underscores the strategic appropriation of the mountain’s materiality and sacrality to establish a Buddhist territory deeply intertwined with the Silla elite’s politics and ideologies. Full article

Semantic ontologies have been widely utilized as crucial tools within natural language processing, underpinning applications such as knowledge extraction, question answering, machine translation, text comprehension, information retrieval, and text summarization. While the Kurdish language, a low-resource language, has been the subject of some ontological research in other dialects, a semantic web ontology for the Badini dialect remains conspicuously absent. This paper addresses this gap by presenting a methodology for constructing and utilizing a semantic web ontology for the Badini dialect of the Kurdish language. A Badini annotated corpus (UOZBDN) was created and manually annotated with part-of-speech (POS) tags. Subsequently, an HMM-based POS tagger model was developed using the UOZBDN corpus and applied to annotate additional text for ontology extraction. Ontology extraction was performed by employing predefined rules to identify nouns and verbs from the model-annotated corpus and subsequently forming semantic predicates. Robust methodologies were adopted for ontology development, resulting in a high degree of precision. The POS tagging model attained an accuracy of 95.04% when applied to the UOZBDN corpus. Furthermore, a manual evaluation conducted by Badini Kurdish language experts yielded a 97.42% accuracy rate for the extracted ontology. Full article

(1) Background: Australian Aboriginal English (AAE) is a variety known to differ in various ways from the mainstream, but to date very little phonetic analysis has been carried out. This study is a description of L1 Aboriginal English in southern Australia, aiming to comprehensively describe the acoustics of vowels, focusing in particular on vowels known to be undergoing change in Mainstream Australian English. Previous work has focused on static measures of F1/F2, and here we expand on this by adding duration analyses, as well as dynamic F1/F2 measures. (2) Methods: This paper uses acoustic-phonetic analyses to describe the vowels produced by speakers of Aboriginal Australian English from two communities in southern Australia (Mildura and Warrnambool). The focus is vowels undergoing change in the mainstream variety–the short vowels in KIT, DRESS, TRAP, STRUT, LOT, and the long vowel GOOSE; focusing on duration, and static and dynamic F1/F2. As part of this description, we analyse the data using the sociophonetic variables gender, region, and age, and also compare the Aboriginal Australian English vowels to those of Mainstream Australian English. (3) Results: On the whole, for duration, few sociophonetic differences were observed. For static F1/F2, we saw that L1 Aboriginal English vowel spaces tend to be similar to Mainstream Australian English but can be analysed as more conservative (having undergone less change) as has also been observed for L2 Aboriginal English, in particular for KIT, DRESS, and TRAP. The Aboriginal English speakers had a less peripheral vowel space than Mainstream Australian English speakers. Dynamic analyses also highlighted dialectal differences between Aboriginal and Mainstream Australian English speakers, with greater F1/F2 movement in the trajectories of vowels overall for AAE speakers, which was more evident for some vowels (TRAP, STRUT, LOT, and GOOSE). Regional differences in vowel quality between the two locations were minimal, and more evident in the dynamic analyses. (4) Conclusions: This paper further highlights how Aboriginal Australian English is uniquely different from Mainstream Australian English with respect to certain vowel differences, and it also highlights some ways in which the varieties align. The differences, i.e., a more compressed vowel space, and greater F1/F2 movement in the trajectories of short vowels for AAE speakers, are specific ways that Aboriginal Australian English and Mainstream Australian English accents are different in these communities in the southern Australian state of Victoria. Full article

This work aims to explore climate change as a decisive element for the transition from feudalism toward capitalism and considers the Marxist transition debate as a framework. In order to avoid the deterministic trap, climate must be considered as a condition framing the historical possibilities in a dialectical relationship with human historical agents. Thus, this paper explores the interactions between medieval English society, focusing on land use and class relation, and the conditions imposed by nature, particularly the change in rainfall and the transformation of ecological conditions around the North Sea Basin, especially on England’s east coast. Through the course of this research, we found out that the climate change that happened in the 14th century is one important condition for the rise of capitalism, as it creates certain pressures on both peasant and manorial economies that exacerbate their contradictions and sets a course for profound societal change. Full article

Coalitional communication is a dwelling amidst non-dominant differences that requires introspective, complex communicative philosophy and practice. My concern is with differentiation in hierarchies. They are understood and shaped by colonial modernity. They are historical logics and practices of settler colonialism, enslavement, and citizenship. My perspective is feminist, decolonial critiques of modern, capitalist social systems. The analysis is grounded in communicative philosophy in intercultural contexts where folks intend justice and equality. For example, in political democracies, localized social alliances actually harm one another being hegemonic by taking routes of familiarity through structures of linguistic and practical cultural systems. Communicative projects of liberation across oppressions (with monologic and single-axis perceptions) tend to miss intersections of our raced and gendered experiences. The result is unintelligibility among us. In this state, one can sense in the body the space of the liminal—with both a communicative impasse and opening. Rather than aligning liberation and domination in the impasse, I describe the creativity of liminal space as a communicative opening. The opening is a recognition of multiplicity and a refusal to assimilate each other’s lived experiences into familiar, complex codes of habituated thought and action. Examining communication hostilities in oppressed–oppressing relations is a necessary condition for coalition. Thus, coalitional communication is a call to engage a full sense of listening to one another as relevant. Ways that decipher codes and signals of resistance come to constitute the project of creating relevant intelligibility together. Praxis as critical, dialectical, and intersectional thinking is part of this method. Full article

This study investigates how the unique circumstances of heritage language acquisition impact prosody, an understudied aspect of heritage speech. I examine the perception and production of lexical pitch accent by two generations of heritage Lithuanian speakers in Chicago (n = 13), with a qualitative comparison to one normative native speaker also living in Chicago. The speakers participated in the following: (1) a perception task requiring them to identify meaning distinctions between pairs of words that differ only by accent; and (2) a production task in which they produced sentences containing nine nominal declensions, where pitch accent plays a morphological role. In task (1), speakers across the board were not able to identify meaning distinctions in accent-based minimal pairs, irrespective of their frequency, and were more accurate at perceiving pairs that differed on the basis of segmental phonological features. However, HSs with more education perceived more accent-based distinctions, as did HSs who were more engaged in the Chicago community. Older HSs maintained more distinctions than either the NS or the younger HSs, which suggests a change in progress in the language or the Chicago Lithuanian community. In task (2), none of the speakers consistently used pitch to signal word-level prominence. Instead, all speakers relied on changes in duration and vowel quality to signal word-level prominence, suggesting that, for these speakers, there has been a shift to a stress-accent system. The older HSs also patterned more like the NS in their retention of the expected stress in the nominal declensions. Dialect was also determined to play a role in the retention of standard accent patterns in both perception and production. Full article

This paper foccusses on the Tangwang language, a Chinese variety spoken in southern Gansu that has been in contact with the Dongxiang language, a Mongolic language. Tangwang is believed to be a highly altaicised variety, as it demonstrate several traits that are usually absent in this language family are are reputed ‘typical’ of the Turkic-Mongolic languages. However, most of these traits are present in the other northwestern chinese varieties and are the result of reanalysis, thus, it is difficult to trace their exact origin. This paper aims at analyzing the influence of Mongolic languages on Tangwang from the perspective of borrowings, and in particular direct loans. Taking the formally identical features that are shared in Dongxiang and Tangwang as a starting point, we will try to determine which form can be seen as a direct borrowing due to the adstratal influence of Dongxiang and which one is probably due to an earlier altaic influence. We will try to classify which form is a ‘true’ direct loan from Dongxiang and which form could be the evidence of an earlier substrate. From the results, and based on the existing models on languages contact, we will try to understand which mechanisms from relexification, grammaticalization, and language shift is the most probable in the case of Tangwang. Full article

Short-term pediatric psychiatric hospitalization is used to manage acute-crisis behaviors. Few studies have detailed their clinical model and key metrics such as patient behavioral health outcomes and staff experience. This study describes a model which emphasizes group therapy based on dialectical behavior therapy during brief inpatient stays (average length of stay of 8 days). The study variables assessed included patient symptoms of depression, anxiety, and anger at discharge, patient satisfaction, and staff safety. The program produced significant improvements in adolescent depression, anxiety, and anger, and patients reported high satisfaction with the services received. However, there was a high rate of staff injuries, correlated with staffing ratios and the time of day. The key findings from this study demonstrate the effectiveness of brief inpatient programs and highlight variables that may impact staff experiences on these units, which could serve as further discussion points to improve clinical care. Full article

This paper aims to conceptualize the patterns of cultural change. Building on the seminal work of the German sociologist Tönnies and using eight cultural dimensions from Inglehart, Hofstede, Schwartz, and GLOBE, the study analyzes the patterns of cultural change at three distinct levels: (1) socio-economic development/modernization, (2) birth/migration, and (3) globalization/contact. The paper suggests that the path of cultural change is complex and dialectical. While socio-economic development shifts cultural values from traditional to modern, demographic pressures and migratory movements have opposite effects and reinforce traditional cultural values. Moreover, globalization and increasing contact between traditional and modern cultures create a constant blend and conflict. Full article

This study looks at the sense of belonging among the youth who fled Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine and currently reside in Weimar, Germany. Having fled the war in a time of transition to a more independent stage of life, refugee youth are finding themselves in a challenging context of liminality: both in terms of age and environment. Experiencing a feeling of uncertainty about their positioning in life and a new society, refugee youth are especially prone to feeling excluded and lost, which creates further challenges for their well-being. While the sense of belonging cannot be strictly defined, it is considered a vital factor for mental and physical well-being, as well as a core sign of social integration. To understand how to help newcomers foster their sense of belonging, this study tracks senses of (non)belonging among refugee youth following a weak theory and psychogeographic approach. The results demonstrate the ‘dialectic’ battle of opposites: how right-wing city rallies and pro-Russian symbolism in Weimar are triggering a sense of alienation and detachment on the one hand, and how signs of solidarity with Ukraine and connecting to local social groups invite engagement with the city, its politics and hence create a sense of agency, welcoming and belonging on the other. The results of the study have important applicability for human geography as well as the development of the theory on the sense of belonging among refugee youth in the context of liminality. Full article

Social media platforms like X (formerly known as Twitter) are integral to modern communication, enabling the sharing of news, emotions, and ideas. However, they also facilitate the spread of harmful content, and manual moderation of these platforms is impractical. Automated moderation tools, predominantly developed for English, are insufficient for addressing online offensive language in Arabic, a language rich in dialects and informally used on social media. This gap underscores the need for dedicated, dialect-specific resources. This study introduces the Saudi Offensive Dialectal dataset (SOD), consisting of over 24,000 tweets annotated across three levels: offensive or non-offensive, with offensive tweets further categorized as general insults, hate speech, or sarcasm. A deeper analysis of hate speech identifies subtypes related to sports, religion, politics, race, and violence. A comprehensive descriptive analysis of the SOD is also provided to offer deeper insights into its composition. Using machine learning, traditional deep learning, and transformer-based deep learning models, particularly AraBERT, our research achieves a significant F1-Score of 87% in identifying offensive language. This score improves to 91% with data augmentation techniques addressing dataset imbalances. These results, which surpass many existing studies, demonstrate that a specialized dialectal dataset enhances detection efficacy compared to mixed-language datasets. Full article

The experiential bias in modern understandings of spirituality has led to readings of the pre-modern texts of Pseudo-Dionysius as referring to “negative experiences” of faith. Denys Turner, Bernard McGinn, and others have outlined the mistaken “spiritual positivism” of such readings and their contrast with the negative dialectics of the classical apophatic tradition. Indeed, the philosophical parameters of the Christian mysticism of the Dionysian tradition would deny “mystical experience” to be “experience” as such. Nevertheless, several modern theologians have attempted to integrate interpretations of the experiential in Christian mysticism into their theology. These include Sara Coakley in the idea of spiritual sense in her theology of the body, Karl Rahner in the conception of spiritual touch within his theology of grace, and Louis Dupré’s view that there is religious significance in the experience of “emptiness” in modern-day atheism. I shall contrast these attempted integrations with the critique of “mystical experience” within classical understandings of apophaticism. Full article