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Part of the intorduction: The task of writing a reliable and convincing paper on this topic is a very uneasy one because it is threefold: one has to know at least a bit about the agricultural sector, biology (or more precisely ecology), and about the sometimes beneficial but often distorting consequences of human activities. And all that has to be judged from the perspective of an economist who is aware of the steadily increasing uncertainties which are closely connected with post-modem sciences. Especially with regard to global, but also regional environmental issues, neither the conventional applied sciences nor the traditional professional consultancy deliver promising results. Today scientists have to tackle problems which are created by political necessities overwhelmingly caused by short-term human behavior, due in part to a serious lack of information on the longterm behavioral consequences. In these issues, typically, information stacks are high, scientific facts uncertain, individual as well as collective values disputed, and political decisions very urgent. "In general, the post-normal situation is one where the traditional opposition of 'hard'facts and 'soft' values is inverted. Here we find decisions that are 'hard' in every sense, for which the scientific inputs are irremediably 'soft'" (FUNTOWICZ/RAVETZ, 1991, p. 138).
Contents: Introduction (The Editors) Basic Notions of Information Structure (Manfred Krifka) Notions of Focus Anaphoricity (Mats Rooth) Topic and Focus: Two Structural Positions Associated with Logical Functions in the Left Periphery of the Hungarian Sentence (Katalin É. Kiss) Direct and Indirect Aboutness Topics (Cornelia Endriss & Stefan Hinterwimmer) Information Structure as Information-based Partition (Satoshi Tomioka) Focus Presuppositions (Dorit Abush) Contrastive Focus, Givenness and the Unmarked Status of “Discourse-new”(Elisabeth O. Selkirk) Contrastive Focus (Malte Zimmermann) The Fallacy of Invariant Phonological Correlates of Information Structural Notions (Caroline Féry) Notions and Subnotions of Information Structure (Carlos Gussenhoven) The Restricted Access of Information Structure to Syntax – A Minority Report (Gisbert Fanselow) Focus and Tone (Katharina Hartmann)
This dissertation contains theoretical investigations on the morphology and statistical mechanics of vesicles. The shapes of homogeneous fluid vesicles and inhomogeneous vesicles with fluid and solid membrane domains are calculated. The influence of thermal fluctuations is investigated. The obtained results are valid on mesoscopic length scales and are based on a geometrical membrane model, where the vesicle membrane is described as either a static or a thermal fluctuating surface. The thesis consists of three parts. In the first part, homogeneous vesicles are considered. The focus in this part is on the thermally induced morphological transition between vesicles with prolate and oblate shape. With the help of Monte Carlo simulations, the free energy profile of these vesicles is determined. It can be shown that the shape transformation between prolate and oblate vesicles proceeds continuously and is not hampered by a free energy barrier. The second and third part deal with inhomogeneous vesicles which contain intramembrane domains. These investigations are motivated by experimental results on domain formation in single or multicomponent vesicles, where phase separation occurs and different membrane phases coexist. The resulting domains differ with regard to their membrane structure (solid, fluid). The membrane structure has a distinct effect on the form of the domain and the morphology of the vesicle. In the second part, vesicles with coexisting solid and fluid membrane domains are studied, while the third part addresses vesicles with coexisting fluid domains. The equilibrium morphology of vesicles with simple and complex domain forms, derived through minimisation of the membrane energy, is determined as a function of material parameters. The results are summarised in morphology diagrams. These diagrams show previously unknown morphological transitions between vesicles with different domain shapes. The impact of thermal fluctuations on the vesicle and the form of the domains is investigated by means of Monte Carlo simulations.
Interdisciplinary studies on information structure : ISIS ; Working papers of the SFB 632. - Vol. 8
(2007)
The 8th volume of the working paper series Interdisciplinary Studies on Information Structure (ISIS) of the SFB 632 contains a collection of eight papers contributed by guest authors and SFB-members. The first paper on “Biased Questions” is an invited contribution by Nicholas Asher (CNRS, Laboratoire IRIT) & Brian Reese (University of Texas at Austin). Surveying English tag questions, negative polar questions, and what they term “focus” questions, they investigate the effects of prosody on discourse function and discourse structure and analyze the interaction between prosody and discourse in SDRT (Segmented Discourse Representation Theory). Stefan Hinterwimmer (A2) explores the interpretation of singular definites and universally quantified DPs in adverbially quantified English sentences. He suggests that the availability of a co-varying interpretation is more constrained in the case of universally quantified DPs than in the case of singular definites, because different from universally quantified DPs, co-varying definites are inherently focus-marked. The existence of striking similarities between topic/comment structure and bimanual coordination is pointed out and investigated by Manfred Krifka (A2). Showing how principles of bimanual coordination influence the expression of topic/comment structure beyond spoken language, he suggests that bimanual coordination might have been a preadaptation of the development of Information Structure in human communication. Among the different ways of expressing focus in Foodo, an underdescribed African Guang language of the Kwa family, the marked focus constructions are the central topic of the paper by Ines Fiedler (B1 & D2). Exploring the morphosyntactic facilities that Foodo has for focalization, she suggests that the two focus markers N and n have developed out of a homophone conjunction. Focus marking in another scarcely documented African tone language, the Gur language Konkomba, is treated by Anne Schwarz (B1 & D2). Comparing the two alleged focus markers lé and lá of the language, she argues that lé is better interpreted as a syntactic device rather than as a focus marker and shows that this analysis is corroborated by parallels in related languages. The reflexes of Information Structure in four different European languages (French, German, Greek and Hungarian) are compared and validated by Sam Hellmuth & Stavros Skopeteas (D2). The production data was collected with selected materials of the Questionnaire on Information Structure (QUIS) developed at the SFB. The results not only allow for an evaluation of the current elicitation paradigms, but also help to identify potentially fruitful venues of future research. Frank Kügler, Stavros Skopeteas (D2) & Elisabeth Verhoeven (University of Bremen) give an account of the encoding of Information Structure in Yucatec Maya, a Mayan tone language spoken on the Yucatecan peninsula in Mexico. The results of a production experiment lead them to the conclusion that focus is mainly expressed by syntax in this language. Stefanie Jannedy (D3) undertakes an instrumental investigation on the expressions and interpretation of focus in Vietnamese, a language of the Mon-Khmer family contrasting six lexical tones. The data strongly suggests that focus in Vietnamese is exclusively marked by prosody (intonational emphasis expressed via duration, f0 and amplitude) and that different focus conditions can reliably be recovered. This volume offers insights into current work conducted at the SFB 632, comprising empirical and theoretical aspects of Information Structure in a multitude of languages. Several of the papers mine field work data collected during the first phase of the SFB and explore the expression of Information Structure in tone and non-tone languages from various regions of the world.
This volume presents annotation guidelines that have been developed in the context of the SFB 632, a collaborative research center entitled "Information Structure: the Linguistic Means for Structuring Utterances, Sentences and Texts". An important result of the SFB 632 are the SFB corpora from more than 20 typologically different languages, which have been annotated according to the guidelines presented here. The ultimate target of the data and its annotations is to support the study of Information Structure. Information Structure involves all levels of grammar and, hence, the present guidelines cover relevant aspects of all these levels: - Phonology - Morphology - Syntax - Semantics - Information Structure These levels are dealt with in individual chapters, containing tagset declarations with obligatory and optional tags, detailed annotation instructions, and illustrative examples. The volume also presents an evaluation of inter-annotator agreement of Syntax and Information Structural annotation.
Interdisciplinary studies on information structure : ISIS ; Working papers of the SFB 632 - Vol. 5
(2006)
In this paper we compare the behaviour of adverbs of frequency (de Swart 1993) like usually with the behaviour of adverbs of quantity like for the most part in sentences that contain plural definites. We show that sentences containing the former type of Q-adverb evidence that Quantificational Variability Effects (Berman 1991) come about as an indirect effect of quantification over situations: in order for quantificational variability readings to arise, these sentences have to obey two newly observed constraints that clearly set them apart from sentences containing corresponding quantificational DPs, and that can plausibly be explained under the assumption that quantification over (the atomic parts of) complex situations is involved. Concerning sentences with the latter type of Q-adverb, on the other hand, such evidence is lacking: with respect to the constraints just mentioned, they behave like sentences that contain corresponding quantificational DPs. We take this as evidence that Q-adverbs like for the most part do not quantify over the atomic parts of sum eventualities in the cases under discussion (as claimed by Nakanishi and Romero (2004)), but rather over the atomic parts of the respective sum individuals.
Contents: Chapter 1. Introduction 1 Information Structure 2 Grammatical Correlates of Information Structure 3 Structure of the Questionnaire 4 Experimental Tasks 5 Technicalities 6 Archiving 7 Acknowledgments Chapter 2. General Questions 1 General Information 2 Phonology 3 Morphology and Syntax Chapter 3. Experimental tasks 1 Changes (Given/New in Intransitives and Transitives) 2 Giving (Given/New in Ditransitives) 3 Visibility (Given/New, Animacy and Type/Token Reference) 4 Locations (Given/New in Locative Expressions) 5 Sequences (Given/New/Contrast in Transitives) 6 Dynamic Localization (Given/New in Dynamic Loc. Descriptions) 7 Birthday Party (Weight and Discourse Status) 8 Static Localization (Macro-Planning and Given/New in Locatives) 9 Guiding (Presentational Utterances) 10 Event Cards (All New) 11 Anima (Focus types and Animacy) 12 Contrast (Contrast in pairing events) 13 Animal Game (Broad/Narrow Focus in NP) 14 Properties (Focus on Property and Possessor) 15 Eventives (Thetic and Categorical Utterances) 16 Tell a Story (Contrast in Text) 17 Focus Cards (Selective, Restrictive, Additive, Rejective Focus) 18 Who does What (Answers to Multiple Constituent Questions) 19 Fairy Tale (Topic and Focus in Coherent Discourse) 20 Map Task (Contrastive and Selective Focus in Spontaneous Dialogue) 21 Drama (Contrastive Focus in Argumentation) 22 Events in Places (Spatial, Temporal and Complex Topics) 23 Path Descriptions (Topic Change in Narrative) 24 Groups (Partial Topic) 25 Connections (Bridging Topic) 26 Indirect (Implicational Topic) 27 Surprises (Subject-Topic Interrelation) 28 Doing (Action Given, Action Topic) 29 Influences (Question Priming) Chapter 4. Translation tasks 1 Basic Intonational Properties 2 Focus Translation 3 Topic Translation 4 Quantifiers Chapter 5. Information structure summary survey 1 Preliminaries 2 Syntax 3 Morphology 4 Prosody 5 Summary: Information structure Chapter 6. Performance of Experimental Tasks in the Field 1 Field sessions 2 Field Session Metadata 3 Informants’ Agreement
This paper investigates the formation of the ownership structure and the corporate governance system of the Ukraine as a country in transition. Numerous studies consider that privatization results in the establishment of a proprietors’ motivation mechanism. On the other hand it causes ownership concentration in the hands of a few shareholders and managers. The goal of economic reform in transition and, largely, its pace, is measured by the degree to which shareholders participate in short- and long-term corporate value creation. Shareholder access to such created value depends on the ability of corporate “insiders”, especially executives and management, to claim a disproportionate share of corporate value (the “insider effect”). An econometric analysis of the correlation between privatization and macroeconomic factors studies the degree of effectiveness of economic reforming in Ukrainian regions.
This paper tries to apply common methods to estimate unbiased coefficients for the return to schooling in Germany for the year 2004. Based on the simple Mincer-type wage equation, the return to schooling is around 9.5% per year. There is no sheepskin effect. As expected the return in the private sector is higher than in the public sector. Females have a higher return than males, but there are no differences between East and West Germans. An Instrumental Variables and a 3-Stage-Least-Squares approach give very high returns. For correcting the sample selection, the Heckman Two Step Procedure and the Heckman Maximum Likelihood Approach are used. For both methods, the coefficients are very similar, but higher than without correcting for it.
This paper presents in the first section a methodological introduction concerning statistics of consumer prices in Georgia. The second section gives a general idea of the development of consumer prices from January 1994 till September 1999. A detailed regional analysis is added in section 3. The fourth section analyses the development of consumer prices for the eight main groups included in the total CPI. Section 5 compares the changes in Georgian CPI with the movements of foreign exchange rates in Georgian Lari. This paper ends with a summary including a short outlook to the next years.