Entrenchment

An investigation into the foundations of democratic societies and the ongoing struggle over the power of concentrated wealth Much of our politics today, Paul Starr writes, is a struggle over entrenchment—efforts to bring about change in ways that opponents will find difficult to undo. That is why the stakes of contemporary politics are so high. In this wide-ranging book, Starr examines how changes at the foundations of society become hard to reverse—yet sometimes are overturned. Overcoming aristocratic power was the formative problem for eighteenth-century revolutions. Overcoming slavery was the central problem for early American democracy. Controlling the power of concentrated wealth has been an ongoing struggle in the world’s capitalist democracies. The battles continue today in the troubled democracies of our time, with the rise of both oligarchy and populist nationalism and the danger that illiberal forces will entrench themselves in power. Entrenchment raises fundamental questions about the origins of our institutions and urgent questions about the future.

An investigation into the foundations of democratic societies and the ongoing struggle over the power of concentrated wealth Much of our politics today, Paul Starr writes, is a struggle over entrenchment--efforts to bring about change in ways that opponents will find difficult to undo. That is why the stakes of contemporary politics are so high. In this wide-ranging book, Starr examines how changes at the foundations of society become hard to reverse--yet sometimes are overturned. Overcoming aristocratic power was the formative problem for eighteenth-century revolutions. Overcoming slavery was the central problem for early American democracy. Controlling the power of concentrated wealth has been an ongoing struggle in the world's capitalist democracies. The battles continue today in the troubled democracies of our time, with the rise of both oligarchy and populist nationalism and the danger that illiberal forces will entrench themselves in power. Entrenchment raises fundamental questions about the origins of our institutions and urgent questions about the future.

In recent years, linguists have increasingly turned to the cognitive sciences to broaden their investigation into the roots and development of language. With the advent of cognitive-linguistic, usage-based and complex-adaptive models of language, linguists today are utilizing approaches and insights from cognitive psychology, neuropsychology, social psychology and other related fields. A key result of this interdisciplinary approach is the concept of entrenchment—the ongoing reorganization and adaptation of communicative knowledge. Entrenchment posits that our linguistic knowledge is continuously refreshed and reorganized under the influence of social interactions. It is part of a larger, ongoing process of lifelong cognitive reorganization whose course and quality is conditioned by exposure to and use of language, and by the application of cognitive abilities and processes to language. This volume enlists more than two dozen experts in the fields of linguistics, psycholinguistics, neurology, and cognitive psychology in providing a realistic picture of the psychological and linguistic foundations of language. Contributors examine the psychological foundations of linguistic entrenchment processes, and the role of entrenchment in first-language acquisition, second language learning, and language attrition. Critical views of entrenchment and some of its premises and implications are discussed from the perspective of dynamic complexity theory and radical embodied cognitive science.

This book explores the usage-based claim that high usage frequency leads to the entrenchment of complex words in the minds of language users. To probe the correlation between corpus-extracted usage data and mental entrenchment, the author operationalises entrenchment in Gestalt psychological terms and conducts a series of behavioural and neuroimaging experiments.

The racial achievement gap in U.S. education is a pervasive and consistent problem, an unavoidable fact of public schooling in this country. Because This Is Not for Us is a multi-site critical race ethnography of policy and institutional relationships in an large urban West Coast school district, focused on the practices that created and sustain the achievement gap in that district's schools. In this daring and provocative work, author Sabina Elena Vaught examines how this gap, and the policies and practices that sustain it, is produced and reproduced by structures of racism and race attitudes operative in education. She interweaves numerous interviews with and observations of teachers, principals, students, school board members, community leaders, and others to describe the complex arrangement of racial power in schooling, and concludes that the institutional relationships that create and support policy practices ensure the continued undereducation of Black and Brown youth.

This volume enlists more than two dozen experts in the fields of linguistics, psycholinguistics, neurology, and cognitive psychology in providing a realistic picture of the psychological and linguistic foundations of language. Contributors examine t