Structures On The Move

This book enters new territory by moving toward a new conceptual framework for comparative and interdisciplinary research on transcultural state formation. Once more, statehood and governance are highly discussed topics, whereby modern state building is often considered to be a genuinely European characteristic, despite the fact that early modern Europeans knew of, experienced and grappled with highly developed states in Asia. The articles collected in this book discuss how strategies of governance were part of transcultural transfers between the two continents. The first part presents and discusses concepts of statehood in order to provide a set of conceptual tools for analyzing the transcultural appropriation of governmental strategies. The second part is concerned with case studies that examine the transcultural perception of governance, and the third and final part gathers perspectives on political practice in transcultural encounters (e.g. military, administration, and diplomacy)

This book enters new territory by moving toward a new conceptual framework for comparative and interdisciplinary research on transcultural state formation. Once more, statehood and governance are highly discussed topics, whereby modern state building is often considered to be a genuinely European characteristic, despite the fact that early modern Europeans knew of, experienced and grappled with highly developed states in Asia. The articles collected in this book discuss how strategies of governance were part of transcultural transfers between the two continents. The first part presents and discusses concepts of statehood in order to provide a set of conceptual tools for analyzing the transcultural appropriation of governmental strategies. The second part is concerned with case studies that examine the transcultural perception of governance, and the third and final part gathers perspectives on political practice in transcultural encounters (e.g. military, administration, and diplomacy)

Discourse is language as it occurs, in any form or context, beyond the speech act. It may be written or spoken, monological or dialogical, but there is always a communicative aim or purpose. The present volume provides systematic orientation in the vast field of studying discourse from a pragmatic perspective. It first gives an overview of a range of approaches developed for the analysis of discourse, including, among others, conversation analysis, systemic-functional analysis, genre analysis, critical discourse analysis, corpus-driven approaches and multimodal analysis. The focus is furthermore on functional units in discourse, such as discourse markers, moves, speech act sequences, discourse phases and silence. The final section of the volume examines discourse types and domains, providing a taxonomy of discourse types and focusing on a range of discourse domains, e.g. classroom discourse, medical discourse, legal discourse, electronic discourse. Each article surveys the current state of the art of the respective topic area while also presenting new research findings.

Discourse on the Move is the first book-length exploration of how corpus-based methods can be used for discourse analysis, applied to the description of discourse organization. The primary goal is to bring these two analytical perspectives together: undertaking a detailed discourse analysis of each individual text, but doing so in terms that can be generalized across all texts of a corpus. The book explores two major approaches to this task: ‘top-down’ and ‘bottom-up’. In the ‘top-down’ approach, the functional components of a genre are determined first, and then all texts in a corpus are analyzed in terms of those components. In contrast, textual components emerge from the corpus analysis in the bottom-up approach, and the discourse organization of individual texts is then analyzed in terms of linguistically-defined textual categories. Both approaches are illustrated through case studies of discourse structure in particular genres: fund-raising letters, biology/biochemistry research articles, and university classroom teaching.

The book explores ways in which the formal methods of linguistics can cast light on the structure of verbal interaction, and in particular considers how successive utterances cohere together in continuous spoken discourse. Beginning with an earlier model of discourse analysis elaborated to deal with teacher-pupil interaction in the classroom, it then reviews attempts to extend this model to a variety of discourses such as committee talk, doctor-patient interviews, broadcast discussions and the monologue of lectures. The extension of the original model to other situations has prompted a number of innovations and additional insights which are expounded in a series of contributions linked by complimentary themes. There are contributions on the role of intonation and of kinetics in discourse analysis; explorations of the problems of the analytic category ‘sentence’ and of the problems raised by casual conversation; and there is extended discussion of the structural properties underlying exchanges of utterances. The book moves easily between data and theory, forming a unified whole. It sums up a continuing and lively debate within a common tradition of discourse analysis and may well serve as a programmatic statement for future work in the field.

This text examines the interaction between blast pressure and surface or underground structures, whether the blast is from civilian, military, dust and natural explosions, or any other source.

TheArti?cialLifetermappearedmorethan20yearsagoinasmallcornerofNew Mexico, USA. Since then the area has developed dramatically, many researchers joining enthusiastically and research groups sprouting everywhere. This frenetic activity led to the emergence of several strands that are now established ?elds in themselves. We are now reaching a stage that one may describe as maturer: with more rigour, more benchmarks, more results, more stringent acceptance criteria, more applications, in brief, more sound science. This, which is the n- ural path of all new areas, comes at a price, however. A certain enthusiasm, a certain adventurousness from the early years is fading and may have been lost on the way. The ?eld has become more reasonable. To counterbalance this and to encourage lively discussions, a conceptual track, where papers were judged on criteria like importance and/or novelty of the concepts proposed rather than the experimental/theoretical results, has been introduced this year. A conference on a theme as broad as Arti?cial Life is bound to be very - verse,but a few tendencies emerged. First, ?elds like ‘Robotics and Autonomous Agents’ or ‘Evolutionary Computation’ are still extremely active and keep on bringing a wealth of results to the A-Life community. Even there, however, new tendencies appear, like collective robotics, and more speci?cally self-assembling robotics, which represent now a large subsection. Second, new areas appear.