McLuhan and Debray: Theoretical (dis)harmony

Korzybski, Luhmann, and McLuhan

This paper revisits an earlier study of the common ground shared by Alfred Korzybski, founder of general semantics, and Marshall McLuhan, the central figure in media ecology, and makes explicit the use of systems theory to bridge the gap between the two. Following a brief summary of the systems approach and its relationship to the media ecology intellectual tradition, sociologist Niklas Luhmann...

Dislocation, Clustering and Disharmony

Discontinuities come in different flavours. In minimalistic and previous editions of the generative enterprise, long distance dependencies and discontinutities resulting from verb clustering are analyzed in quite different terms. This paper analyzes wh-structures and crossing dependencies as emanations of a single modalized regime of composition in a combinatory categorial setting.

Marital Disharmony in Neurotics

The present study examines the hypothesis that there would be significant differences between neurotics and normals, and between spouses of neurotics and spouses of normals, with regard to marital disharmony and some of its components as measured by the Dyadic Adjustment Scale. The results supported the hypothesis, with neurotics and their spouses indicating that their marriage are disturbed in...

Towards a Typology of Disharmony

We propose an OT-theoretic typology of vowel harmony systems based on a comparative study of front/back harmony. Harmony processes are governed by a general constraint that imposes feature agreement on neighboring segments. Disharmonic (“neutral”) segments arise when this constraint is dominated by markedness constraints and/or by faithfulness constraints that govern segment inventories. These ...

Harmony and Disharmony in International Patent Law