We examine change in government employment among OECD countries between 1980 and 1997, with particular attention to the international spread of ideas about organizational downsizing. Network models of diffusion show linked annual rates of employment change among nations that are geographically close to each other and which trade extensively. Sub-analyses demonstrate that downsizers but not upsi...

We inquire into the question whether the classical ideal of science has been realised by the Model Revolution, initiated at Stanford University during the 1950ies and spread all around the world of philosophy of science — salute P. Suppes. The guiding principle of the Model Revolution is: a scientific theory is a set of structures in the domain of discourse of axiomatic set-theory, characterise...

Perhaps the least visible and understood experience in the academy is that of immigrant women of color This absence is connected to issues of power, privilege, discourse, and practices that silence nonwestern voices in an increasingly globalized world. This paper explores the creative tension immigrant women of color face as they try to negotiate identity and place in US higher education.

Many argumentative texts, and news editorials in particular, follow a specific strategy to persuade their readers of some opinion or attitude. This includes decisions such as when to tell an anecdote or where to support an assumption with statistics, which is reflected by the composition of different types of argumentative discourse units in a text. While several argument mining corpora have re...

Net-based collaborative learning discourses often suffer from deficiencies such as lack of coherence and coordination. It is suggested that the provision of two functionalities, referencing and typing, which learners may optionally use to ground their contributions during a chatbased discourse, can improve collaborative learning. In particular, we examined if goal focus, type of task and group ...

If on the other hand we insist—as we shall here—that classes are to be taken in the sense of multitudes, pluralities, or classes as many, then no class can be an individual and so, in particular, the concept of set will need to be redefined. Here by “class as many” we have in mind what Erik Stenius refers to in [5] as set of, which he defines as follows: If we start from a Universe of Discourse...

Not much is known about the linguistic resources other than discourse connectors for signalling coherence relations. We present here non discourse connector resources for marking coherence relations, namely “discourse verbs” and “discourse prepositions”. “Discourse verbs” are verbs such as precede or cause which take as arguments eventualities or facts. They enter into competition with discours...

In this study, we induce some topological structures in the covering rough set models, and construct their closure operators by using the covering upper approximation operators. Furthermore, we show that the minimum set of each of these topological structures is their base, and a partition on the universe of discourse. Finally, we discuss the relationships between some topologies generated by s...

This paper addresses the problem of generating communicatively adequate extended responses in the absence of specific knowledge concerning the intensions of the questioner. We formulate and justify a heuristic for the selection of optional deep case slots not contained in the question as candidates for the additional information contained in an extended response. It is shown that, in a visually...

This article examines the types of speech acts produced by intermediate Spanish learners as well as their selection of pragmalinguistic forms to communicate these acts. In contrast to much of the research on speech acts and pragmatics in interlanguage which has emphasized learner errors in comparison to native speakers, this study primarily examines what learners are able to produce, and it doe...