Floral displays, influencing attractiveness to insects, increase the number of pollinator visits and the efficiency of each visit in terms of pollen exchange and thus affect the plant reproductive success. Here, we conducted an in situ manipulation experiment to investigate whether the floral modifications affect reproductive success in natural orchid populations of Serapias lingua and Serapias...

Since English has become a lingua franca in the world, English programs need to be based on International standards such as Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR). (1) We report validation experiment by can-do self-check survey in relation to the CEFR levels, in order to find out the cut-off scores and ranges of our computer adaptive placement test called Web-based Test of English Commun...

In this paper I argue that Nouchi, a relatively young Ivoirian contact variety, is and should be treated as a full-fledged language distinct from French and its other source languages. Nouchi, an emerging language spoken in Côte d’Ivoire since that late 1970’s (Ayewa 2005), has been treated in the literature as a slang vocabulary or an urban youth dialect of French. Though Nouchi began as a lin...

Systems for general intelligence require a significant potential to model a variety of different cognitive abilities. It is often claimed that logic-based systems – although rather successful for modeling specialized tasks – lack the ability to be useful as a universal modeling framework due to the fact that particular logics can often be used only for special purposes (and do not cover the who...

In the global debates on English as international lingua franca or as ‘killer language’, the adoption of English as medium of instruction in Higher Education is raising increasing concern. Plurilingualism and multilingualism are embedded in the official policies of the European Union and Council of Europe, and the Bologna Process for harmonizing Higher Education promises ‘proper provision for l...

he Cortegiano rejects one major aspect of the Renaissance reinterpretation of Boccaccio’s Decameron. It cannot consider the text as a model for literary Italian in the way that Bembo urged his readers do so in the Prose della volgar lingua. For Castiglione this attempt to make the Decameron a timeless, linguistic archetype was misguided and inappropriate to the needs of contemporary court socie...

There is a tendency to think of World Englishes in the noun form; as products rather than as processes (implying that one receives both ready-made, controlling the development of neither). Conceptualising World Englishes as processes in which one can participate as an agent raises the question of what skills are needed in their active construction. The author will argue that since culture resid...

Psycholinguistic and stochastic grammatical theories of sound structure are typically stated in quite different formal vocabularies (i.e., connectionist networks vs. stochastic extensions of Optimality Theory). This commentary argues that this difference obscures a common set of core principles: in each framework, the generation of behavior can be conceptualized as the consequence of the intera...

I begin by discussing the use of pattern languages as lingua franca for supporting communication among the diverse parties to the design process. Next, I describe an example of the emergence of a lingua franca during the process of re-designing a small town, and the ways in which it enabled the community to shape its own future. I conclude by suggesting that pattern languages which describe a w...

English. This report describes the EVENTI (EValuation of Events aNd Temporal Information) task organized within the EVALITA 2014 evaluation campaign. The EVENTI task aims at evaluating the performance of Temporal Information Processing systems on a corpus of Italian news articles. Motivations for the task, datasets, evaluation metrics, and results obtained by participating systems are presented...