Cohésion modale et subordination : Le conditionnel et le jussif finnois au miroir de la valeur sémantique et discursive du subjonctif français

Modal cohesion and subordination. The Finnish conditional and jussive moods in comparison to the French subjunctive This study examines verb moods in subordinate clauses in French and Finnish. The first part of the analysis deals with the syntax and semantics of the French subjunctive, mood occurring mostly in subordinate positions. The second part investigates Finnish verb moods. Although subordinate positions in Finnish grammar have no special finite verb form, certain uses of Finnish verb moods have been compared to those of subjunctives and conjunctives in other languages. The present study focuses on the subordinate uses of the Finnish conditional and jussive (i.e. the third person singular and plural of the imperative mood). The third part of the analysis discusses the functions of subordinate moods in contexts beyond complex sentences. The data used for the analysis include 1834 complex sentences gathered from newspapers, online discussion groups and blog texts, as well as audio-recorded interviews and conversations. The data thus consist of both written and oral texts as well as standard and non-standard variants. The analysis shows that the French subjunctive codes theoretical modality. The subjunctive does not determine the temporal and modal meaning of the event, but displays the event as virtual. In a complex sentence, the main clause determines the temporal and modal space within which the event coded by the subjunctive clause is interpreted. The subjunctive explicitly indicates that the space constructed in the main clause extends its scope over the subordinate clause. The subjunctive can therefore serve as a means for creating modal cohesion in the discourse. The Finnish conditional shares the function of making explicit the modal link between the components of a complex construction with the French subjunctive, but the two moods differ in their semantics. The conditional codes future time and can therefore occur only in non-factual or counterfactual contexts, whereas the event expressed by French subjunctive clauses can also be interpreted as realized. Such is the case when, for instance, generic and habitual meaning is involved. The Finnish jussive mood is used in a relatively limited number of subordinate clause types, but in these contexts its modal meaning is strikingly close to that of the French subjunctive. The permissive meaning, typical of the jussive in main clause positions, is modified in complex sentences so that it entails inter-clausal relation, namely concession. Like the French subjunctive, the jussive codes theoretical modal meaning with no implication of the truth value of the proposition. Finally, the analysis shows that verb moods mark modal cohesion, not only on the syntagmatic level (namely in complexe sentences), but also on the paradigmatic axis of discourse in order to create semantic links over entire segments of talk. In this study, the subjunctive thus appears, not as an empty category without function, as it is sometimes described, but as an open form that conveys the temporal and modal meanings emerging from the context.

Semantic Fluency in Mild and Moderate Alzheimer's Disease

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is characterized by an impairment of the semantic memory responsible for processing meaning-related knowledge. This study was aimed at examining how Finnish-speaking healthy elderly subjects (n = 30) and mildly (n=20) and moderately (n = 20) demented AD patients utilize semantic knowledge to performa semantic fluency task, a method of studying semantic memory. In this task subjects are typically given 60 seconds to generate words belonging to the semantic category of animals. Successful task performance requires fast retrieval of subcategory exemplars in clusters (e.g., farm animals: 'cow', 'horse', 'sheep') and switching between subcategories (e.g., pets, water animals, birds, rodents). In this study, thescope of the task was extended to cover various noun and verb categories. The results indicated that, compared with normal controls, both mildly and moderately demented AD patients showed reduced word production, limited clustering and switching, narrowed semantic space, and an increase in errors, particularly perseverations. However, the size of the clusters, the proportion of clustered words, and the frequency and prototypicality of words remained relatively similar across the subject groups. Although the moderately demented patients showed a poor eroverall performance than the mildly demented patients in the individual categories, the error analysis appeared unaffected by the severity of AD. The results indicate a semantically rather coherent performance but less specific, effective, and flexible functioning of the semantic memory in mild and moderate AD patients. The findings are discussed in relation to recent theories of word production and semantic representation. Keywords: semantic fluency, clustering, switching, semantic category, nouns, verbs, Alzheimer's disease

Integrated semantic processing of complex pictures and spoken sentences - Evidence from event-related potentials

It has been suggested that semantic information processing is modularized according to the input form (e.g., visual, verbal, non-verbal sound). A great deal of research has concentrated on detecting a separate verbal module. Also, it has traditionally been assumed in linguistics that the meaning of a single clause is computed before integration to a wider context. Recent research has called these views into question. The present study explored whether it is reasonable to assume separate verbal and nonverbal semantic systems in the light of the evidence from event-related potentials (ERPs). The study also provided information on whether the context influences processing of a single clause before the local meaning is computed. The focus was on an ERP called N400. Its amplitude is assumed to reflect the effort required to integrate an item to the preceding context. For instance, if a word is anomalous in its context, it will elicit a larger N400. N400 has been observed in experiments using both verbal and nonverbal stimuli. Contents of a single sentence were not hypothesized to influence the N400 amplitude. Only the combined contents of the sentence and the picture were hypothesized to influence the N400. The subjects (n = 17) viewed pictures on a computer screen while hearing sentences through headphones. Their task was to judge the congruency of the picture and the sentence. There were four conditions: 1) the picture and the sentence were congruent and sensible, 2) the sentence and the picture were congruent, but the sentence ended anomalously, 3) the picture and the sentence were incongruent but sensible, 4) the picture and the sentence were incongruent and anomalous. Stimuli from the four conditions were presented in a semi-randomized sequence. Their electroencephalography was simultaneously recorded. ERPs were computed for the four conditions. The amplitude of the N400 effect was largest in the incongruent sentence-picture -pairs. The anomalously ending sentences did not elicit a larger N400 than the sensible sentences. The results suggest that there is no separate verbal semantic system, and that the meaning of a single clause is not processed independent of the context.

Semantic Classes in Topic Detection and Tracking

Topic detection and tracking (TDT) is an area of information retrieval research the focus of which revolves around news events. The problems TDT deals with relate to segmenting news text into cohesive stories, detecting something new, previously unreported, tracking the development of a previously reported event, and grouping together news that discuss the same event. The performance of the traditional information retrieval techniques based on full-text similarity has remained inadequate for online production systems. It has been difficult to make the distinction between same and similar events. In this work, we explore ways of representing and comparing news documents in order to detect new events and track their development. First, however, we put forward a conceptual analysis of the notions of topic and event. The purpose is to clarify the terminology and align it with the process of news-making and the tradition of story-telling. Second, we present a framework for document similarity that is based on semantic classes, i.e., groups of words with similar meaning. We adopt people, organizations, and locations as semantic classes in addition to general terms. As each semantic class can be assigned its own similarity measure, document similarity can make use of ontologies, e.g., geographical taxonomies. The documents are compared class-wise, and the outcome is a weighted combination of class-wise similarities. Third, we incorporate temporal information into document similarity. We formalize the natural language temporal expressions occurring in the text, and use them to anchor the rest of the terms onto the time-line. Upon comparing documents for event-based similarity, we look not only at matching terms, but also how near their anchors are on the time-line. Fourth, we experiment with an adaptive variant of the semantic class similarity system. The news reflect changes in the real world, and in order to keep up, the system has to change its behavior based on the contents of the news stream. We put forward two strategies for rebuilding the topic representations and report experiment results. We run experiments with three annotated TDT corpora. The use of semantic classes increased the effectiveness of topic tracking by 10-30\% depending on the experimental setup. The gain in spotting new events remained lower, around 3-4\%. The anchoring the text to a time-line based on the temporal expressions gave a further 10\% increase the effectiveness of topic tracking. The gains in detecting new events, again, remained smaller. The adaptive systems did not improve the tracking results.

Discursive Matrixes of Motherhood : Cultivating Decency and Emotion in Finnish and French Mother-talk

Discursive Matrixes of Motherhood examines women's discourse on their experiences of new motherhood in Finland and France. It sets out from two culturally prevalent turns of speech observed in different social forums: in conversations amongst mothers with tertiary education and in the print media. The pool of data includes: 30 interviews, 8 autobiographically inspired novels and 80 items from women's magazines. With instruments loaned from the toolbox of rhetorical analysis, the recurrence of certain expressions or clichés is analyzed with regard to the national, cultural, biographical, political and daily contexts and settings in which the speaking subjects are immersed. "Staying at home is such a short and special time", the first expression under scrutiny, caught the sociological eye because of its salience in Finland and because it appeared as contradictory with a core characteristic of the Finnish context:long family leave. The cliché was found to function as a discursive micromechanism which swept mothers' 'complaints' under the proverbial carpet. Proper emotions and decency in mother-talk thereby appear as collective achievements. An opposite phenomenon - that of the scaling up of rewards procured by children - was also discerned in the data. Indeed, the French expression "Profiter de mon enfant" ["making the most of my child"/"enjoying my child"] is interpreted as a crystallization of a hedonist ethos of motherhood in everyday language. Secondly, the recurrence of this utterance is analyzed in the light of a requisite located in child-rearing expert literature: that of pleasure that women should take in mothering. Hence, one of the rules found to structure the discursive matrixes of motherhood is the laudability and audibility of enjoyment and conversely the discretion and discouragement of 'complaints'. The cultivation of decent matches between certain categories of emotions and certain categories of individuals also appears as a characteristic of discursive matrixes. One of the methodological findings relates to the fact that such matches may be constituted as sociological objects through the identification of recurrent discursive crystallizations in a given culture. Ideal matches may crystallize in turns of speech and mismatches can be managed through clichés. Becoming a mother entails an immersion in such a particular economy of speech. Key words: mothers, motherhood, transition to parenthood, family, emotions, morality, bonds, rhetorical analysis, discourse analysis, media analysis, France, Finland, comparative sociology

Explorations in the distributional and semantic similarity of words

A straightforward computation of the list of the words (the `tail words' of the list) that are distributionally most similar to a given word (the `head word' of the list) leads to the question: How semantically similar to the head word are the tail words; that is: how similar are their meanings to its meaning? And can we do better? The experiment was done on nearly 18,000 most frequent nouns in a Finnish newsgroup corpus. These nouns are considered to be distributionally similar to the extent that they occur in the same direct dependency relations with the same nouns, adjectives and verbs. The extent of the similarity of their computational representations is quantified with the information radius. The semantic classification of head-tail pairs is intuitive; some tail words seem to be semantically similar to the head word, some do not. Each such pair is also associated with a number of further distributional variables. Individually, their overlap for the semantic classes is large, but the trained classification-tree models have some success in using combinations to predict the semantic class. The training data consists of a random sample of 400 head-tail pairs with the tail word ranked among the 20 distributionally most similar to the head word, excluding names. The models are then tested on a random sample of another 100 such pairs. The best success rates range from 70% to 92% of the test pairs, where a success means that the model predicted my intuitive semantic class of the pair. This seems somewhat promising when distributional similarity is used to capture semantically similar words. This analysis also includes a general discussion of several different similarity formulas, arranged in three groups: those that apply to sets with graded membership, those that apply to the members of a vector space, and those that apply to probability mass functions.

Three-year-olds are sensitive to semantic prominence during online language comprehension

Recent evidence from adult pronoun comprehension suggests that semantic factors such as verb transitivity affect referent salience and thereby anap- hora resolution. We tested whether the same semantic factors influence pronoun comprehension in young children. In a visual world study, 3-year- olds heard stories that began with a sentence containing either a high or a low transitivity verb. Looking behaviour to pictures depicting the subject and object of this sentence was recorded as children listened to a subsequent sentence containing a pronoun. Children showed a stronger preference to look to the subject as opposed to the object antecedent in the low transitivity condition. In addition there were general preferences (1) to look to the subject in both conditions and (2) to look more at both potential antecedents in the high transitivity condition. This suggests that children, like adults, are affected by semantic factors, specifically semantic prominence, when interpreting anaphoric pronouns.

A Recursive Perspective on Discursive Legitimation and Organizational Action in Mergers and Acquisitions

This paper challenges the predominant view that legitimation is merely a specific phase in merger or acquisition processes. We argue that a better understanding of postmerger organizational dynamics calls for conceptualization of discursive legitimation as an inherent part of unfolding merger processes. In particular, we focus on the recursive relationship between legitimation and organizational action. We have two objectives: to outline a theoretical model that helps one to understand the dynamics of discursive legitimation and organizational action in postmerger organizations, and to examine a revealing case to distinguish the inherent risks and problems in discursive legitimation. Our case analysis focuses on the merger between the French pharmaceutical companies BioMérieux and Pierre Fabre. We adopt a critical multimethod approach and distinguish specific discursive dynamics and pathological tendencies in this case. The analysis highlights the unintended consequences of discursive legitimation, the central role of sensegiving and sensehiding in discursive legitimation, the inherently political nature of legitimation and the risks associated with politicization, the special problems associated with fashionable discourses and the role of the media, the use of specific discursive strategies for legitimation and delegitimation, and the crucial role of actual integration results. This analysis adds to the existing research on mergers and acquisitions by treating discursive legitimation as part of the merger dynamics. In particular, our case analysis provides a new explanation for merger failure. We also believe that the recursive model connecting discursive legitimation and delegitimation strategies to concrete organizational action makes a more general contribution to our understanding of organizational legitimation.

A DISCURSIVE PERSPECTIVE ON LEGITIMATION STRATEGIES IN MULTINATIONAL CORPORATIONS

Few studies have examined legitimation in multinational corporations from a discursive perspective. To complement the existing institutional literature, we adopt a critical discourse analysis perspective that allows us to examine the microlevel processes of discursive legitimation. We provide an example of a media text— dealing with a production unit shutdown—to demonstrate how this perspective elucidates the various textual strategies used to legitimate multinational corporations’ actions and their controversial consequences.

On the discursive construction of success/failure in narratives of post-merger integration

This article concentrates on the discursive constmction of success and failure in narratives of post-merger integration. Drawing on extensive interview material from eight Finnish-Swedish mergers and acquisitions, the empirical analysis leads to distinguishing four types of discourse — 'rationalistic', 'cultural', 'role-bound' and 'individualistic' — that narrators employ in recounting their experiences. In particular, the empirical material illustrates how the discursive frameworks enable specific (di.scursive) strategies and moves for (re)framing the success/failure, justification/legitimization of one's own actions, and (re)constniction of responsibility when dealing with socio-psychological pressures associated with success/failtire. The analysis also suggests that, as a result of making use of these discursive strategies and moves, success stories are likely to lead to overly optimistic or, in the case of failure stories, overly pessimistic views on the management's ability to control these change processes. Tliese findings imply that we should take the discursive elements that both constrain our descriptions and explanations seriously, and provide opportunities for more or less intentional (re)interpretations of postmerger integration or other organizational change processes.

On the Problem of Participation in Strategy: A Critical Discursive Perspective

We still know little of why strategy processes often involve participation problems. In this paper, we argue that this crucial issue is linked to fundamental assumptions about the nature of strategy work. Hence, we need to examine how strategy processes are typically made sense of and what roles are assigned to specific organizational members. For this purpose, we adopt a critical discursive perspective that allows us to discover how specific conceptions of strategy work are reproduced and legitimized in organizational strategizing. Our empirical analysis is based on an extensive research project on strategy work in 12 organizations. As a result of our analysis, we identify three central discourses that seem to be systematically associated with nonparticipatory approaches to strategy work: “mystification,” “disciplining,” and “technologization.” However, we also distinguish three strategy discourses that promote participation: “self-actualization,” “dialogization,” and “concretization.” Our analysis shows that strategy as practice involves alternative and even competing discourses that have fundamentally different kinds of implications for participation in strategy work. We argue from a critical perspective that it is important to be aware of the inherent problems associated with dominant discourses as well as to actively advance the use of alternative ones.

Strategies as Discursive Constructions: The Case of Airline Alliances

In this paper, we argue that by examining the discursive elements in strategy talk we can contribute to our understanding of the myriad of microprocesses and practices that make up strategies. We focus on airline alliances as a particularly illustrative case. Based on a critical discourse analysis of an extensive material of strategy talk on airline alliances, we point to five types of discursive practices that characterize strategizing in this context in 1995–2000: (1) problematization of traditional strategies; (2) rationalization, objectification and factualization of alliance benefits; (3) fixation of ambiguous independence concerns; (4) reframing of cooperation problems as ‘implementation’ issues; and (5) naturalization of alliance strategies. While we want to emphasize the context-specificity of these practices, we claim that similar types of discursive practices are also likely to be an inherent part of strategizing in other settings.

Struggling over subjectivity: A discursive analysis of strategic development in a group

We have seen growing interest in discursive perspectives on strategy. This perspective holds great promise for development of an understanding on how strategy discourse and subjectivity are intertwined. We wish to add to this existing research by outlining a discursive struggle approach to subjectivity. To understand the complex subjectification and empowering/disempowering effects of organizational strategy discourse, this approach focuses on organization-specific discourse mobilizations an various ways of resistance. Drawing on an analysis of the discourses and practices of ‘strategic development’ in an engineering and consulting group we provide an empirical illustration of such struggles over subjectivity. In particular, we report three examples of competing ways of making sense of and giving sense to strategic development, with specific subjectification tendencies. First, we show how corporate management can mobilize and appropriate a specific kind of discourse to attempt to gain control of the organization, which tends to reproduce managerial hegemony, but also trigger discursive and other forms of resistance. Second, we will illustrate how middle managers resist this hegemony by initiating a strategy discourse of their own to create room for manoeuvre in controversial situations. Third, we show how project engineers can distance themselves from managerial-initiated strategy discourses to maintain a viable identity despite all kinds of pressures. Although our examples are case-specific, we believe that similar discursive dynamics also characterize strategizing in other organizations.