Promoting local innovation - a tool for sustainable rural development

Change, be it socio-cultural, political, institutional, technological, economic or ecological motivates local communities and farming families to mobilise and increase their innovation potential in order to create ways of life and production that match their own visions and priorities. In spite of the growing recognition of the potential of local innovations, they are hardly being integrated into development plans and projects; as a consequence, their diffusion within and between communities is limited. therefore interactive and participatory methods for supporting and strengthening the innovative potential of local actors are valuable inputs for sustainable rural development. the article presents an approach to promote local innovations.

Verbs as Linguistic Markers of Agency - The Social Side of Grammar

Basic grammatical categories may carry social meaning irrespective of their semantic content. In a set of four studies, we demonstrate that verbs – a basic linguistic category present and distinguishable in most languages – are related to the perception of agency, a fundamental dimension in social perception. In an archival analysis on actual language use in Polish and German, we found that targets stereotypically associated with high agency (men and young people) are presented in the immediate neighborhood of a verb more often than non-agentic social targets (women and old people). Moreover, in three experiments using a pseudo-word paradigm, verbs (but not adjectives and nouns) were consistently associated with agency (but not communion). These results provide consistent evidence that verbs, as grammatical vehicles of action, are linguistic markers of agency. In demonstrating meta-semantic effects of language, these studies corroborate the view of language as a social tool and of language as an integral part of social perception.