Talents in Migration Processes in the Conditions of the Czech Republic of the Nineties

The transformation of the 1990s has had a bearing on the academic and scientific world, as is becoming increasingly obvious with the changing numbers of foreign students wishing to study in the Czech Republic and of Czech students wishing to study abroad, the virtual collapse of doctoral studies, and the rapidly increasing age of Czech academics (placed at 48 by official sources and at rather more by this research). At the same time there is an apparent lack of interest in analysing and understanding these trends, which Mr. Cermak terms an ostrich policy, although his research showed that academics are in fact both aware and concerned about them. The mid-1990s migration of talent to and from R+D in the Czech Republic is also reflected in the number of talented Czech students studying abroad, who represent the largest and most interesting group of actual and potential migrants. Mr. Cermak's study took the form of a Delphi enquiry participated in by 44 specialists, including experts in the problems of higher education and science policy from the Presidium of the Higher Education Council (n = 23), members of the Council's Science and Research Commission (n = 14), former and current managers of higher education authorities (n = 4) and selected participants of the longitudinal talent research (n = 3). Questions considered included the influence of continuing talent migration from domestic R+D on the efficiency of domestic higher education, the diversification of forms of the brain drain and their impact on other processes in society, the possibility of positive influence on the brain drain processes to minimise the risks it presents, and the use of the knowledge obtained about the brain drain. The study revealed a clear drop of interest in brain drain problems in higher education in the mid-1990s, which is probably related to the collapsed of Czech R+D in the field of talent education. The effects on this segment of the labour market appeared earlier, with a major migration wave in 1991-1993 which significantly "cleared" the area of scientific talent. In addition, prospective talents from the ranks of younger students have not been integrated into domestic R+D, leading to the increasing average age of those working in this field. "Talent scouting" tended to be oriented towards much younger individuals, even in some cases towards undergraduate students. The R+D institutions deprived of human resources considered as basic in a functional R+D system have lost much of their dynamism and so no longer attract not only domestic talent but also talent from other regions. As a result the public, including the mass media and political structures, have stopped regarding the support of domestic science as a priority. This is clear both among the young people who are important for the future development of R+D (support for the education of talented children has dropped), from the drop in the prestige of this area as a profession among university students, and from the lack of explicit support for R+D by any of the political parties. On the basis of his findings Mr. Cermak concludes that there is no basis for the belief that the brain drain will represent a positive force in stimulating the development of the open society. Migration data shows that the outflow of talent from the Czech Republic far exceeds the inflow, and that the latter is largely short-term. Not only has the number of returning Czech professors dropped to half of its level at the beginning of the 1990s, but they also tend to take up only short-term contracts and retain their foreign positions. Recruitment of scientific talent from other countries, including the Slovak Republic, is limited. Furthermore internal contacts between those already involved in R+D have been badly hit by economic pressures and institutional co-operation has dropped to a minimum. There have been few moves to counteract this situation, the only notable one being the Program 250, launched in 1996 with government support to try and attract younger (i.e. under 40) talent into R+D. Its resources are however limited and its effects have not so far been evaluated. The deficit of academic and scientific talent in the Czech Republic is increasing and two major directions of academic work are emerging. Classic higher education science based on the teaching process is declining, largely due to economic factors, while there is an increasing emphasis on special; ad hoc projects which cannot be related directly to teaching but are often interesting to specialists outside the Czech Republic. This is shown clearly by the increase in publishing and in participation in domestic and foreign grant projects, which often serve to supplement the otherwise low salaries in the higher education sector. This tend was also accelerated by the collapse of applied R+D in individual sectors of the national economy and by substantial cutbacks in the Czech Academy of Sciences, which formerly fostered such research. Some part of the output of this research can be used in the education system and its financial contribution does significantly affect the stability of the present staff, but Mr. Cermak sees it as generally unfavourable for the development of talent education. In addition, it has led to a certain resignation on the question of integration into international structures, due to the emphasis on short-term targets, commercial advantages and individualism rather than team work. At the same time, he admits that these developments reflect those in other areas of the transformation in the Czech Republic.

The Modern Urban Cartography of Present-day Bratislava.

Following an extensive survey of sources on urban development and comparative analyses of Bratislava and other major Central European cities and Slovak regional centres, Divinsky completed a detailed study of Bratislava's spatial structure using the most recent approaches of the so-called Belgian school. He also produced an intraurban regionalisation of Bratislava as a multi-structural interactive model, mapped and characterised by the cardinal parameters, processes, trends and inequalities of population and housing in each spatial element of the model. The field survey entailed a seven-month physical investigation of the territory using a "street by street, block by block, house by house and locality by locality" system to ensure that no areas were missed. A second field survey was carried out two years later to check on transformations. An important feature of the research was the concept of the morphological city, which was defined as "a continuously built-up area of all urban functions (i.e. excluding agricultural lands and forests lying outside the city which serve for half-day recreation) made up of spatial-structural units fulfilling certain criteria". The most important criteria was a minimum population density per unit of no less than 650 persons per square kilometre, except in the case of units totally surrounded by units of higher densities, where it could be lower. The morphological city as defined here includes only 36% of the territory of the administrative city, but 95% of the popula tion, giving a much higher population density which better reflects the urban reality of Bratislava.

The Retirement Behaviour of Older Workers in Transitional Economies

Research has shown that public pay-as-you-go, defined-benefit pension plans penalise those who stay at work beyond a certain age by reducing the present discounted value of future retirement benefits. In discussions on the effectiveness of policies aimed at eliminating the age-dependency factor in workers' decisions to retire, it is often assumed either that the benefits in all future periods have the same weight in the present discounted value or that the discount rate is close to unity due to low real interest rates used in this case. Galuscak first considered the U.S. pension scheme, showing that discounting plays a crucial role since the formula for the present discounted value of future retirement benefits is sensitive to the discount rate used. He then analysed the role of social security incentives and retirement provisions on older workers' behaviour in the labour markets of the Czech and Slovak Republics and the effect of the macroeconomic environment on workers' decisions to retire. He calculated the optimal parameters of the Czech and Slovak pension rules and assessed the potential effectiveness of changes to the Czech scheme introduced in January 1996.

The Sociolinguistics of Hungarian Outside Hungary

This study describes the sociolinguistic situation of the indigenous Hungarian national minorities in Slovakia (c. 600,000), Ukraine (c. 180,000), Romania (c. 2,000,000), Yugoslavia (c. 300,000), Slovenia (c. 8,000) and Austria (c. 6,000). Following the guidelines of Hans Goebl et al, the historical sociolinguistic portrait of each minority is presented from 1920 through to the mid-1990s. Each country's report includes sections on geography and demography, history, politics, economy, culture and religion, language policy and planning, and language use (domains of minority and/or majority language use, proficiency, attitudes, etc.). The team's findings were presented in the form of 374 pages of manuscripts, articles and tables, written in Hungarian and English. The core of the team's research results lies in the results of an empirical survey designed to study the social characteristics of Hungarian-minority bilingualism in the six project countries, and the linguistic similarities and differences between the six contact varieties of Hungarian and Hungarian in Hungary. The respondents were divided by age, education, and settlement group - city vs. village and local majority vs. local minority. The first thing to be observed is that Hungarian is tending to be spoken less to children than to parents and grandparents, a familiar pattern of language shift. In contact varieties of Hungarian, analytic constructions may be used where monolingual Hungarians would use a more synthetic form. Mr Kontra gives as an example the compound tagdij, which in Standard Hungarian means "membership fee" but which is replaced in contact Hungarian by the two-word phrase tagsagi dij. Another similar example concerns the synthetic verb hegedult "played the violin" and the analytic expression hegedun jatszott. The contrast is especially striking between the Hungarians in the northern Slavic countries, who use the synthetic form frequently, and those in the southern Slavic countries, who mainly use the analytic form. Mr. Kontra notes that from a structural point of view, there is no immediate explanation for this, since Slovak or Ukrainian are as likely to cause interference as is Serbian. He postulates instead that the difference may be attributable to some sociohistoric cause, and points out that the Turkish occupation of what is today Voivodina caused a discontinuity of the Hungarian presence in the region, with the result that Hungarians were resettled in the area only two and a half centuries ago. However, the Hungarians in today's Slovakia and Ukraine have lived together with Slavic peoples continuously for over a millennium. It may be, he suggests, that 250 years of interethnic coexistence is less than is needed for such a contact-induced change to run its course. Next Mr. Kontra moved on to what he terms "mental maps and morphology". In Hungarian, the names of cities and villages take the surface case (eg. Budapest-en "in Budapest") whereas some names denoting Hungarian settlements and all names of foreign cities take the interior case (eg. Tihany-ban "in Tihany" and Boston-ban "in Boston). The role of the semantic feature "foreign" in suffix-choice can be illustrated by such minimal pairs as Velence-n "in Velence, a village in Hungary" versus Velence-ben "in Velence [=Venice], a city in Italy", and Pecs-en "in Pecs, a city in Hungary" vs. Becs-ben "in Becs, ie. Vienna". This Hungarian vs. foreign distinction is often interpreted as "belonging to historical (pre-1920) Hungary" vs. "outside historical Hungary". The distinction is also expressed in the dichotomy "home" vs. "abroad'. The 1920 border changes have had an impact on both majority and minority Hungarians' mental maps, the maps which govern the choice of surface vs. interior cases with placenames. As there is a growing divergence between the mental maps of majority and minority Hungarians, so there will be a growing divergence in their use of the placename suffixes. Two placenames were chosen to scratch the surface of this complex problem: Craiova (a city in Oltenia, Romania) and Kosovo (Hungarian Koszovo) an autonomous region in southeast Yugoslavia. The assumption to be tested was that both placenames would be used with the inessive (interior) suffixes categorically by Hungarians in Hungary, but that the superessive suffix (showing "home") would be used near-categorically by Hungarians in Romania and Yugoslavia (Voivodina). Minority Hungarians in countries other than Romania and Yugoslavia would show no difference from majority Hungarians in Hungary. In fact, the data show that, contrary to expectation, there is considerable variation within Hungary. And although Koszovo is used, as expected, with the "home" suffix by 61% of the informants in Yugoslavia, the same suffix is used by an even higher percentage of the subjects in Slovenia. Mr. Kontra's team suggests that one factor playing a role in this might be the continuance of the former Yugoslav mentality in the Hungarians of Slovenia, at least from the geographical point of view. The contact varieties of Hungarian show important grammatical differences from Hungarian in Hungary. One of these concerns the variable use of Null subjects (the inclusion or exclusion of the subject of the verb). When informants were asked to insert either megkertem or megkertem ot - "I asked her" - into a test sentence, 54.9% of the respondents in the Ukraine inserted the second phrase as opposed to only 27.4% in Hungary. Although Mr. Kontra and his team concentrated more on the differences between Contact Hungarian and Standard Hungarian, they also discovered a number of similarities. One such similarity is demonstrable in the distribution of what Mr. Kontra calls an ongoing syntactic merger in Hungarian in Hungary. This change means effectively that two possibilities merge to form a third. For instance, the two sentences Valoszinuleg kulfoldre fognak koltozni and Valoszinu, hogy kulfoldre fognak koltozni merge to form the new construction Valszinuleg, hogy kulfoldre fognak koltozni ("Probably they will move abroad."). When asked to choose "the most natural" of the sentences, one in four chose the new construction, and a chi-square test shows homogeneity in the sample. In other words, this syntactic change is spreading across the entire Hungarian-speaking region in the Carpathian Basin Mr. Kontra believes that politicians, educators, and other interested parties now have reliable and up-to-date information about each Hungarian minority. An awareness of Hungarian as a pluricentric language is being developed which elevates the status of contact varieties of Hungarian used by the minorities, an essential process, he believes, if minority languages are to be maintained.

Central Europeans towards Integration with the European Union: A Study of Public Opinion, Social Attitudes and National Identities

Since the turbulence of 1989, the countries of Central and Eastern Europe have striven to "return to Europe". Agreements have been signed with ten post-communist countries, beginning in 1991 with Czechoslovakia (before its division), Hungary and Poland. Since that time several countries have expressed a desire to become members of the EU. In 1997 the European Commission announced its opinion on the applications for EU membership of the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia, and seven other applicant countries. The Commission recommended the commencement of negotiations on accession with the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Poland, and Slovenia. Mr. Kucia's report, presented in the form of a series of manuscripts totalling 91 pages, written in English and Polish and including many pages of tables and graphs, presents the results of a study of public opinion on European integration in four countries of Central Europe (CE): the Czech Republic (CZ), Hungary (H), Poland (PL), and Slovakia (SK). The research results are primarily based on a public-opinion survey known as the Central and Eastern Eurobarometer (CEEB). CEEB has been conducted on behalf of the European Commission in the Central and Eastern European countries each year in autumn since 1990. Below is a very small selection of Mr. Kucia's research findings. Throughout the 90s people in the four countries increasingly saw their countries' future tied up with the EU, since economic and political connections to the EU were growing and prospects for EU membership were increasing. Regional co-operation within CE did not gain much popular recognition. However, initially high levels of enthusiasm for the EU were gradually superseded by a more realistic approach or even scepticism. Poland was the exception in this respect; its population was more positive about the EU in 1996 than ever before. Mr. Kucia concludes that, since the political "elites" in CE are more positive about the EU than the people they serve, they should do their best to bring people round to their beliefs, lest the project of European integration become purely the business of the elites, as Mr. Kucia claims it has been in the EU up till now. He accuses the governments of the region, the EU authorities and the media of failing to provide appropriate information, especially about the two subjects which most affect them, association with the EU and the PHARE assistance programme. Respondents were asked to rank in order the countries or regions they saw their country's future most closely tied up with. In the period 92-96 the EU received the highest ratings in all of CE. The ratings were highest in CZ in 92 and 93 (46%) and in Poland in 96 (46%). They were the lowest in Hungary (22% in 94). After the EU came "Other Western European countries (non EU)", that is Austria, Sweden and Finland (before they joined the EU in 1995), Switzerland and Norway. Mr. Kucia puts the high ratings of these countries down to historical connections and geographical proximity, particularly in the case of Austria. The USA always came second in Poland, and in Hungary too its standing has always been higher than in CZ or SK. Indeed Mr. Kucia suggests that the USA's standing is disproportionately low in especially the CZ. Germany was nominated frequently by Hungarians, though in the CZ and SK, figures have been consistently low (1-2%). "Other CE/EE countries" increased their ratings in all of CE except Poland between 92 and 96. With regard to these last figures, Mr. Kucia makes an interesting note. Assuming that for the respondents in the four countries this category covered the Visegrad 4, least support was found in Poland, whose government was the most in favour of close political co-operation within the V4, while most support was in evidence in CZ and SK, for whose governments V4 was simply not a priority. Again, there is evidence of a divide between the political elites and the people. Russia has occupied a consistently modest rank. It was the highest in PL, fairly low in H and SK and the lowest in CZ. The Slovak government's policy of closer ties with Russia is reflected in a growth in the figures from 2% in 93 to 6% in 95. Every year the spontaneous answer "we should depend on ourselves" appeared, which Mr. Kucia interprets as either a sign of isolationism and disillusionment or as a call for self-reliance. Unfortunately he regards both these tendencies as unfeasible in the uniting Europe. Moving to more general conclusions, Mr. Kucia finds that the concept "Central Europe" does not have much meaning for Central Europeans. He believes that this is probably due to the failure to establish a viable regional co-operation network. Group discussions also revealed that people thought themselves European as a consequence of being Czech or Polish etc. Thus European identity is based on national identities. Generally within the surveyed period, the numbers of those who said they often think themselves European decreased, while the numbers of those who said they never think themselves European increased from 41% in PL, 36% in CZ, and 30% in H in 1990, to 67% in CZ, 58% in PL, and 51% in H in 1995.

Synchronous Description of the Grammatical Structure of Modern Romani and Elaboration of Romani Textbook

The first outcome of this project was a synchronous description of the most widely spoken Romani dialect in the Czech and Slovak Republics, aimed at teachers and lecturers of the Romani language. This is intended to serve as a methodological guide for the demonstration of various grammatical phenomena, but may also assist people who want a basic knowledge of the linguistic structure of this neo-Indian language. The grammatical material is divided into 23 chapters, in a sequence which may be followed in teaching or studying. The book includes examples of the grammatical elements, but not exercises or articles. The second work produced was a textbook of Slovak Romani, which is the most detailed in the Czech or Slovak Republics to date. It is aimed at all those interested in active use of the Romani language: high school and university students, people working with the Roma, and Roma who speak little or nothing of the language of their forebears, The book includes 34 lessons, each containing relevant Romani tests (articles and dialogues), a short vocabulary list, grammatical explanations, exercises and examples of Romani written or oral expression. The textbook also contains a considerable amount of ethno-cultural information and notes on the life and traditions of the Roman, as well as pointing out some differences between different dialects. A brief Romani-Czech phrase book is included as an appendix.

Regional Differences in Living Standards in Eastern European Countries - Changes During the Transition

This research aimed to discover how differences in living standards between regional units changed during the period of transformation from 1990 to 1995 in Poland, the Slovak Republic, the Czech Republic and Hungary. The standard of living was measured by the so-called Living Standard Index (LSI), a composite taxonomic measure. Fixed reference points make it possible to compare the standard of living in regional administrative units and to study its dynamics. The analysis was country-specific, since the lists of variable were not fully identical for all the countries studied. The main tools used were LSI variability measures (mainly variance and standard deviation). By identifying trend patterns in the characteristics of LSIs, it was possible to compare the different countries. It was found that * differences in living standards between regional units have been decreasing during the transformation in Poland and in the Czech Republic. In the latter this process is slow and smooth, while in Poland there was a relatively sharp decline which then stopped entirely in 1994 * the only country with increasing differences between regions is Hungary and these differences are growing at a constant rate * the lowest level of regional differences in the LSI was found in Poland, followed by the Slovak Republic and the Czech Republic * the regional differences in Hungary are almost twice as high as in the Czech Republic

Influence of directionality and maximal power output on speech understanding with bone anchored hearing implants in single sided deafness

Bone-anchored hearing implants (BAHI) are routinely used to alleviate the effects of the acoustic head shadow in single-sided sensorineural deafness (SSD). In this study, the influence of the directional microphone setting and the maximum power output of the BAHI sound processor on speech understanding in noise in a laboratory setting were investigated. Eight adult BAHI users with SSD participated in this pilot study. Speech understanding in noise was measured using a new Slovak speech-in-noise test in two different spatial settings, either with noise coming from the front and noise from the side of the BAHI (S90N0) or vice versa (S0N90). In both spatial settings, speech understanding was measured without a BAHI, with a Baha BP100 in omnidirectional mode, with a BP100 in directional mode, with a BP110 power in omnidirectional and with a BP110 power in directional mode. In spatial setting S90N0, speech understanding in noise with either sound processor and in either directional mode was improved by 2.2-2.8 dB (p = 0.004-0.016). In spatial setting S0N90, speech understanding in noise was reduced by either BAHI, but was significantly better by 1.0-1.8 dB, if the directional microphone system was activated (p = 0.046), when compared to the omnidirectional setting. With the limited number of subjects in this study, no statistically significant differences were found between the two sound processors.

"When we like what we know – A parametric fMRI analysis of beauty and familiarity"

This paper presents a neuroscientific study of aesthetic judgments on written texts. In an fMRI experiment participants read a number of proverbs without explicitly evaluating them. In a post-scan rating they rated each item for familiarity and beauty. These individual ratings were correlated with the functional data to investigate the neural correlates of implicit aesthetic judgments. We identified clusters in which BOLD activity was correlated with individual post-scan beauty ratings. This indicates that some spontaneous aesthetic evaluation takes place during reading, even if not required by the task. Positive correlations were found in the ventral striatum and in medial prefrontal cortex, likely reflecting the rewarding nature of sentences that are aesthetically pleasing. On the contrary, negative correlations were observed in the classic left frontotemporal reading network. Midline structures and bilateral temporo-parietal regions correlated positively with familiarity, suggesting a shift from the task-network towards the default network with increasing familiarity.

The CHEOPS mission

Ground based radial velocity (RV) searches continue to discover exoplanets below Neptune mass down to Earth mass. Furthermore, ground- based transit searches now reach milli-mag photometric precision and can dis- cover Neptune size planets around bright stars. These searches will find exo- planets around bright stars anywhere on the sky, their discoveries representing prime science targets for further study due to the proximity and brightness of their host stars. A mission for transit follow-up measurements of these prime targets is currently lacking. The first ESA S-class mission CHEOPS (CHarac- terizing ExoPlanet Satellite) will fill this gap. It will perform ultra-high preci- sion photometric monitoring of selected bright target stars almost anywhere on the sky with sufficient precision to detect Earth-sized transits. It will be able to detect transits of RV-planets by photometric monitoring if the geometric con- figuration results in a transit. For Hot Neptunes discovered from the ground, CHEOPS will be able to improve the transit light curve so that the radius can be determined precisely. Because of the host stars’ brightness, high precision RV measurements will be possible for all targets. All planets observed in tran- sit by CHEOPS will be validated and their masses will be known. This will provide valuable data for constraining the mass-radius relation of exoplanets, especially in the Neptune-mass regime. During the planned 3.5 year mission, about 500 targets will be observed. There will be 20% of open time available for the community to develop new science programmes.

All-sky Meteor Orbit System AMOS and preliminary analysis of three unusual meteor showers

All-sky Meteor Orbit System (AMOS) is a semi-autonomous video observatory for detection of transient events on the sky, mostly the meteors. Its hardware and software development and permanent placement on several locations in Slovakia allowed the establishment of Slovak Video Meteor Network (SVMN) monitoring meteor activity above the Central Europe. The data reduction, orbital determination and additional results from AMOS cameras–the SVMN database– as well as from observational expeditions on Canary Islands and in Canada provided dynamical and physical data for better understanding of mutual connections between parent bodies of asteroids and comets and their meteoroid streams. We present preliminary results on exceptional and rare meteor streams such as September ε Perseids (SPE) originated from unknown long periodic comet on a retrograde orbit, suspected asteroidal meteor stream of April α Comae Berenicids (ACO) in the orbit of meteorites Příbram and Neuschwanstein and newly observed meteor stream Camelopardalids (CAM) originated from Jupiter family comet 209P/Linear.

Arabische Sprüchwörter oder die Sitten und Gebräuche der neueren Aegyptier : erklärt aus den zu Kairo umlaufenden Sprüchwörtern

übersetzt und erläutert von Johann Ludwig Burckhardt ; herausgegeben im Auftrage der Gesellschaft zur Beförderung der Entdeckung des Inneren von Africa von William Ouseley, Deutsch mit einigen Anmerkungen und Registern von H.G. Kirmß

Un elixir de la palabra : Heterogeneidad interlingüe en la narrativa de Sandra Cisneros

Esta tesis doctoral explora la construcción de algunos aspectos enunciativos relacionados con la heterogeneidad lingüístico-cultural presentes en la narrativa de la escritora chicana Sandra Cisneros [n. 1954]. Más específicamente, esta investigación tiene como objetivo principal explicar el fenómeno de la desterritorialización de la lengua a partir del examen de la conformación de espacios lingüístico-culturales intersticiales a lo largo del desarrollo de la obra de Cisneros [1984, 1991, 2002], que conforma el corpus de nuestro trabajo. Nuestra hipótesis rectora indica que en la escritura de Cisneros. La constitución de la heterogeneidad y la gesta del sentido son ineludiblemente interlingües. Así, proponemos que la heterogeneidad interlingüe es la categoría que permite explicar la complejidad discursivo-enunciativa característica de nuestro corpus. A partir del concepto de heterogeneidad[es] enunciativa[s] elaborado por Authier-Revuz [1984]. Definimos la heterogeneidad interlingüe como un fenómeno enunciativo que se inscribe en el ámbito del dialogismo interdiscursivo [Bajtin [1952-3] 1982] y que se manifiesta a través de las marcas y formas que surgen en el discurso a través de los procesos de negociación y traducción Iingüistico-culturales actualizados en el encuentro constante y constitutivo de distintas lenguas. Según entendemos, la heterogeneidad interlingüe se articula a partir de tres dimensiones que se encuentran en permanente interacción: la conformación de una imagen discursiva o ethos [Ducrot, [1984] 1986; Amossy, 1999] asociado al responsable de la enunciación de la totalidad de los textos narrativos [Iocutor-Autor], la institución de sitios -formas y marcas- que se presentan como heterogéneos desde un punto de vista lingüístico-cultural y la configuración de una practica de lectura particular que exige una competencia discursivo-cultural de parte del lector que debe completar el sentido del texto y también del discurso. En atención alas dimensiones aludidas, esta tesis otorga atención específica a los siguientes aspectos: la constitución interlingüe de la paratextualidad, la alternancia de lenguas, los distintos modos de presencia de la traducción, los enunciados paremiológicos y la dimensión reflexiva de la enunciación. Entre los objetivos centrales de nuestra investigación, se cuentan: 1. la elaboración de un andamiaje teórico-metodológico pluridisciplinario que permita dar cuenta de las particularidades discursivas de nuestro corpus y ser referencia para el análisis de otras escrituras de minorías y narrativas de frontera; 2. la contribución al desarrollo de los estudios del discurso [Authier-Revuz, 1984, 1995; Ducrot. [1984] 1986, 2004] a través de la incorporación de la noción de interlingüismo a la discusión de la constitución de la heterogeneidad y de la gesta del sentido discursivo; 3. la articulación del concepto de desterritorializacion [Deleuze y Guattari, [1975] 1998] con algunas nociones originadas en los modelos provenientes de la teoría de la Frontera [Hicks, 1991; Arteaga, 1997] y de la teoría discursiva de Authier-Revuz [1984, 1995]. En cuanto a los objetivos particulares, este trabajo de tesis se propone examinar las distintas formas y marcas de la heterogeneidad interlingüe presentes en la narrativa de Cisneros y ofrecer un panorama analítico que pondere la evolución de la obra de la escritora chicana en relación con la construcción del responsable de la enunciación, los sitios de la heterogeneidad y la practica de lectura singular que impone esta escritura