The AustLit Gateway and Scholarly Bibliography: A Specialist Implementation of the FRBR

This paper discusses how the AustLit: Australian Literature Gateway's interpretation, enhancement, and implementation of the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions' Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR Final Report 1998) model is meeting the needs of Australian literature scholars for accurate bibliographic representation of the histories of literary texts. It also explores how the AustLit Gateway's underpinning research principles, which are based on the tradition of scholarly enumerative and descriptive bibliography, with enhancements from analytical bibliography and literary biography, have impacted upon our implementation of the FRBR model. The major enhancement or alteration to the model is the use of enhanced manifestations, which allow the full representation of all agents' contributions to be shown in a highly granular format by enabling creation events to be incorporated at all levels of the Work, Expression, and Manifestation nexus.

Why children and adults sometimes (but not always) compute implicatures

Noveck (2001) argued that children even as old as 11 do not reliably endorse a scalar interpretation of weak scalar terms (some, might, or) (cf. Braine & Rumain, 1981; Smith, 1980). More recent studies suggest, however, that children's apparent failures may depend on the experimental demands (Papafragou & Musolino, 2003). Although previous studies involved children of different ages as well as different tasks, and are thus not directly comparable, nevertheless a common finding is that children do not seem to derive scalar implicatures to the same extent as adults do. The present article describes a series of experiments that were conducted with Italian speaking subjects (children and adults), focusing mainly on the scalar term some. Our goal was to carefully examine the specific conditions that allow the computation of implicatures by children. In so doing, we demonstrate that children as young as 7 (the youngest age of the children who participated in the Noveck study) are able to compute implicatures in experimental conditions that properly satisfy certain contextual prerequisites for deriving such implicatures. We also present further results that have general consequences for the research methodology employed in this area of study. Our research indicates that certain tasks mask children's understanding of scalar terms, not only including the task used by Noveck, but also tasks that employ certain explicit instructions, such as the training task used by Papafragou & Musolino (2003). Our findings indicate further that, although explicit training apparently improves children's ability to draw implicatures, children nevertheless fail to achieve adult levels of performance for most scalar terms even in such tasks, and that the effects of instruction do not last beyond the training session itself for most children. Another relevant finding of the present study is that some of the manipulations of the experimental context have an effect on all subjects, whereas others produce effects on just a subset of children. Individual differences of this kind may have been concealed in previous research because performance by individual subjects was not reported. Our general conclusions are that even young children (7-year olds) have the prerequisites for deriving scalar implicatures, although these abilities are revealed only when the conversational background is natural.

Syntactic complexity measures and their relation to oral proficiency in Japanese as a foreign language

The study reported in this article is a part of a large-scale study investigating syntactic complexity in second language (L2) oral data in commonly taught foreign languages (English, German, Japanese, and Spanish; Ortega, Iwashita, Rabie, & Norris, in preparation). In this article, preliminary findings of the analysis of the Japanese data are reported. Syntactic complexity, which is referred to as syntactic maturity or the use of a range of forms with degrees of sophistication (Ortega, 2003), has long been of interest to researchers in L2 writing. In L2 speaking, researchers have examined syntactic complexity in learner speech in the context of pedagogic intervention (e.g., task type, planning time) and the validation of rating scales. In these studies complexity is examined using measures commonly employed in L2 writing studies. It is assumed that these measures are valid and reliable, but few studies explain what syntactic complexity measures actually examine. The language studied is predominantly English, and little is known about whether the findings of such studies can be applied to languages that are typologically different from English. This study examines how syntactic complexity measures relate to oral proficiency in Japanese as a foreign language. An in-depth analysis of speech samples from 33 learners of Japanese is presented. The results of the analysis are compared across proficiency levels and cross-referenced with 3 other proficiency measures used in the study. As in past studies, the length of T-units and the number of clauses per T-unit is found to be the best way to predict learner proficiency; the measure also had a significant linear relation with independent oral proficiency measures. These results are discussed in light of the notion of syntactic complexity and the interfaces between second language acquisition and language testing. Adapted from the source document

Charlatan philosopher and wise enchantress: Seduction and authority in eighteenth-century French discourses on happiness

In late 1757 Rousseau wrote a series of moral letters on happiness to Mme Sophie d'Houdetot. He distinguished himself and his teaching from the empty babble and hypocrisy prevalent in 'the century of philosophy and reason'. Philosophers were charlatans peddling happiness. This paper shows how Rousseau's critique of philosophy reworks the standard image of charlatans in the public square. It highlights a questioning and a gendering of reason implicit in the issue of credentials for teaching happiness. Against the dubious authority of the philosopher, Rousseau casts Sophie as the wise enchantress whose gentle influence inspires her tutor. He places moral authority outside the public square in a private, feminine domain. Rousseau's ideal woman cannot be a tainted charlatan like him. Yet the very opposition puts her in her place. (Author abstract)