Both rhetorical structure and punctuation have been helpful in discourse processing. Based on a corpus annotation project, this paper reports the discursive usage of 6 Chinese punctuation marks in news commentary texts: Colon, Dash, Ellipsis, Exclamation Mark, Question Mark, and Semicolon. The rhetorical patterns of these marks are compared against patterns around cue phrases in general. Result...

Being inclusive across cultural and ethnic differences continues to be an important and topical challenge for public services in European societies that host large immigrant communities and that are facing new immigration flows. Concurrently, welfare states are changing, and often, as in the Netherlands, a more active role for citizens as well as partnerships between government, professional ex...

The roles and effects of changes in syntax on comprehension and processing effort, and the relationships between these two, comprise a large and separate field of inquiry, with the general belief now in place that such changes and variations bring about varied psycholinguistic and discursive implications for comprehension, manifesting themselves differently in different genres.The current study...

Taken as a model for how groups should make collective judgments and decisions, the ideal of deliberative democracy is inherently ambiguous. Consider the idealised case where it is agreed on all sides that a certain conclusion should be endorsed if and only if certain premises are admitted. Does deliberative democracy recommend that members of the group debate the premises and then individually...

Political theorists have offered many accounts of collective decision-making under pluralism. I discuss a key dimension on which such accounts differ: the importance assigned not only to the choices made but also to the reasons underlying those choices. On that dimension, different accounts lie in between two extremes. The ‘minimal liberal account’ holds that collective decisions should be made...

ion of any dimension of comparison is an imperfect but potentially useful conceptual achievement of simplification, not an inherent property of the world. I offer a model of political discourse that is equally dynamic, and use it to illustrate how structurally anchored discursive opportunities in continental Europe differ from the

This paper seeks to better understand the way middle managers contribute strategically to the development of an organization by examining how they enact the strategic roles allocated to them, with particular reference to strategic change. Through vignettes drawn from the authors’ current research, a framework is developed that shows two situated, but interlinked, discursive activities, ‘perform...

This thesis is a theoretically guided empirical discussion of fashion and its role within the production of national identity in Germany. In recent years, a new patriotism in contemporary German fashion could be observed, starting with the fashion designer Eva Gronbach in 2001. I will approach the term patriotism with the aid of one of Michel Foucault’s key terms, the notion of the episteme. In...

This paper presents a framework for analysing the different ways in which materiality impacts environmental policy and governance. It draws on notions from wider literature integrates relevant insights into theory Building key distinction between material discursive dimensions of governance, it develops concepts events dependencies. Material bring attention to linkages changes their observation...