It is well-known that an adjective is not a universal part of speech. As pointed out in the previous researches, many oceanic languages do not have a morphologically distinguished adjective class. The only criteria which distinguish adjectives from verbs and nouns could be whether they appear in comparative construction or not. However, even comparative construction is not universal. Whereas mo...

Analysis of typological features has received much attention in recent years. Despite claims that such analysis replicates the families and subgroups of families that are the product of work using the comparative method, there is strong evidence that the geographic distribution of typological features reflects socio-geographically relevant areas, rather than historically related subgroups. Furt...

Virtual communities are complex systems interweaving technical and human aspects. We propose here to identify usual functions provided by virtual communities and define a typology based on the common objects or goals shared by their users. The papers included in this special issue show some examples of research works lead in some of these categories of communities.

Several recent studies have suggested that there are two different ways in which a person can proceed when assessing the persuasiveness of a mathematical argument: by evaluating whether it is personally convincing, or by evaluating whether or not it is publicly acceptable. In this paper, using Toulmin’s (1958) argumentation scheme, we produce a more detailed theoretical classification of the wa...

The great variety of traceability systems in the German food industry makes it difficult to describe them coherently and to distinguish them clearly one from another. Therefore a classification system or typology is needed to facilitate their description and analysis. This study suggests an approach to extract distinguishing aspects from a detailed description of traceability systems for pork. ...