Women's narratives of their breastfeeding experiences are sites of construction and reconstruction of self as they undertake moral work in relation to feeding their baby. We engaged Foucault's 'technologies of the self' and his notion of ethics (the relationship with self) to examine that moral work (individual actions rather than adherence to universal moral codes) in relation to women's subje...

Since the human life process is at their roots, a legal framework without precedent for medical practice and research was bound to develop from modem biology and genetics. A vast amount of legislation has been enacted in the field of bioethics. Committees on the ethics of living sciences have blossomed. The latest of these committees was set up by President Clinton in the US. Within the United ...

Optimality Theory (OT) is a formal linguistic model in which grammars consist of a universal set of violable constraints that are ranked in a language-particular hierarchy. Lower-ranked constraints are often forcibly violated in order to improve satisfaction of higher-ranked constraints. The optimal or most harmonic pronunciation of a given word is that output candidate which best fulfills the ...

Ordinary people often make moral judgments that are consistent with philosophical principles and legal distinctions. For example, they judge killing as worse than letting die, and harm caused as a necessary means to a greater good as worse than harm caused as a side-effect (Cushman, Young, & Hauser, 2006). Are these patterns of judgment produced by mechanisms specific to the moral domain, or do...

Indigenous knowledge of underdeveloped countries or of underdeveloped peoples within developed or developing nations is a sought after commodity in today’s marketplace. These commercialisation pressures will increase in the globalised climate of the new-world economic order. Since knowledge is intangible, legal protection of intangible knowledge is minimal. However, when the knowledge is expres...

Of ongoing interest within generative grammar is the proper treatment of language variation in terms of parameters. One important recent question concerns the existence of macro-parameters. Baker (2008) outlines three ways to determine whether a parameter is macro or not, one of which relates to the size of effect, or impact of a parameter. The greater the size of effect, or impact a parameter ...