psychoanalysts since sigmund freud have tried to discuss the role of religion in modern societies. freud himself saw religion as an illusion which had struck neurotics, while slavoj žižek viewed it as some sort of “perversion” which functioned in the cycle of law-transgression. in this essay, i dig into these theories to uncover traces of lutheran interpretations of paul’s words on the jewish l...

this paper examines the theoretical rationales and practical aspects of task-based language teaching (tblt) with particular reference to research findings in efl/esl contexts. the definitional scope of the term ‘task’, polarizations in terms of task vs. non-task, and its relation to different language teaching approaches have engendered conceptual and methodological ambiguities.  moreover, fact...

Research related to colonialism and post colonialism shows how the identities of indigenous people were constructed and how these identities are reconstructed in our contemporary world. The thrust of this paper is that colonialism brought a shift in the linguistic structure of Ghana with the introduction of the use of English among Ghanaians. The coexistence of both Ghanaian languages and Engli...

Contemporary semantics assumes two influential notions of context: one coming from Kaplan (1989), on which contexts are sets of predetermined parameters, and another originating in Stalnaker (1978), on which contexts are sets of propositions that are "common ground." The latter is deservedly more popular, given its flexibility in accounting for context-dependent aspects of language beyond manif...

Worldwide, and especially in Asia, myopia is a major vision-threatening disorder. From AD 1600 on, to prevent myopia, authors warned against near work without sufficient pauses. There was an abundance of theories about the causes of myopia, the most common one being the necessity of extra convergence on nearby work with thickened extraocular muscles and elevated intraocular pressure. Ocular ten...

Mobile solutions have gone beyond the role of personal tool to offer solutions in supporting coordinated work. Mobile workers shift constantly from individual to group work, access shared virtual environments from different devices and can create new elements when disconnected (annotations, appointments, etc.). However, current approaches focus either on individual or group work, as well as on ...

It is often necessary to combine objects that were not designed to work together. These objects may be databases of facts, programs, hardware or plans. Even if the objects were intended to be used together, maintenvalcc of adherence to their specifications and ensuring the consistency of terminology through time is often difficult. Each object was developed in a context, and these contexts diff...

Contrastivism about ‘ought’ holds that ‘ought’ claims are relativized, at least implicitly, to sets of mutually exclusive but not necessarily jointly exhaustive alternatives. This kind of theory can solve puzzles that face other linguistic theories of ‘ought’, via the rejection or severe restriction of principles that let us make inferences between ‘ought’ claims. By rejecting or restricting th...

This paper describes a compositional semantics for temporal expressions as part of the meaning representation language (MRL) of the JANUS system, a natural language understanding and generation system under joint development by BBN Labs and ISI. The analysis is based on a higher-order intensional logic described in detail in Hinrichs (1987a). Temporal expressions of English are translated into ...