In the literature on complexity theory it has been noted that the increasing interdependence, non-linearity, and adaptiveness of social and other systems require forms of representation that can accommodate such complexity. In this essay I argue for examining the possibilities of cartography (mapmaking) in and of educational theory and research. Cartography offers alternative forms of represent...

Discourse markers, also known as clue words, are used extensively in human-human task-oriented dialogs to signal the structure of the discourse. Previous work showed their importance in monologs and social conversations for marking discourse structure , but little attention has been paid to their importance in spoken dialog systems. This paper investigates what discourse markers signal about th...

This paper argues that current academic approaches to environmentalism in developing countries understate the role of class in either dominating political alliances, or in constructing underlying environmental discourse. The paper uses examples of various social movements in Thailand to illustrate the diverse ways in which environmental activism may represent or support different political obje...

This paper refines and extends the empirical base of previous work on children’s use of referring expressions in spontaneous discourse within the Givenness Hierarchy framework, and further develops implications of this work for our understanding of the development of a theory of mind. The study supports earlier findings that children use definite and indefinite articles, demonstrative determine...

1. Overview China, in its 50 years of communist rule since liberation, has experienced cultural and ideological change on a massive scale. The editorials from the People’s Daily, the typical public discourse representing the Communist ideology of China, encoded these ideological changes in its formulations. This study will present the meaning changes of some political-social keywords in editori...

* Increasing attention has been devoted to virtual learning. In the last decade, a large number of studies in CSCL have assessed how social interaction, learning processes and outcomes in virtual settings are intertwined. Although recent research findings indicate that learners differ with respect to the amount and type of discourse contributed in virtual settings, little is known about the cau...

Public sector information systems (IS) may produce unintended negative consequences that are very challenging to predict in advance. In this paper we seek to answer the following critical research questions: How does a democratic society identify and deal with ethically and morally problematic effects of public sector IS? What does it mean for public sector IS to be ethically and morally justif...

In this article I examine one of the thorniest aspects of the relationship between feminism and postmodernism, in order to see what a discursive analytic approach can contribute to this important debate. The problem I refer to concerns the threat that the postmodern turn—despite its benefits—is said to pose for a politically committed feminism. I begin with a brief recapping of the postmodernis...

Discourse comprehension is a hallmark of human social behaviour and refers to the act of interpreting a written or spoken message by constructing mental representations that integrate incoming language with prior knowledge and experience. Here, we report a human lesion study (n = 145) that investigates the neural mechanisms underlying discourse comprehension (measured by the Discourse Comprehen...

Caste as a system of social stratification was an encompassing system in the past. There was reciprocal system of exchange goods and services. With time, occupation and mode of generation of livelihood of various caste groups changed, and the traditional form of jajmani system fizzled out. This paper provides an account of changing perspectives of caste relations in social science writing and p...