Moreover it was somebody who could recruit 20 grown men with wives and families to take part in a mission that entailed 18 months of planning and training, all with the sure knowledge that they would die if the mission was successful. It is a frightening prospect. The first reaction here was an outpouring of sympathy. The sidewalk outside the U. However, a couple of days after the event itself I went to pick up my daughter at a friend s house. Ruby was busy, so her friend s mother and I got to talking.
She knew I was an American, but nonetheless was unguarded in her anger and disgust at Bush s just announced War on Terrorism. Americans are so nationalistic and violent, she said, You can t solve anything that way. Later, when it became clear that the U. He was deeply opposed to any military intervention. It s only people, he said, war can kill millions.
We Europeans know this. And, when the war actually began, the BBC kept up a drumbeat of pessimistic, critical reporting. There were other voices, of course, but as time went on my main impression is that there is little support in Europe for trying to destroy Al Qaeda. It is hard to know what is the best course of action.
History is full of examples of bellicose powers that blundered into costly, self-destructive wars through pride and overconfidence. It is also full of examples of timid self-deceptive governments that failed to defeat their enemies while they were still weak and as a result perished when they grew strong. We have an enemy who wants to destroy us. We need to coolly weigh alternative courses of action, and choose the best one.
The most disturbing result of my year at Wiko is the realization that many intellectuals seem unwilling to attempt such calculations. History from York University. Visiting Professorships at Hamburg and Bielefeld. Nationalismus und moderner Staat. I finished a book 1 with help from the college, especially Marianne Buck, who obtained the image used for the 1 Austria, Prussia and Germany London: I completed an essay for a book on German nationalism. A New Social and Economic History 3. I completed an essay on Historians and the Nation.
I wrote an essay on state modernization in Napoleonic Germany. I aim to demonstrate that some such concept is necessary for a long-run, large-scale modern history of Germany, that it can organize and illuminate historical detail and suggest fruitful areas for future research. Much of my time in Berlin was spent reading relevant theoretical and empirical work.
I sketched a structure for the book and wrote drafts of most chapters. Cambridge University Press will publish the book, which is intended as the first of two volumes: There is much still to do and a lot depends on the conditions I encounter back in the UK, with its deteriorating university system. However, without this time in Berlin I would be nowhere nearly as advanced as I am.
My stay also enabled me to make closer contacts with colleagues in Berlin especially at the Centre for the Comparative History of Europe and elsewhere, attend seminars, give some talks and participate in a couple of conferences. Liz, helped by excellent computer facilities, including voice recognition software, was able to transcribe her mother s correspondence with her father between and , a necessary step towards producing a published edition of that correspondence.
Work, in a Broader Sense The research of other Fellows and partners proved fascinating. The Tuesday colloquia, talks and seminars, lunchtime conversations, concerts of Helmut Lachenmann, films 2 Nationalismus als kulturelle Konstruktion: Some seemed promising in relation to my own projects, although when I was depressed some appeared threatening, representing forms of knowledge superior to that of academic history.
Fortunately the latter mood soon passed. A scheme for a group of historians and other social scientists to exchange ideas about the history of Western and Muslim society did not bear fruit, mainly because we were different kinds of historians who could not figure out ways of engaging in comparative dialogue that did not require more effort than was worthwhile. Nevertheless, I profited from those differences. Beshara Doumani and Suraiya Faroqhi rekindled an interest in Ottoman history, frequently neglected by historians of Europe, yet crucial to their own work.
Jakob Tanner reminded me of the need to engage with new kinds of cultural history. Meeting David Sabean finally induced me to read carefully his wonderful books on the south German village of Neckarhausen, something I trust will be reflected in how I treat kinship and family in German modernization. Unexpectedly, I found myself attending the meetings of two interlinking groups interested in social norms and risk.
My theoretical reading included W. Runciman s Treatise on Social Theory, in which he argues for treating historical change as social evolution. Most historians dismiss such debates as irrelevant to their research. Undoubtedly, attempts to import into the rich particularity of modern history interpretations drawn from studies of non-human biological evolution, or human pre-history, or experiments in economic decision-making are fraught with dangers.
But apart from fascination with the imaginative and precise work of these natural and social scientists, I thought I could learn as historian to discriminate between usable and non-usable ideas from such fields. The Wissenschaftskolleg provided an ideal place for such learning. As far as fascination is concerned, I would highlight: Alex Kacelnik s clever crows, Raghavendra Gadagkar s primitive wasps, and how a cat s back legs move.
If I remain unconvinced that without game theory all social science will remain in the stone ages, I see that the experimental work of Ernst Fehr and others undermines basic axioms of classical economic theory. How far one can arbeitsberichte Other intellectual relationships were more individual. Richard Hauser and Catherine Eckel helped with for me difficult econometric history, while John McNamara explained some of the underlying concepts.
Allan Young s company was always fascinating, as was reading his marvelous book. Martin Kusch forced one to argue right or surrender, a service too rare in academic circles. David McDougall made me think about the notion of visual argument. If space permitted, I could give many more examples. Indeed, sometimes it seemed as if there was too much stimulation, especially as I returned after lunch to a tedious but essential piece of historical work.
Work, in the Broadest Sense Intellectual exchange at the Wissenschaftskolleg is a form of sociability. It is difficult to distinguish between work and play, business and pleasure in such a world. Such blurring approximates to my idea of earthly paradise. Some activities, however, had more of play than work in them. I leave aside all that the city has to offer in the way of concerts, opera, museums, art galleries, food and drink, architecture, and much more. Berlin is sensually, not just officially, a capital city with all the buzz and excitement that go with that status.
My experiences in this regard were nothing exceptional, even if special to me. Making music is more worthy of note than listening to it. I joined a choir based on the British Embassy. Wednesday evening rehearsals were a welcome break from the Wissenschaftskolleg.
Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin - PDF
Even earthly paradise palls if one cannot leave it occasionally. The performances were great fun: Thursday evening singing and performances at the midsummer and farewell parties gave the singers, and, I trust, the audience much pleasure. Reinhart Meyer- Kalkus came close to making me bankrupt by introducing me to new music, singers, and a discount CD store.
I had constantly to pinch myself to be sure this was happening. Apart from the pleasure of singing, I learned so much. Helmut with his expressive and generous nature, his vivid sense of humor, his pleasure in all kinds of music but, even more, his delight in the pleasure music gives to others, made hours rush past all too quickly.
Another unexpected pleasure resulted from my election as a Fellow speaker, along with Sara Danius. At first this was a sinecure, since Sara took on the only duty involved: Because relations between Fellows themselves and with the Wissenschaftskolleg were cordial, any mediating role envisaged for the speakers was unnecessary. We organized two informal seminars in which Fellows and others discussed the different ways they acquired knowledge and how the college functioned in this process. However, in the spring Sara and I found out that our real purpose in life was to take the lead in organizing the farewell party that the Fellows put on for the staff.
We got in some practice with a midsummer party. I found someone who supplied Fritz Ringer with an accordion so we could put his musical claims to the test. He rose to the challenge and I have photographs to prove it. The choir sang a song in Swedish. Two things especially made the farewell party enjoyable. First, it gave pleasure to the college staff, which was the point of the exercise.
Second, it brought Fellows and families together in a cooperative project that revealed many and considerable talents. Margret Boehm organized the cooking team with great skill. I don t know who exactly cooked what, but I ate it all with great gusto. Fritz Ringer prepared his legendary bowle. Mary Ringer designed an invitation. Adonis astonished us with his generous donation of three of his collages as a collective gift to the college. Ansgar came up with the idea of personalized wine labels so that we could present bottles of Chateau Wallot to each member of the staff.
Gottfried Boehm used his knowledge to select a good wine. Short speeches celebrating different sections of the college were each stamped by the individual personality of the speaker, sharing only sincerity in common. John McNamara and Jakob Tanner provided lighter moments with spoof talks that were ingenious and very funny.
Others joined in in guying themselves. People came together in many different ways to produce an eventful and enjoyable arbeitsberichte Sara and I enjoyed our coordinating role and think we should get a chance to do it again! The party was a fitting climax to the year, though followed by a few anti-climactic weeks before we all left. I greatly enjoyed the companionship of my fellow Fellows, partners, and children who helped make us less of an artificial community. I must particularly mention the loving care and hot chicken soup from Roberta Young and Judith McDougall when I had bronchitis in January.
The college staff provided everything one could wish for, and with such enthusiasm as well as efficiency that one never felt bad about asking for assistance. I regret that I learned too late or not at all of the talents and achievements of many of them. I left Berlin reluctantly. I had worked and played hard, made friends, and had a marvelous time.
My main fear now is that, like a satellite returning from heaven, I will burn up as I re-enter the earth s atmosphere. If I do land in one piece, I intend to make return visits to Berlin as often as possible. Auf Wiedersehen implies as much. Some Information on My Field of Research Animal movements appear so natural and automatic that we generally take them for granted.
However, the underlying mechanisms are complex, with the generation of a functional locomotor movement depending on a coordinated series of interactions between the environment, body segments, muscles, and the nervous system. A multitude of experimental approaches is necessary to gain a sufficient understanding of the mechanisms controlling the execution of movements. Behavioral and biomechanical studies have determined arbeitsberichte Anatomical and physiological studies determined properties of muscles and the functional properties of neuronal circuits, as well as their elements.
Finally, computational modeling studies test the hypotheses emerging from these areas about sensory-motor transformations and neuro-mechanical principles and incorporate the findings in a functional context. My research field is the neurobiology of locomotion. Throughout the past years, my laboratory has focused on the generation of the motor output of the insect multi-jointed limb.
We have described various nervous influences and mechanisms by which sensory signals from one joint can control motoneuronal activity in the same and adjacent leg joints. These data provided a detailed insight into the interaction of sensory signals with central neuronal networks and vice versa.
A level of understanding was reached at which it appeared desirable to have a platform to test the sufficiency of the mechanisms described and to identify areas of lack of knowledge. Such a platform had to be a neuro-mechanical simulation. The Group and the Project The Wissenschaftskolleg offered me the chance to establish a research group of scientists for this academic year.
One main aim was the creation of 3D-dynamic neuromechanical simulations of 4-legged and 6-legged walking organisms. We then started to incorporate the current knowledge of neural control in these models. It soon became clear that our group had to bridge the broad gap between biomechanical and neurobiological research.
The distance between these two fields is astonishing, necessitating a more in-depth discussion of various biomechanical issues of our project. Our group took substantial advantage of the newly instituted possibility of the Wissenschaftskolleg to invite Guests of the Fellows to work with them for some time.
Substantial help was also provided by the seemingly infinite resources of the library services at the Wissenschaftskolleg. I got all publications I needed immediately. All along this path, various new ideas of projects to be conducted in the home laboratory evolved, as well as a definite plan and grant application directed toward the aim of going on together on this path in our future research. Living and Working at the Wissenschaftskolleg The work on the project in the ideal environment of the Wissenschaftskolleg is the first aspect to be mentioned because of its immediate payoff for my own work.
My other ongoing scientific activities also profited from this environment. During my stay I was able to prepare two major grant applications, I wrote one book chapter on Comparative Locomotor Systems to be published in the Comprehensive Handbook of Psychology edited by M. However, in a much broader sense, my stay at the Wissenschaftskolleg offered me the chance to understand the ways-of-knowing in other disciplines and enabled me to gain a glimpse of other fields of research, as well as develop new views on art. This happened through personal contact and conversations with Co-Fellows in a fascinating diversity of fields and from experiencing and taking part in the exceptional cultural life at the Kolleg.
Needless to say that living in Berlin itself was an exceptional experience and that all matters arising throughout our stay at the Wissenschaftskolleg were always taken care of efficiently and caringly by the staff acting in the background.
May R. Tanner
For me, being an experimental scientist, my stay at the Wissenschaftskolleg was interrupted by brief returns to my lab at my home university every once in a while, where my supervision was needed for ongoing projects of candidates, post-docs, and collaborators, arbeitsberichte This duty was also generously supported by the Wissenschaftskolleg. These more professional aspects were embedded in a living situation that allowed me to get to know the other Fellows, their partners, and their children.
Specifically, living at the Villa Walther created for my family a fascinating personal atmosphere. Living virtually around the corner from work as well as from the school of the children made family life very spontaneous for us. This atmosphere at the Wissenschaftskolleg allowed us to make many new friends during one of the most interesting years for me and my family.
linguistics
Geboren in Sevilla. Denn Geschichten dieser Art sind immer durch eine Wahl bedingt.
Vor nunmehr zehn Jahren, im Mai , war mein erster Versuch gescheitert, als Fellow ans Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin zu kommen. Die nationale Verfassung im globalen Zeitalter. Das Kolleg hat mir erlaubt, unter privilegierten Bedingungen diesen Wandel zu vollziehen. Doch wie es am vergangenen Wie kaum an einem anderen Ort kann man im Wissenschaftskolleg lernen, wie die anderen lernen: Ein wichtiges Element des Kollegs bilden weiterhin die Altfellows.
Gerade die deutschen Altfellows meines Fachs, zum Teil alte Freunde und Bekannte, haben meine Arbeit mit Interesse verfolgt und mir mit vielen Anregungen geholfen: Preuss, Christian Starck und Rainer Wahl. Und bei all dem: This has remained one of my main interests, but for the last 25 years, I have also been working with my spouse Margo Wilson on human behavior and psychology, with special interests in family relations and in violence. Margo and I are co-authors of a textbook Sex, Evolution and Behavior, 2nd edition, and two monographs Homicide, , and The Truth About Cinderella, , and we are members of the MacArthur Foundation Economics Network on norms and preferences, whence ideas and methods from economics have infused our work on homicide and risk-taking.
When Alex Kacelnik explained his proposal for an interdisciplinary Risk group at Wiko to Margo Wilson and me, we were immediately enthusiastic. We knew some of the invitees personally, others only from their writings, and we were sure that our own approach to the study of risk evaluation and risky behavior would profit from an opportunity for extended interactions. Unfortunately, ours could only be a relatively short stay of three months arbeitsberichte To spare our cats the traumas of airplane transfers and successive flights, we flew to Frankfurt and hired a car to drive to Berlin.
It was a pleasant trip through attractive countryside, except for the environs of Erfurt, a town which would soon be in the news for tragic reasons. However, we were surprised when, with still no signs of an approaching city, our directions led us off the Autobahn into a forest dotted with lakes, and soon to the Wissenschaftskolleg itself. There, the four of us two people and two cats ate, drank, and sank contentedly into an overdue hour sleep, still unaware that we were in fact in Berlin, just a short walk from the Ku damm.
And I never did get over that initial astonishment. The wondrous thing about our few months in the Grunewald was the incongruous juxtaposition: The urban scene delivered pleasures throughout our stay, but I think I derived even more from the woods. I especially remember tracking down the nightingale who seemed to be singing in our Villa Walther flat, but who was really 60 m away across the Koenigsallee, and a couple of hours spent watching nuthatches and blue tits simultaneously provisioning their chicks in nest boxes just a few meters apart at the foot of the Wiko garden.
Unfortunately, the woods made me miserable, too, for I was desperately allergic to the local mix of tree pollens for the entire month of May. Since the current cohort of Fellows had already been together through a Berlin winter when we arrived, they had established a culture that we and our friend Catherine Eckel, another latecomer, had to suss out and the Risk group had its own subculture, as well. But it wasn t difficult to start to feel at home, since there were so many people with whom we shared professional interests and an enthusiasm for conversation over good meals.
In fact, the socializing was a bit gruelling! I had last been in Berlin 30 years ago, and I confess that I returned with certain prejudices about dull Northern European cuisine. So what pleasant surprises in that domain! I expected the bread to be good, but no one had prepared me for the intensity with which asparagus season is celebrated, nor for the pfifferling season that followed. And I had no idea how good the Wiko kitchen would turn out to be; I m not sure that the lunches helped me work productively, but they certainly kept me happy. When the Fellows told me about the winter they had been through and when I considered the hibernal implications of the hour days in late June , I wasn t altogether sorry to be a spring migrant.
But three months was clearly too short a stay. We knew from past residences at other interdisciplinary centers that some of the best things about an institution like Wiko can be the interactions with people whose areas of expertise are very far from one s own. Historian John Breuilly s Wednesday colloquium was one of my favorites, and I was fascinated by the little that I learned about the activities of the locomotion group, but what with museums to visit, a marvellously stimulating Dahlem Conference and events that couldn t be missed at Humboldt University, the Max Planck Institute and Leibniz Kolleg Potsdam, I felt like I underexploited my opportunity for real interdiscplinary dialogue at Wiko itself.
She received her B. She contributes literary criticism to Dagens Nyheter, the major morning paper in Sweden, and has published essays on a variety of topics, from fashion to Marcel Proust. She currently lives in Stockholm with her husband, Stefan Jonsson, a literary scholar and writer, and a son. I was an ideal Fellow. At least if you follow Wolf Lepenies definition: After a few months at the Wissenschaftskolleg, I thus decided to put aside my original research plans and to start a completely new project on the nineteenth-century novel and the advent of visibility.
And because I conceived this project at the Wissenschaftskolleg, the bibliography stretches over many more fields than it otherwise would have done, from the role of photography in the history of visual anthropology to the advent of democracy in the West. At the end of the year, I presented my new project to an audience ranging from neurologists and legal scholars to composers. This was one of the high points of my year at the Wissenschaftskolleg. My family and I arrived in Berlin in early September in order to attend the intensive German course. We had great plans for our year in Germany.
I was going to make headway with my projects, brush up on my German, and get to know Berlin. My husband Stefan had taken the year off to look after our twelve-month-old son. His plan was to explore the city and its history together with our little one. Leo, for his part, had decided to learn how to walk. At the colloquia and various lunch tables, the locomotion group made me understand that this is one of the most complicated tasks a human being can undertake. Five months into our stay in Berlin, and having practiced at numerous splendid art museums, Leo finally mastered the art of walking.
He had been cheered on by forty keen-eyed Fellows who, especially on Thursday evenings, had noted his gradual progress. I think it is safe to say that Leo was by far the most successful of the three of us. Seriously, how many of the Fellows managed to achieve as much as our children did? Six days after our arrival, a friend of ours called me from Alexanderplatz.
Before a word had been spoken, I could tell he had bad news. The World Trade Center had been exploded, he said, and the Pentagon was on fire. I realized he was not joking and turned on the radio. The curious mix of excitement, disbelief, and fear that marked the reports during those confused hours immediately after the terrorist attacks would mark our stay in Berlin for months. For some Fellows, most of the year was lost, at least in terms of work. The research project I brought to Berlin was an inquiry into modern theories of photography, in particular as articulated in the early part of the twentieth century.
It is an intervention in current debates on visual culture, with an emphasis on their historicity. I spent a lot of time reading closely their texts, penetrating the architecture of their arguments. In December I gave a lecture in Copenhagen on Kracauer s notion of the unique affinity between the photographic image and the real. In the spring I decided to do what I had longed to do for years: I wanted to approach a series of classical nineteenth-century texts with evenly suspended attention, to borrow a phrase from Freud.
Such unstructured reading is a luxury that few literary scholars can afford, but thanks to the extraordinary working conditions at the Wissenschaftskolleg, I was able to do exactly that. I began with Goethe and Kleist, and then turned to the French nineteenth- arbeitsberichte The extraordinary librarian Gesine Bottomley and her brilliant staff saw to it that my bookcases in my office in the Neubau never collected dust; soon books, journals, and notes started spilling over into my Japanese futon sofa.
One day, I discovered that yet another research project was about to take shape. I had spent years working on the modernist period in European culture stretching from, say, through , and I now decided to venture into a new field: I wanted to explore a little-understood aspect of the realist period: How can it be, I asked myself, that so many writers at this time suddenly exhibit such a passionate interest in representing how persons and things look?
Conversely, why did writers before the nineteenth century consider visual description less important, to the extent that they even thought about the alternatives? The German philosopher Theodor W. Adorno once suggested apropos of Balzac s obsession with precise details and specialized lingo that the realist pursuit of concreteness and exactness has nothing to do with a familiarity with the real world; on the contrary, what enables the realist project is a generalized loss of reality, a Wirklichkeitsverlust. If Adorno was right, then what did that lost reality consist in? And what modes of representation did it encourage, and why?
I found a brilliant article by Italo Calvino on the visual nature of Flaubert s style; it confirmed my hypothesis that the early nineteenth century sees something like a paradigmatic shift in the history of literary visibility. I then decided to explore my initial hunch that the rise of the realist novel coincides with the advent of literary visibility proper. I also decided that such a project could usefully be seen as a prehistory of modernism. And when I say that I gained from these conversations, I have more in mind than my research bibliography; I can already see that the very framework of my project has been influenced by our exchanges.
In June, I was able to test the waters with my new project before a distinguished audience at New Europe College in Bucharest, Romania. We were three literary scholars Heinrich Detering, my husband Stefan, and I and we had been invited to lecture on Literature and Modernity. Thanks to them, our professional network now extends to Romania, and I can picture conferences and workshops emerging out of our interactions.
The Tuesday colloquia proved to be a great learning experience, from both an intellectual and a sociological point of view. As one might expect of any multidisciplinary setting, different epistemological cultures do not coexist easily. In addition, the colloquium format never really worked as a forum for discussion. After a few months, I detected a growing sense of frustration among many of the Fellows.
John Breuilly and I thought we had better address the situation. In our capacities as Sprecher, we decided to organize an informal meeting called Ways of Knowing. Wolf Lepenies told us that a similar attempt had been made the previous year. It had ended in disaster, he added with a grin. John and I settled for a minimalist approach.
We decided that if our meeting did not end in disaster, it would have to be considered a roaring success. We were clear about what we wanted to avoid. We did not want to build bridges between the two cultures ; there were more cultures than two, and C. Snow s analysis was obsolete anyhow, including the terms in which his discussion was framed. Nor did we intend to establish a shared understanding of what should count as scientific and what not.
We also wanted to avoid discussions of interdisciplinarity. As I saw it, the problem was not that the Fellows had little in common theoretically and methodologically, nor that we had different notions of what counts as evidence, proof, and truth. The problem was rather that we had no conceptual languages in common with which these crucial differences could be brought to light and discussed. What John and I sought to do, then, was to create an informal context for discussing these differences, however tentatively.
We knew we could count on support from the expertise in our own group: Sheila Jasanoff, a science and technology studies scholar, and Martin Kusch, a philosopher and sociologist of science.
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It turned out to be an intense and productive Thursday afternoon, with some twenty Fellows attending. The perhaps most instructive exchange emerged out of our discussion of the epistemological and methodological status of analogy in various kinds of scientific inquiry. Afterwards, John and I agreed that our Ways of Knowing meeting would have to be considered a success.
In fact, the response encouraged us to organize a second one. It also consisted of new friendships. During the year I became acquainted with a series of extraordinary intellectuals in Berlin, notably Reinhard Baumgart and Hanns Zischler. For me, our conversations were an education in itself. Without the generosity of these free spirits, my year in Berlin would have been much less inspiring. I am writing this report at the end of October, three somewhat melancholic months after our departure. Many memory images insist on being entered into the Jahrbuch: Or that dinner on Valentine s Day when Alex Kacelnik and I, surrounded by chocolate hearts folded in red metal foil, debated the science wars and postmodern cultural theory.
Or the many times when Leo assisted the ever-gracious Frau Sanders with the switchboard I could go on, but the long and the short of it is: Family History in the Middle East: Household, Property, and Gender. Binghamton, New York, Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, Berkeley, One of the defining aspects of intellectual life is the seemingly unbridgeable gap between vision and praxis. In the pursuit of truth one never arrives, but must constantly strive. Like many of the Fellows this year, I was not always satisfied with the results of my and other s efforts, but I deeply appreciated and learned from the creativity and dedication that surrounded me in abundance.
The impossibility of arriving has another more mundane dimension. Intellectuals are for the most part located in academic institutions that officially promote a culture of innovation, but which are in reality increasingly hierarchical and centralized corporate structures whose funding policies, more often than not, serve the interests of the very forces that arbeitsberichte Thus, the schizophrenic world many of us experience: It is no wonder then, that I tremendously enjoyed my year at Wiko.
In this institution I had the freedom, or at least the temporary illusion of freedom, to focus only on what I think matters most. At the same time, the confining isolation of disciplinary specialization was lifted and I was thrust into a world of intellectual cultures that, to my shame, I found to be surprisingly foreign. The opportunity, on a daily basis, to wander into and to wonder at formerly distant worlds now located only a table-width away became intoxicating.
This is why going back to the University may prove to be as difficult as kicking a heroin addiction. This is only a slight exaggeration; for it is precisely this richly diverse world of ideas and insights that so clearly reveals the confining webs we have spun or allowed others to spin around ourselves. Like many of my colleagues here, I will sorely miss being in an institution whose mission is to nurture the very essence of who we are.
Of course, We are but a small and often disconnected minority. To think that we alone can recreate the world in our image is a dangerous illusion that has long been recognized as such. I was not able, therefore, to work on my own projects as much as I could otherwise have done. With family and friends directly affected by these events, I found it difficult to focus, especially during the spring when the Israeli army unleashed a number of military campaigns to destroy the infrastructure of the Palestinian Authority and to reoccupy the West Bank.
In addition, I accepted a series of speaking engagements, radio interviews, and the like. Most important perhaps, I did not have much of an opportunity to discuss my project with the Fellows and staff at Wiko, as most conversation inevitably turned to the current political situation. There were exceptions of course, the major one being a wonderful series of exchanges with David Sabean, who is also specialized in family history. I came here with two projects. The first was to finish an edited volume of original research articles on family history in the Middle East, the first of its kind.
I also allowed myself to fall into the wonderful trap of in-depth reading in preparation for writing the introduction, a process which took several weeks, but which will pay out long-term dividends in the future. With this manuscript completed by mid-january, I immediately started my second project: The challenge I faced was to come up with a methodology for reading, a theoretical framework for analyzing, and a narrative structure for integrating thousands of disconnected and un-indexed court appearances ranging from endowment of trusts and real-estate transactions to lawsuits and probate inventories.
Specifically, I looked for patterns both in terms of form and content and across space and time that can shed light on the complex relationships between property devolution strategies, gender, and the praxis of Islamic law. I have made substantial progress on this front despite the traumatic events of this spring and the continuing process of copy-editing, proofreading, and indexing the first manuscript. In fact, I am now just about ready to start writing and dearly wish that I could have another year at Wiko to do just that.
Instead, I will be going back to a heavy teaching load, postponed exams and projects of graduate students, committee work, and a university that finds itself in an unexpected financial and structural crisis. So it will be at least a year or two before I can start picking up the pieces of this project again, and when I do, I will fondly remember the supportive staff and the exciting colleagues who have helped to make it all possible. So did my parents. Luckily, most Swabians don t believe in fate, so this coincidence neither biased my political opinion nor influenced my choice of study.
If anything was fateful for me, it was the contagious fascination of a school teacher and the inspiration of a charismatic mentor. One of these beliefs is that genuine understanding in science requires a formal theoretical concept. If you can t model it, you can t be sure. In , the appointment as Wissenschaftlicher Assistent at the Biocybernetics Department in Bielefeld introduced a slight change in my projects.
They became less cellular and more system-oriented, less sensory and more motor more SensoryMotor, perhaps. A Postdoc Among Legends How great is it for a postdoc to join a group of enthusiastic scientists, to meet them on a regular basis, to exchange ideas with them, to learn about their scientific motifs and to appreciate their expertise for months? I consider it an outstanding gift to have had the chance to meet, get to know and work with the other three members of the locomotion group.
Their ideas, suggestions, hints and thoughts have left many traces in my current view on neural control of locomotion and have added a new twist to my current projects. Perhaps my benefit was due to the fact that the four of us made up a nearly perfect two-by-two block design of scientific interest, exploring a theory-physiology gradient and a vertebrate-invertebrate gradient across the same topic. Having been the least renowned, least experienced and least tenured of the group, I appreciate that the Wiko took considerable risk in inviting me but sure enough, they also invited an entire group of risk experts , because nobody on the planet could have possibly had a reliable and objective indicator of why it would have been more appropriate to support me rather than another postdoc.
Even more so, I hope that I filled my role in the group in a way that helped to encourage the Wiko panel to take the same risk again in future years and to offer more postdocs the same chance that I had. Workshop and studium generale I would describe my stay at the Wiko as a mix of workshop, practical and studium generale. It was arguably the most intense workshop on the biomechanics of walking one could imagine. Felix Zajac, our first workshop tutor, gave us several lectures on his generic muscle model, the pivot around which most current models on vertebrate biomechanics turn.
Bob Full gave a set of lectures on insect muscle and the biomechanics of hexapod walking. His favorite theme, the pogo stick a spring-mass model , impressed me not only because it is a powerful concept to analyze and simulate various kinds of movements. Also, it is a topic around which a cross-disciplinary research network of biologists, engineers and mathematicians has created synergy effects that all participants seem to benefit from. Finally, Arnim Henze taught me how to calculate the inverse dynamics of an insect limb, opening up a whole new range of studies that I can now manage myself.
Also, my stay was a productive programming practical, giving me time to implement many routines that I now frequently use, and even to learn a new programming language Python. Both the workshop and the practical are already helping me to reconcile some conceptual differences in locomotion models. Hopefully, the continued cooperation of our group will witness the merging of behavior-based control circuits made of Artificial Neural Networks e. Although less focused and often a little dogmatic, the studium generale, consisting of the weekly Tuesday colloquia and some lunch discussions, provided a further source of insight.
It encouraged me to present my own area of research in a slightly different light than I usually do. I thought, why not draw a picture of Biological Cybernetics using a few historical examples that are representative of its conceptual insights for neuroscience, but that also allow long-term evaluation of its successes, relevance and limits. On top of that, I attempted to embed two of my own projects into the general framework of my seminar.
As expected, at least when speaking to an exclusively clever but also outrageously mixed audience, the responses afterward were rather incongruent: Physically, they ranged from enthusiastic shoulder-patting to facial expressions that I attributed to the first signs of a major depression. Verbally, they ranged from something like a profound plea against positivism to a presentation of rigorous experimental conduct.
The world of science never agrees, and general students of science generally get many study details wrong. But what about the main message? The experience made me wonder whether I would ever manage to get everyone in my audience to take home the same message. So far, I fear that this will only happen with trivial, incredibly bad or cancelled seminars. Vocal Resources Social Bonds During one of the Thursday evening dinners, the conversation came to music, giving rise to the plan to organize an informal singing group.
It all started out with a very funny, entertaining and rather out-of-tune evening rehearsal on the top floor of the Villa Walther. Rather, one of them ever joined the group later on. Soon, the sing-along developed into a regular social event, starting with one or two rounds, followed by a motette Tallis , a pop song Beatles or a folk song Bellmann. Even a hippy hit made it into the Wiko singing charts of year , possibly because many of the singers have been Mamas and Papas for some time.
In return, I re-introduced him, a sorcerer of sound, to his own vocal resources of sound. The past five months were truly exceptional for me as a postdoc among legends, as a student of biomechanics, and as a social singer. They brought back to me a notion of idealism in science that had been partly eaten away by a kind of mid-life cynicism nourished by akward science politics and the usual everyday mediocrity. A less scientific, but rather influential outcome of my stay in Berlin was that I now firmly believe in two things that I had formerly only suspected to be true: First, I could live without the natural sciences, although I wouldn t like to, but I d always keep singing.
Second, moving on does not require locomotion. Krause Design of a biomimetic active tactile sensor for legged locomotion. Neuroethological concepts and their transfer to walking machines. Graded limb targeting in an insect is caused by the shift of a single movement pattern. Studied Economics at the University of Virginia. Quarterly Journal of Economics , 1 Evidence From Dictator Games. The Economic Journal I arrived in Berlin on Wednesday, May 1: Naturally, the Wiko office and kitchen were closed, as was nearly everything else in the city.
I was pleasantly surprised by the green beauty of the rather grand residential neighborhood, the Grunewald living up to its name. Not everyone agrees with my assessment. In The Berlin Stories Christopher Isherwood refers to the Grunewald area as a millionaire s slum because of the enormous houses proximity to one another, in all known styles of expensive ugliness, ranging from the eccentric-rococo folly to the cubist flat-roofed steel and glass box. He has a point. But somehow it is very lovely anyway. The first two days, I participated in an interdisciplinary conference on risk attitudes, which is one of the subjects I study.
There were biologists and anthropologists and mathematicians and psychologists, one philosopher, one sociologist, and two economists. Never have I been surrounded by such a diversity of disciplines and interests. What a great pleasure it was to discuss everything with such an intellectually curious and diverse group of people. In the Tuesday Colloquia, Wiko colleagues presented a fascinating array of studies. I ll admit my favorite talks were the scientists: Raghavendra Gadagkar on the kindness of wasps, and the locomotion group on, well, locomotion.
But I greatly enjoyed them all. It was an unprecedented opportunity to learn and learn. I am an economist, one of only three at the Wiko during my stay. Much of my work chips away at the economic man paradigm that is still predominant in economics. Economic man had taken quite a beating before my arrival, and to my surprise I found myself defending the self-interested old fellow. Economists are not very popular among academics, and the three of us had our work cut out communicating our science to both to the nonscientists and to the real scientists in residence.
It was challenging and very much fun. I made quite a lot of progress, though less than I wanted to, on two projects. As the only official member of two groups the Risk Group and the Social Norms Group I had plenty to do just attending all the seminars and discussions. The Risk Group meetings fed one project, having to do with developing behavioral measures of risk aversion that generalize across decision contexts. The input of Elke Weber and Eric Johnson changed the way I think about the problem, closing off some research avenues, but opening many more. And John McNamara s intolerance for sloppy thinking sharpened all our arguments.
Alex somehow charmingly kept us all communicating with each other over the chasms of disciplinary terminology. The Norms Group participated in the lively seminars of Martin Hoffman, who educated us all about the psychology of empathy. Cristina Bicchieri s persistent enthusiasm and Ernst Fehr s eloquence and diplomacy contributed greatly to the quality of our interactions. These discussions substantially shaped the paper I wrote on social status and learning. While I had been exposed previously to evolutionary thinking, the prevalence of evolutionists at the Wiko this summer led to many discussions that expanded my knowledge of the subject.
In some ways, evolutionists are even more firm in their thinking than economists, and they encounter similar resistance to their ideas. However, this work is beginning to have a significant influence on my work and the way I think about human behavior. In a recent experimental project, I test the ability of subjects to detect reciprocators in a situation where money is at stake. This work has been strongly shaped by my experience at Wiko.
Martin concentrated on the birds; Margo on the environment more generally. I forced them to pause now and then and look at a building an inanimate castle or a church about which they were surprisingly good-natured. The island of Hiddensee has no cars, but many bicycles, and has no English speakers that we could detect. Fortunately Martin s high school German had not deserted him, despite 40 years of neglect. I bought an amber pin in a tiny shop, and Martin and Margo added considerably to their lifetime bird lists. Most of the houses on the island and many of the larger buildings have thatched roofs, which I had never seen before.
We stopped to observe a chorus of frogs. Lunch was smoked halibut on thin, dense black bread, with beer. The scenery was very beautiful, and the food excellent and plentiful and very fishy. There were many, many nice surprises, including: Francis opera; the amazing thunderstorm that accompanied Helmut Lachenmann s last concert; sun pouring in my window at 4. And there were a few inevitable disappointments: All I needed was a few more months. I am enormously grateful to the Wiko and its friendly and extremely accommodating staff for making the visit such a wonderful experience for me, and for my family.
His research initially cantered on computational models of neural networks including memory capacity and error-correcting memory retrieval. More recently, he has specialized in the use of computer simulations to study the interaction between neuronal networks and behaviour via muscles and biomechanical properties. In close collaboration with neurophysiologists at the Karolinska Institute, he has developed simulation models of the rhythm-generating neuronal circuits in the spinal cord responsible for swimming in fish.
Being a Fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg has irreversibly changed me as a scientist. I have learned to see my work in a much broader perspective and I have gained a better understanding of how research is being done in completely different fields. In a world where front-line research requires extreme specialization, such interdisciplinary understanding has become a valuable but rare resource. It is hard to describe in a few words how a fellowship at the Wissenschaftskolleg influences you. The Kolleg can perhaps best be characterized as a social training camp for researchers.
When arriving, all Fellows have left their fame and authority behind and they are forced to build new social networks from scratch. After one year, new relations have formed and most Fellows have discovered that they did not have to hide behind titles and fame. Instead, the true content of their work becomes the focus. Being allowed to do what arbeitsberichte I think that this experience may be the most important aspect of a stay at the Wissenschaftskolleg.
Working Alone Initially I had the impression that this would be a year when I would work very much alone. In particular, I would have the opportunity to focus on the project of my choice without anyone caring or even knowing what I was doing. Now, at the end of my stay, I find that things turned out very differently. I have had numerous discussions with Co-Fellows on matters that colleagues at my home department know little about and I feel that many Fellows now know and care more about my research than even my colleagues back home.
I am a computer scientist specializing in simulation models of neural networks controlling animal movement. This involves formulating mathematical descriptions of how muscles work and calculating how the resulting forces result in coordinated movements of legs and other body parts. A substantial part of the research also involves finding suitable numerical solution methods and implementing them in programs.
Looking through the list of Co-Fellows before arriving, I quickly concluded that few would be able to contribute much to my work. I saw economists, historians, social scientists, composers, poets, and others, most of whom I had never heard of before. On the other hand, I knew that I would not be entirely left on my own, since I was invited as part of a special interest group on locomotion. Plurals and tense are optional monosyllables. Symbols can combine with other symbols to make polysyllabic words.
If two logograms combine, meanings combine. Phonetic compounds with same borrowed character can differ in pronunciation, because phonetic meaning is more important than sound. In Homo habilis, advanced vocal cords and brain language areas allowed better communication. Later, sounds carried meaning without context. Perhaps, words originate by onomatopoeia or sound-symbolism [Smith, ]. Before language, brains must have spatial and temporal ideas, such as line, group, boundary, figure, background, movement, ascending, descending, association, attraction, and repulsion.
Rules order words into subject-verb-object, make broader categories from objects, use categories to specify objects, and combine words and gestures. Later, word associations evolved to associate words and speech-part categories and then make complete sentences [Corballis, ]. Probably, language first described situations. Then language described speaker thoughts. Then language described hearer characteristics and thoughts. Later languages were more logical, artificial, and precise. Speech frees hands and arms and allows communication at night [Browman and Goldstein, ].
Angular gyrus and TPO connect vision and hearing sense qualities to cause synesthesia. Visual areas link to Broca's motor area. Emotional vocalizations start from right hemisphere and anterior cingulate. Korean and Japanese languages are similar to Altaic and Turkish. In Bantu classificatory languages, nouns have classes, and noun classes have prefixes, which precede all words associated with noun.
Semitic includes East Semitic and West Semitic. East Semitic includes only Akkadian. Northern Semitic includes Maltese, Canaanite, and Aramaic. Canaanite includes Hebrew, Phoenican, and Moabite. Aramaic includes Eastern Aramaic and Western Aramaic. Hamitic includes Egyptian, Libyo-Berber, and Kushitic. Egyptian includes Egyptian and Coptic. Libyo-Berber includes Berber and extinct Libyan.
Kushitic includes Somali and Galla in Ethiopia. Perhaps, Kushitic belongs to Afro-Asiatic language family. Xhosa is in south Africa. Ubangi includes Banda, Mitlu, and Zande. Perhaps, it is in Amerind language family. Perhaps, it is in Uto-Aztecan family. Brythonic includes Welsh, Breton, and Cornish. Anglo-Friscian includes English and has Friscian in Netherlands. East Germanic includes extinct Gothic, Burgundian, and Vandal. High German and Low German separated from to Indo-European has inflection, is synthetic, and has three genders. Later branch [] branched [] into Welsh and Old Irish [] and into Latin [] and Umbrian and Oscan [].
Later branch [] branched [] into Ancient Greek and Classical Armenian. Later branch [] branched [] into Vedic and Old Persian and into Prussian [] and Latvian and Lithuanian []. India has 14 major languages. Urdu and Kashmiri use modified Arabic scripts. Hindi, Sanskrit, and Marathi use Devanagari script. Punjabi uses Gurmukhi script. Bengali uses Bengali script. Script symbols can be syllables. Osco-Umbrian includes Oscan and Umbrian. Sabellian includes Marsian, Sabine, and Volscian. Ugric includes Hungarian or Magyar.
Hungarian reached Hungary [], from Ural Mountains. Ob-Ugrian includes Ostyak and Vogal. Permian includes Votyak and Zyrican. Samoyedic includes Samoyed, Yurak, Kamessian, and Tugvy. Altaic includes Turkish, Manchu-Tungus, and Mongol. Altaic [ to ] came from central Asia steppes to Europe and Turkey.
Manchu-Tungus includes Manchu and Tungus. Western Mongol includes Kalmuk. Northern Mongol includes Buryat. Eastern Mongol includes Khalkha. Ainu and Gilyak do not relate to Chukchi-Kamchadal, except by location. Chukchi-Kamchadal includes Chukchi, Kamchadal, and Koryak. Spread from south China over southeast Asia. Vietnamese Hmong speak it. Himalayan includes Toto, Lepcha or Kong, and Gurung. Lo-lo-Mo-so includes Lo-lo and Mo-so. Thai includes Siamese, Karen in Burma, and Shan dialects.
Alternatively, Tai-Kadai includes Thai and Laotian. It spread from southeast China over southeast Asia and India. Annamese-Muong includes Annamese or Vietnamese and Muong.
Austronesian has three other families on Taiwan, which spread from Taiwan to Indonesia and Polynesia. Bali is in Bali. Batak is in Samoa. Buginese is in Celebes. Dayak is in Borneo. Malagasy is in Malagasy. Malay is in Malaysia. Sundanese is in Sundan Islands. Javanese is in Java. Indonesian is in Indonesia. Tagalog is in Philippines. Language similar to Manyan is in Madagascar. Italian, with some Arabic and Greek, was in Mediterranean area. Persons result from social dialogues [Bakhtin, ] [Bakhtin, ].
Brain concepts are in languages, software programs, or virtual machines. Software is not physiological, mechanical, or phenomenological but has information content. Phonology, phonetics, morphology, word-order rules, syntactic-redundancy rules, and parsing rules are not necessarily in the language of thought.
Syntactic-redundancy rules are for pronouns, agreement, and case. Perhaps, language of thought has syntax and all proposition types. Words start as emotion expressions, then designate concrete objects, and later have abstract meaning. Language develops from sign use into sign system. Semantics develops, and sign meanings change. Children think by memorizing, but adults memorize by thinking.
Higher mental processes require social settings to develop. Socialization processes lead to consciousness. Human conscious behavior relates subject of experience to social environment. Language develops from first gestures and then grooming and other physical interactions [Mead, ]. Creativity, self, and reason arise from social life, which uses language reflexively. All languages can transform into first-order languages, so speakers can have truth-theory.
In first-order languages, meaning depends on truth-conditions. Beliefs and other intentions are mental states with contrasts. Speakers speak intentionally [Davidson, ]. Fundamental language-element meanings rely on subjective experiences. More-complex language meanings derive from language element meanings, using verification methods. Statement meanings depend on verification methods. Science facts can be verifiable by observation or experiment.
Analytic logic and mathematics statements can be true by language rules. Ethical statements convey emotion or attitude and are not verifiable or analytic. Other statements are meaningless. However, internal language independent of human social life cannot describe mental contents [Hunter, ] [Wittgenstein, ], because language presupposes public rules and symbols. Languages are for shared-things communication. In private languages, knowing and not knowing are meaningless [Hunter, ] [Wittgenstein, ]. Words about conscious states can only be about observable inclinations to behave, not about subjective experience.
Public terms must be publicly verifiable. Languages must be public and about public things. For example, language can state facts and define contexts. Referents can be constant only in contexts. Contexts give referent features and functions, which supply meaning. Acoustic parameters correspond to sound contrasts used to discriminate among speech features.
Speech production and perception parameters are the same. Sound types are consonants, sonants or semivowels, vowels, stops, continuants, aspirates, voiced, and unvoiced. People identify and label perceptual features by sharpening boundaries. People can discriminate among features along many dimensions. People group sounds into rhythms based on sound loudness, length, and pitch.
Louder, longer, and higher-pitch sounds are accents. Special mechanisms make and perceive speech. Vocal cords, lungs, pharynx, tongue, nose, teeth, and lips make speech sounds. All people can make all speech sounds, but at different pitches and timbres. Lungs, pharynx, tongue, nose, teeth, and lips modify speech sounds. African languages can use clicks. Languages can use inhaled sounds. Nasalization and other vowel modifications do not change speech-sound basis.
Lowest-frequency formant is main formant. Sign language uses physical movements as phonology. Phonemes are not separate and independent but have sequences. People recognize phonemes only in context, because preceding and succeeding phonemes indicate current phoneme. Phonemes have or lack nine features. Phonemes can use consonants, vowels, pitches, silences, intonations, and stresses.
Vowels are a, e, i, o, u, and y. Consonants are b, c, d, f, g, h, j, k, l, m, n, p, q, r, s, t, v, w, x, and z. Voiced consonants are b, d, g, and z. Unvoiced consonants are p, t, k, and s. Nasal consonants are m and n. Non-nasal consonants are b, k, and s. Constricted-lip vowels and consonants are oo, w, p, and m.
Unconstricted-lip vowels and consonants are i, e, k, and n. People can pronounce 40 phonemes [Jaynes, ]. Languages typically have 12 to 67 phonemes. Phoneme number and substitutability do not relate to language type, whether isolating, agglutinative, flexional, analytic, synthetic, or polysynthetic.
Phoneme changes follow regular recurrent rules. Functional, autonomous, or spontaneous causes can change paradigmatic sounds. Nearby phonemes can change syntagmatic sounds. Intonation emphasizes sentence parts, for example, signaling difference between declarative sentence and question. Speech amplitude and rhythm do not necessarily change. Speech sounds can rise, fall, rise then fall, or have no pitch change.
Neighboring sounds or grammatical functions can alter sounds. English and Finnish do not show sandhi in spelling. Sanskrit can show or omit sandhi. Mandarin has high monotone, rising tone, falling-rising tone, and falling tone. Word stresses are main accent and secondary accent. People know speech sounds. Airflow-obstruction locations affect articulation. Airflow-obstruction levels affect articulation.
Articulation-point changes change consonants but not vowels. In Greek, aspiration or rough breathing can precede initial vowels and r. Such breathing has ' sign. Mouth obstruction and nasal opening makes n, m, and ng. Fricative consonants can be sibilant. Vowels can have tongue highest part in front or back, mouth open or closed, and lips round or spread out. Spanish and many languages have only five vowels: Consonants can be vowel-like.
Grammar includes syntax and inflexion. Language knowledge is a finite system of rules operating on fundamental elements, which interact to determine an infinite number of expressions, with phonetic forms, meanings, and structural properties. Grammar is about linguistic-unit relations, not meaning. Grammar expresses location, direction, time, number, familiarity, possibility, contingency, possession, agency, purpose, necessity, obligation, and existence or non-existence.
All grammars indicate spatial location and motion. Sentence linguistic-unit relations reflect physical object and event relations in space and time. Physical relations reflect required grammar type: Complex concepts use spatial-location and motion concepts. Many fundamental grammar properties are innate, but people have different language elements and mental representations. Grammatical sense depends on words fitting into familiar connection frameworks.
Contexts are unit relations. Context can be syntax rules about relations between grammar units. Context can be contrast rules about which linguistic units can replace grammar units. For constant number of linguistic units, number of relations is inversely proportional to number of paradigms. For both hearing and speaking, people use words, not morphemes, as language units. Words replace lexical concepts. Inflection is also about sound stresses. Morphemes are not separate and independent but have sequences. Phonological units can have preferred order or no order.
Succeeding-morpheme probability depends on preceding morphemes. People recognize morphemes only in context, because preceding and succeeding morphemes indicate current morpheme through associations and sound cues. Spoken language is a phoneme series. Phonemes are not separate and independent sounds but have specific sound sequences. Substitutions can change next-phoneme contexts. All utterances have paradigms. Words and spoken language have morpheme series, which have paradigms.
People first learn frequently used grammar contrasts, which resist change most. Syntax relations reflect relations in world and mind. Languages use syntax forms: All utterances have syntax. Sentences have nested or embedded phrases. Roles include subject, verb, object, agent, theme, goal, source, instrument, beneficiary, time, and place.
Syntax uses lexical categories, such as nouns, verbs, adjectives, prepositions, and adverbs. Syntax uses phrasal categories, such as noun phrases, verb phrases, prepositional phrases, and sentences. Some languages do not have interjections. Nouns are words for objects. Verbs are words for actions. Some languages do not have conjunctions. There are 80 to prepositions. Some languages do not have prepositions. Prepositions can be about spatial location: Prepositions can refer to object axis above or below vertical axis, distance from axis, or direction from axis.
Prepositions can describe object motions related to location descriptions, such as motion paths and where paths begin and end. No prepositions require knowledge of reference objects, except axis, or figure parts. Spatial configurations can be non-stereotypical or ambiguous. With no copula, phrases are predicates. Common nouns are not proper nouns and are not pronouns. Only Indo-European languages have gerunds. Russian, Greek, Latin, and German use three genders. Languages can use two genders, male and female. Swahili uses six genders.
Gender refers to social roles and other meanings besides biology. Some languages do not use gender. The idea of counting is in all languages. Chinese and Vietnamese do not use noun number categories but denote number by classifier words. Count nouns can take indefinite articles and are plural. Bounded nouns, nouns about events, and telic nouns are similar to count nouns. Mass nouns are similar to plural nouns.
Unbounded nouns, nouns about processes, and atelic nouns are similar to mass nouns. Pronouns agree with referents in number, person, and gender. Pronoun references should be to antecedents. Pronoun references should be unambiguous. Pronoun references should be definite. Pronoun references should be specific.
All languages use person categories. Person is I, we, you, he, she, it, or they. I, me, my, mine, we, us, our, ours, you, your, yours, he, him, his, her, his, hers, it, its, they, them, their, and theirs. Aspect can be about action frequency, regularity, start, or type. Aspect relates to tense and mood. Aspect in Russian and Greek refers to completed or incomplete actions. Aspect in Greek can refer to short action length or future action. Not all languages use aspect. Verb "to have" denotes possession. Verb "to be" denotes class member, having class, place, or time, or having existence.
Verbs "to have" and "to be" carry only tense, mood, and aspect. Adjectives are about qualities and states. Verbs are about actions or states. Adverbs modify both adjectives and verbs. Simple predicates have one verb or verb phrase. Infinitives typically have no person or number. Some languages have personal infinitives, with person and number. Not all languages use mood.
Mood and tense relate. Not all languages use tense. Some languages do not have passive voice or middle voice. Because sentences are complex, hearers can analyze same sentence in different ways. Each of the six possible sequences of subject, verb, and object appears in at least one human language. String analysis can be bottom up or top down. Bottom-up analysis scans grammar rules to see if any apply to input string. Top-down analysis hypothesizes output sentences or phrase structures and tries to generate input string, trying grammar rules and backtracking if rule fails.
Top-down parsers start with rules with variables and find places that match rules. Bottom-up parsers start with constants and make variables based on rules. Sentences can have different parse trees. Because quantitative grammars involve only integers, quantitative grammars can be algorithms.
For verbs, Hungarian and Finnish languages, but not English, have an iterative marker to convey sense of repetition, which acts semantically like a plural marker. Verbs, including adjectives, modify nouns. Constituent grammar uses subject and predicate as fundamental categories. Other grammatical categories derive from them.
Rule sequences build word-group hierarchies. Sentence types have grammar rules, which speakers use for sentence generation, and which hearers use for sentence analysis. Sentence-type rules put high-level word groups in sequences. Sentence-type rules can have necessary parts, optional parts, and branching parts. Second-level grammar rules order words in word groups. Third-level grammar rules order words in subgroups, and so on. Language comprehension uses same levels and rules.
Deep structure relates grammatical units of simple, representative sentences, sometimes using semantic rules. Surface structure relates word categories, like constituent grammar does, and phonological rules affect it. Deep structure resolves ambiguities left open by surface structure.
Predicate calculus is a transformational grammar. All children can learn all languages. Only current state determines output. Quantitative grammars involve enumerable sets of input sentences, output sentences, and grammar rules. Recursive functions, algorithms, Turing machines, and Post axiomatic systems are mathematically equivalent ways to model quantitative grammars. Language processing and computer coding rely on grammar, which specifies sentence-structure rules.
Parsing finds syntactical structure. Generating uses rules to create valid sentences. Type 0, with highest complexity, is General Grammars, such as Turing Machines. Type 0 grammars can be context-free, unrestricted, contracting, and freely substituting. Turing machines read input and write output anywhere on tape. Type 1 grammars can be context-sensitive, unrestricted, and non-contracting.
Pushdown machines with finite tape read input and store output, after going backward and forward on tape until they find input string context that tells them what to do next. Type 2 grammars can be context-free, unrestricted, and non-contracting. Pushdown machines read input and store output based solely on current state, without going backward or forward on tape.
Type 3 grammars can be context-free or context-sensitive, regular, linear, and non-contracting. Finite-state machines read input tape, with no storage, until they find input string that tells them what to do next. Computer languages must be deterministic, so parsing look-ahead is finite. Most unambiguous and ambiguous recursive transition networks are non-deterministic and cannot map to deterministic recursive transition networks.
Non-deterministic finite state automata can map to deterministic finite state automata. Grammars can have variables, which can have actions and include start symbols.