Recursivity

"This dissertation explores the phonological representation and the phonetic realization of prosodic prominence in Persian. It comprises two related parts: the first part addresses prosodic phrasing in Persian sentences, while the second part deals with phonetic correlates of prosodic prominence by reporting conducted production and perception experiments. The phonological part is carried out within the framework of Prosodic Phonology, and aims at determining the prosodic structure of Persian from foot level, up to utterance level. By adopting Optimality Theory, it tries to explain how morphosyntax-phonology interface constraints together with prosodic markedness constraints form the prosodic structure of the language. It begins with foot level and suggests that in languages like Persian which have one non-iterative weight-insensitive edgemost stress per word, a single foot which is edge-aligned with the minimal Phonological Word best explains the prosodic pattern at word level. This part also focuses on prosodic differences between lexical words and weak function words (clitics) and shows that any attempt to describe the prosodic structure of Persian without addressing this crucial difference, will not be able to provide explanation for a wide range of phenomena. This study suggests that proclitics and enclitics behave asymmetrically in Persian: enclitics prosodize as affixal clitics, while proclitics are free clitics. Next, it addresses the problem of weak function words which are not a part of their preceding or following XPs, and demonstrates how the phonological well-formedness constraints determine the direction of cliticization in these XP-external function words. It also deals with the issue of clitic clusters in Persian which was not explored in the previous works. Another contribution of this study is reclassification of so-called exceptionally initial-stressed words.
This dissertation also deals with the longstanding problem of Ezafe constructions and by reviewing previous proposals on the prosodic structure of these constructions, based on phonological evidence and phonetic observations suggests that each lexical word in an Ezafe construction maps onto a Phonological Phrase, and the Ezafe morpheme phrases with its preceding material to satisfy the phonological well-formedness constraint ONSET. The prosodic structure of XP-external clitics such as the Ezafe morpheme is explained by adopting a syntax-prosody interface constraint namely MAP-XP, that bans two sister XPs inside a single Phonological Phrase. This study proposes a ranking of OT constraints by which the prosodic structure of Ezafe constructions and other syntactic phrases such as DPs and VPs can be predicted and explained uniformly. It also proposes that the interaction between morphosyntax-phonology interface constraints and prosodic markedness constraints determine prosodic constituents of all levels and their heads, and other constraints require the heads of phonological phrases to be associated with audible accents. The rightmost Phonological Phrase in an Intonational Phrase is the head. This head associates with an accent which is perceived more prominently than the other accents. One further issue explored here is the fact that in lexicalized Ezafe constructions and also in the ones containing given/old information, some words may appear without audible accent.
The phonetic difference between final and non-final accents is the subject of the second half of this dissertation. Previous research on Persian has shown that the main acoustic correlate of prosodic prominence is f0. This study reports production and perception experiment results conducted in order to answer the question whether final (nuclear) accents are perceived more prominently than the other ones only because they are not followed by any other accent, or because they are phonetically different from the non-final (pre-nuclear) accents. The results of production experiments reveal that nuclear accented syllables have a lower f0 range, but a longer duration in comparison with pre-nuclear accented ones. Other parameters such as overall intensity, spectral tilt and vowel quality do not differ significantly in the two types of accents. Perception experiments reveal that native listeners can indeed distinguish the two types of accents without having access to the portion of the utterance that follows the final accent. This proves that the two types of accents are phonetically different. Perception tests also show that the difference between the shapes of f0 curves in the two types of accents is the main acoustic parameter that helps the listeners distinguish them from each other. In pre-nuclear accented words, the f0 peak is at the right edge of the metrically strong syllable, and the curve has a rising slope at this point. In these syllables, the peak may even occur on the initial syllable of the following word. However, in the syllables associated with nuclear accents, the f0 peak is located inside the syllable, and the curve has a falling slope at the right edge of the syllable.
If the f0 at the right edge of a nuclear accented syllable is manipulated and raised so that the f0 peak is moved to the right edge, the native listeners will perceive the word containing this syllable as a pre-nuclear accented word. This study also shows that duration alone cannot cue the difference between the two types of accents. However, when accompanied by f0 changes, it can help the listeners distinguish the two accents more easily and more efficiently.
Downloadable at: http://roa.rutgers.edu/content/article/files/1314_hosseini_1.pdf
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A strategy for adaptive control and energetic optimization of aerobic fermentors was implemented, with both air flow and agitation speed as manipulated variables. This strategy is separable in its components: control, optimization, estimation. We optimized parameter’s estimation (from the usual KLa correlation) using sinusoidal excitation of air flow and agitation speed. We have implemented parameter’s estimation trough recursive least squares algorithm with forgetting factor. We carried separate essays on control, optimization and estimation algorithms. We carried our essays using an original computational simulation environment, with noise and delay generating facilities for data sampling and filtering.

Our results show the convergence and robustness of the estimation algorithm used, improved with use of both forgetting factor and KLa dead-band facilities. Control algorithm used in our work compares favorably with PID using the integrated area criteria for deviation between oxygen molarity and critical molarity (set point). Optimization algorithm clearly reduces energetic consumption, respecting critical molarity. Integration of control, optimization and adaptive algorithms was implemented, but future work is needed for stability. Methods were defined and implemented for stability improvement. We have implemented data acquisition and computer manipulation of air flow and agitation speed for actual fermentors.

This paper explores the role of anthropological expertise in shaping the outcome of legal proceedings under conditions of cultural diversity. Taking the state-driven land-restitution process in post-apartheid South Africa as its point of reference, the text reflects upon the work of anthropological experts in a number of cases and shows how their theoretical and political stances shaped the trajectories of their legal engagements. Pointing towards frictions that emerge in acts of translation between the seemingly objectivist rhetoric evoked in court and more relativist and subjectivist stances within the academy, the paper revisits and problematises debates around strategic essentialism. Sketching instead the contours of a 'recursive anthropology' that expresses itself in terms of a post-positivist universalism, the paper turns on the author's use of his own expertise in support of a White land claim, probing-and critically reflecting upon-the practical potential of a form of expertise grounded in such a recursive anthropology.

Tradition is not a mixture of customs, o more or less faithful and mechanic repetition of a remote past, or the face of culture free from ideology. Onthe contrary, it is an incandescent vase, a spark resulting from the friction between a constructed past tense an uncertain future, a gap or crack from where the wishes of the collective peep through and that, in its hidden instability, intervenes as fertile support to symbolize the present and sometimes to crystallize processes of socila struggle. To develop this approach we rely on three communities in Michoacan (Mexico): Zirahuen, Cheran and La Mintzita. Although they represent different ways of owning tradition, in al threee cases it serves as a symbolic platform which holds identities that appeal to the indigenous significant, and acts as a spring of possibilities for resistance and community orgamization.

This paper studies the governance of microfinance and asks about its recursivity: whether the system is responsive to changes prompted by feedback from borrowers or not. It draws on Hirschman's heuristic of exit and voice and the idea of participation in development, to examine three channels of feedback from borrowers to rule-makers and ask to what extent they have facilitated or restricted recursivity in microfinance. The standardisation of microfinance along a financial template is shown to have created very open flows of financial information, useful for monitoring clients' exit, but not granting them voice. The more recent creation of systems for social performance management and pursuing 'responsible' microfinance, however, has not resulted in similarly robust information flows, because, despite intentions to capture client satisfaction and feedback, these channels are severely restricted. They offer borrowers little chance to practically exercise voice and convey feedback which affects the rules. Recursivity studies, it is suggested, might integrate participation and exit/voice frameworks to explore the prospects of feedback from grassroots rule-subjects and better understand the factors that can restrict it. For microfinance, it is suggested that government regulation and clients' collective action could be necessary where the sector's governance system shows itself to be unresponsive.

In the wake of terrorist attacks in Paris in 2015, stereotypes of Muslim migrants who pose a threat to the French nation loom large. This article considers how communicative practices associated with belonging in France shift with rising tensions surrounding Islam and immigration. By analyzing the language used in state discourses on the one hand, and in conversations in Senegalese households on the other, this article examines 'integration' in France, both as a legal category and as a powerful metapragmatic framework that mediates indexicality in everyday interactions. This article shows how immigrants take part in the continual redefinition of what is required to 'sound' integrated in attempts to illustrate their belonging in France. It contends that French republican ideologies create an axis of contrast between the 'integrated' foreign-born and potentially problematic 'immigrants,' revealing how immigrants appropriate state discourses in their efforts to demonstrate their own integration. In so doing, immigrants themselves produce nested hierarchies of belonging among France's immigrant minority populations, in which Senegalese Catholics perform integration through critiques of Muslims, while Senegalese Muslims denounce Islamic associations and others who are more pious in public than they.

In the age of global production networks, companies increasingly become confronted with demands for transparency of their contractual business relations and purchasing practices as a basis for creating accountability and democratic control. The chapter discusses the dual nature of corporate transparency politics as a means of governing and taming corporate power, on the one hand, and as an instrument of corporate control and profit maximization, on the other. We conceptualize four levels of transparency practices in global production networks. The dual nature of transparency is inherent in each level: the level of collecting (1) and translating (2) information into corporate governance, the usage of information for public policy decisions (3) and for private legitimation strategies in corporate public relations (4). We argue that the consideration of these four levels and their recursive interconnectedness together are necessary to understand the political nature of corporate transparency. They are of key relevance with regard to the wider dynamics of relations of power, political conflicts, and social change in global production networks because they link conflicts around corporate transparency with the broader debate about the 'new' political role of transnational corporations and a changing relationship between states, markets and civil society in transnational relations. Our empirical evidence suggests that the main techniques of knowledge production, translation and usage are mainly shaped and dominated by business, allowing for increasing marketization, commodification and profit maximization under the veil of legitimacy as a transparent – i.e. allegedly democratic and accountable – company. We conclude by calling for a new research agenda on transnational transparency politics, which introduces a cultural perspective on knowledge practices and links it with a political-sociological view on power and governance struggles. This agenda would require looking into the technologies and practices of information collection, translation, and usage as well as inherent and subtle mechanisms of exclusion and inclusion related to them.

This article examines the neglected question of workers' voice in the transnational governance of labour rights. While governance studies often neglect worker's agency and labour studies focus on strikes or collective bargaining, this article takes the theoretical lenses of recursivity to explore and compare new channels for worker participation that developed in the context of transnational governance schemes. Taking the example of the Fair Labor Association, a prominent multistakeholder initiative in the garment industry, the article distinguishes between three channels: workers' surveys during audits, complaint procedures, and local grievance mediation. Despite the fact that such opportunities count as key innovation for the participation of labour in transnational governance, statistical and qualitative data from FLA's factory audits and self-conducted interviews show that locally situated actors, especially workers, are only occasionally able to make their voice heard in formally open channels. The article identifies two main sources of constraints: The first is workers' lack of knowledge of these channels and distrust towards these procedures. This is tied, secondly, to the more fundamental problem that business continues to have interpretative power over the nature of the problems and solutions in transnational labour governance.

Policy implications
Transparency: Transnational governance institutions need to better inform and raise awareness about possibilities for participation among workers.
Involvement of local actors: Including local trade unions and civil society organizations can create trust and legitimacy for the procedure. Workers and unions should also be involved in solving the problems; otherwise management can dominate the remediation process
Labour strategizing: National and international trade unions and activist groups should think about how to integrate these new channels into their joint strategizing, so that workers can profit from them in collective (not only individual) ways.

Recursivity is a concept explicitly used in mathematics and linguistics; however, the term has yet to find a stable home in the social sciences. The purpose of this chapter is to contribute a social psychological variant of recursion, mainly, “imagined recursivity,” by returning to the work of Cooley and the “looking-glass self.” We examine the role of imagined recursivity in stigma management, in particular, regarding self-disclosure. We draw from 35 in-depth interviews with a growing group in the United States called “Nones” (i.e., individuals who do not self-identify with any religion). Respondents demand that if plainly asked in conversation “are you religious?”  they would openly reveal their (“discreditable”) non-religious identity, which we will call the “displaced burden of disclosure.” Additionally, we believe that this technique has the practical utility of “hiding without hiding” their non-religious identity. This protects the identity’s owner from feeling the need to actively conceal their identity under the promise that if they were hypothetically asked they would hypothetically tell. This strategy is, above all, an interactional gambit; in exchange for the freedom of not feeling silenced, individuals risk the chance to be revealed.

This paper examines phonological phrasing in the Kwa language Akan. Regressive [+ATR] vowel harmony between words (RVH) serves as a hitherto unreported diagnostic of phonological phrasing. In this paper I discuss VP-internal and NP-internal structures, as well as SVO(O) and serial verb constructions. RVH is a general process in Akan grammar, although it is blocked in certain contexts. The analysis of phonological phrasing relies on universal syntax–phonology mapping constraints whereby lexically headed syntactic phrases are mapped onto phonological phrases. Blocking contexts call for a domain-sensitive analysis of RVH assuming recursive prosodic structure which makes reference to maximal and non-maximal phonological phrases. It is proposed (i) that phonological phrase structure is isomorphic to syntactic structure in Akan, and (ii) that the process of RVH is blocked at the edge of a maximal phonological phrase; this is formulated in terms of a domain-sensitive CrispEdgeconstraint.

Jonas Tinius and Sharon Macdonald. 2020. 'The recursivity of the curatorial’, in: The Anthropologist as Curator, edited by Roger Sansi. London: Bloomsbury, pp. 35-58.

Link: https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/the-anthropologist-as-curator-9781350081918/

"""This paper investigates the prosodic structure of weak (stressless) function words in Persian within the framework of Prosodic Phonology. Weak function words in Persian are prosodic clitics that form phrases with the material following them (proclitics) or preceding them (enclitics). So far, only the prosody of enclitics has been studied in the literature. The present study proposes that, in Persian, enclitics are affixal clitics, while proclitics are free clitics. These proposals contribute to the findings in Prosodic Phonology that prosodic categories can in fact be recursive and non-exhaustive.

Publisherʼs version downloadable at:
http://uu.diva-portal.org/smash/record.jsf?searchId=1&pid=diva2:657354""""

There is a common agreement in sociology that ‚true‘ sociological explanations imply causal assumptions. But as long as causality is entrenched in methodology the problem of recursivity – which is tantamount to the conundrum of the social itself – will remain obscure. It subverts the strength of the discipline, which consists in providing explanations of phenomena that do not operate in a causal fashion. A brief inspection of Durkheim, Weber, and Simmel shows that sociology‘s interest has never been directed towards causality but rather towards recursivity and the self-generated indeterminateness of the social. However, the implementation of causality for the purpose of merging sociology with a technically-driven social research between the 1940s and 1960s has radically reshaped sociology‘s self-conception. Since then sociological theory is seen to be in need for method and to lack empirical rigor. The self-prescribed remedy is a particular causal type of social research. But we should recognize that sociology, just as social research, cultivates its own methods and its own forms of empirical evidence. It furthermore acknowledges its entanglement in recursive circumstances and thus formulates non-causal, cybernetic explanations that allow interested observers to approach and re-experience social phenomena.

keywords: causality, recursivity, sociology, social research, indeterminateness, cybernetic explanation

Recursivity is holding society together but we shouldn't forget the formation of identities. Identities are the main product of recursive social operations and concurrently allow recursivity to continue. Rituals play an interesting role in this respect since they are social forms that preserve and invoke identities. Furthermore they are used to transform them in a controlled fashion.

Automated verification of multi-threaded programs requires explicit identification of the interplay between interacting threads, so-called environment transitions, to enable scalable, compositional reasoning. Once the environment transitions are identified, we can prove program properties by considering each program thread in isolation, as the environment transitions keep track of the interleaving with other threads. Finding adequate environment transitions that are sufficiently precise to yield conclusive results and yet do not overwhelm the verifier with unnecessary details about the interleaving with other threads is a major challenge. In this paper we propose a method for safety verification of multi-threaded programs that applies (transition) predicate abstraction-based discovery of environment transitions, exposing a minimal amount of information about the thread interleaving. The crux of our method is an abstraction refinement procedure that uses recursion-free Horn clauses t...

We propose a methodology of reducing the space requirements of recursive procedures without destroying their fundamental recursive structure. This technique is quite general, and seems to apply to most recursive procedures, particularly those dealing with recursive data structures. A recursive procedure is transformed into three procedures — a shell which is called from the outside, and has the same interface as the original, a recursive procedure with a minimum number of parameters, and no local variables, and a procedure that performs the operations but has no recursive calls. Our methodology was successfully employed in an implementation of a decision support system. The paper also includes results of experiments, in which space was reduced by a factor of up to seven, and run time was also improved.

Colocar el sentido en el plano de inmanencia responde a la crisis del cognitivismo y a la dicultad de enmarcar en una clave fenomenologica el encuentro con la subjetividad del otro (Marsciani, Landowski). Hasta la fecha, esta solucion requiere esclarecer las articulaciones del plano de la inmanencia mediante el modelo de su constitucion. A este respecto, el ensayo propone una gramatica generativo-transformacional del metalenguaje desarrollada por Greimas, Courtes, Marsciani y Zinna para el analisis de las estructuras narrativas. Al mostrar algunas caracteristicas de la narratividad que no aparecen de inmediato en el plano de manifestacion, se subrayan ciertas caracteristicas topologicas del plano de inmanencia: la infinita capacidad de generar estructuras recursivas, la auto-similitud y el vinculo problematico con el plano de manifestacion. De lo anterior se deriva que todavia habria espacio en la semiotica para descubrir propiedades inmanentes, si bien no evidentes en la superficie...

Abstract Type-based model checking algorithms for higher-order recursion schemes have recently emerged as a promising approach to the veri-fication of functional programs. We introduce pattern-matching re-cursion schemes (PMRS) as an accurate model of computation for ...