Author: Rene Kager File Type: pdf This is an introduction to Optimality Theory, whose central idea is that surface forms of language reflect resolutions of conflicts between competing constraints. The book does not limit its empirical scope to phonological phenomena, but also contains chapters on the learnability of OT grammars OTs implications for syntax and other issues such as opacity. Exercises accompany chapters 1-7, and there are sections on further reading. Optimality Theory will be welcomed by any linguist with a basic knowledge of derivational Generative Phonology.ReviewThis volume is an excellent introduction to the principles and worlings of optimality theory, a relatively new constraint-based framework....a superior introduction to the most current version of optamality theory... Studies in Second Language AcquisitionKagers book provides a comprehensive overview of OT theory and practice....It is noteworthy for its attention to detail and its analysis of arguments. Lanuage in Society Language NotesText English

Author: Jeremy Withers File Type: pdf Amid apocalyptic invasions and time travel, one common machine continually appears in H. G. Wellss works the bicycle. From his scientific romances and social comedies, to utopias, futurological speculations, and letters, Wellss texts abound with bicycles. In The War of the Wheels, Withers examines this mode of transportation as both something that played a significant role in Wellss personal life and as a literary device for creating elaborate characters and complex themes. Withers traces Wellss ambivalent relationship with the bicycle throughout his writing. While he celebrated it as a singular and astonishing piece of technology, and continued to do so long after his contemporaries abandoned their enthusiasm for the bicycle, he was not an unwavering promoter of this machine. Wells acknowledged the complex nature of cycling, its contribution to a growing dependence on and fetishization of technology, and its role in humanitys increasing sense of superiority. Moving into the twenty-first century, Withers reflects on how the works of H. G. Wells can serve as a valuable locus for thinking through many of our current issues and problems related to transportation, mobility, and sustainability.

Author: Christina Dunbar-Hester File Type: pdf The United States ushered in a new era of small-scale broadcasting in 2000 when it began issuing low-power FM (LPFM) licenses for noncommercial radio stations around the country. Over the next decade, several hundred of these newly created low-wattage stations took to the airwaves. In Low Power to the People, Christina Dunbar-Hester describes the practices of an activist organization focused on LPFM during this era. Despite its origins as a pirate broadcasting collective, the group eventually shifted toward building and expanding regulatory access to new, licensed stations. These radio activists consciously cast radio as an alternative to digital utopianism, promoting an understanding of electronic media that emphasizes the local community rather than a global audience of Internet users.Dunbar-Hester focuses on how these radio activists impute emancipatory politics to the old medium of radio technology by promoting the idea that microradio broadcasting holds the potential to empower ordinary people at the local community level. The groups methods combine political advocacy with a rare commitment to hands-on technical work with radio hardware, although the activists hands-on, inclusive ethos was hampered by persistent issues of race, class, and gender. Dunbar-Hesters study of activism around an old medium offers broader lessons about how political beliefs are expressed through engagement with specific technologies. It also offers insight into contemporary issues in media policy that is particularly timely as the FCC issues a new round of LPFM licenses. **Review Never mind the Orwellian forces of corporate radio -- a new generation is quietly tinkering its way toward a far more democratic world. In this clear-eyed, closely observed account, Christina Dunbar-Hester gives us a compelling glimpse of that generation and with it, a new way to see how technologies and people can make one another political. (Fred Turner, Associate Professor of Communication, Stanford University author of The Democratic Surround Multimedia and American Liberalism from World War II to the Psychedelic Sixties) Christina Dunbar-Hesters Low Power to the People will challenge what you think you know about media activism. Blending ethnography, technology study, and cultural and policy history, Low Power to the People shows how technological politics are never just about technology. As activists fight for greater media democracy and access, they come up against issues of expertise, identity, and exclusion. Dunbar-Hester demonstrates that in itself, technology is never enough for social change. Rich with ethnographic detail and political insight, this book is a must-read for anyone interested in the politics of media and technology today. (Jonathan Sterne, author of * MP3 The Meaning of a Format and The Audible Past Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction) In this compellingly argued, well-written work, Christina Dunbar-Hester offers an ethnography of the radio activists who helped birth low-power FM radio and also successfully challenged FCC media ownership rules. She probes the expressive culture of left-wing activists who see radio as inherently democratic and a tool for community empowerment, and technical competence as a challenge to socially embedded expertise and elitism. While sympathetic, Dunbar-Hester deftly underscores the contradictions of their politics and practices. (Robert B. Horwitz, University of California, San Diego, author of The Irony of Regulatory Reform The Deregulation of American Telecommunications and Americas Right Anti-Establishment Conservatism from Goldwater to the Tea Party) Low Power to the People offers a richly detailed exploration of the struggle for low-power FM as it played out both at the grassroots level and in the halls of Washington... Dunbar-Hester offers a convincing argument that an old medium like radio has the potential to be at least as open and democratic as does the Internet, and that we need to more critically examine claims about the intrinsic character of different communications technologies. (Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly) [A] captivating narrative that reproduces the passion, emotions, and tensions of the field.... (New Media & Society) In Low Power to the People, Dunbar-Hester delivers a perceptive interrogation of [the] intricate entwinement of technology and politics, and the activists labour of love (embracing passionate and playful work) to enact inclusive ideals for social change, which is compelling and inspirational for scholars and activists alike working to further media democracy. (Feminist Media Studies) About the Author Christina Dunbar-Hester teaches in Journalism and Media Studies in the School of Communication and Information at Rutgers University, where she is also affiliated faculty in Womens and Gender Studies.

Author: Wu Hung File Type: pdf Heavily illustrated, this collection brings together carefully selected primary texts on contemporary Chinese art, arranged in chronological order**