Over the past few decades serious reservations have been expressed about the explanatory power of sociological theory and research. In this important book, leading social theorist Peter Hedstrom outlines the foundations of an analytically oriented sociology that seeks to address this criticism. Building on his earlier influential contributions to contemporary debates, Professor Hedstrom argues for a systematic development of sociological theory so that it has the explanatory power and precision to inform sociological research and understanding. He discusses various mechanisms of action and interaction and shows how strong links can be forged between the micro and the macro, and between theory and empirical research. Combining approaches to theory and methodology and using extensive examples to illustrate how they might be applied, this clear, concise and original book will appeal to a broad range of social scientists.

What biological factors make human communication possible? How do we process and understand language? How does brain damage affect these mechanisms, and what can this tell us about how language is organized in the brain? The field of neurolinguistics seeks to answer these questions, which are crucial to linguistics, psychology and speech pathology alike. This textbook introduces the central topics in neurolinguistics: speech recognition, word and sentence structure, meaning, and discourse - in both 'normal' speakers and those with language disorders. It moves on to provide a balanced discussion of key areas of debate such as modularity and the 'language areas' of the brain, 'connectionist' versus 'symbolic' modelling of language processing, and the nature of linguistic and mental representations. Making accessible over half a century of scientific and linguistic research, and containing extensive study questions, it will be welcomed by all those interested in the relationship between language and the brain.

Andrew Radford's latest textbook, Minimalist Syntax, provides a concise, clear, and accessible introduction to current work in syntactic theory, drawing on the key concepts of Chomsky's Minimalist Program. Assuming little or no prior knowledge of syntactic theory, Radford takes students through a diverse range of topics in English syntax - such as categories and features, merger, null constituents, movement, case, and split projections - and shows how the 'computational component' works within the minimalist framework. Beginning at an elementary level, the book introduces grammatical concepts and sets out the theoretical foundations of Principles and Parameters and Universal Grammar, before progressing in stages towards more complex phenomena. Each chapter contains a workbook section, in which students are encouraged to make their own analyses of English phrases and sentences through exercises, model answers, and 'helpful hints'. There is also an extensive glossary of terms.

Review
"...this is a landmark book that deserves, and will undoubtedly receive, a wide readership." Journal of Interdisciplinary History
"Few historical studies feature animals in their titles. We gain insight, however, from turning human-centered history around because animals, earth, water, and climate all strongly affect human daily life. One of the special merits of Robert Marks's meticulous study of long-term environmental change in South China is that he incorporates the human story into a balanced, synthetic description of natural, biological, and political developments. While recognizing the great achievements of the Chinese settlers who transformed their environment, he never loses sight of the costs." Peter C. Purdue, Journal of Asian Studies
"...the book's most thought-provoking achievement is to make us ponder late imperial Chinese history in terms of long-term processes of change through which human interaction with the environment has created an ambivalent mix of economic goods and ecological "bads"." JAAS
"...it deserves high praise for being one of the most comprehensive studies of the economic history of South CHina in the late imperial period...Marks has provided the most balanced overview of the different aspects of agricultural and commercialization in the Pearl River Delta during the Ming and Qing...The book is packed with useful statistics, and the maps are beautifully presented...Marks has presented us with a solid examination of economic activity in the Lingnan region and its implications for the environment." China Review International
"insightful and well-documented...Tigers, Rice, Silk, and Silt weaves together a vast variety of data on environmental trends, including long-term climate shifts, deforestation, land reclamation, and the disappearance of elephants and togers. It is presented with the help of many useful maps, charts and tables. Marks is particularly successful in showing the reclamation and settlement of the Pearl River Delta near Canton after the fourteeth century, and the expansion of a regional rice market as the Delta area turned to the production of cash crops and manufactured goods for export to other parts of China and Southeast Asia." Jrnl of World History Fall 2000
Book Description
Challenging the conventional wisdom of Western environmental historians, this book examines the correlations between economic and environmental changes in the southern imperial Chinese provinces of Guangdong and Guangxi (a region historically known as Lingnan, "South of the Mountains") from 1400 to 1850. Marks discusses the impact of population growth on land use patterns, the agro-ecology, and deforestation; the commercialization of agriculture and its implications; the impact of climatic change on agriculture; and the ways in which the human population responded to environmental challenges.

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An internationally recognized team of Kant scholars explore his argument that the basic principles of the natural science are imposed on reality by human sensibility and understanding, and thus that human beings are also free to impose their own free and rational agency on the world. This volume is the only systematic and comprehensive account of the full range of Kant’s writings available.

First published in 1978, Reading Greek has become a best-selling one-year introductory course in ancient Greek for students and adults. It combines the best of modern and traditional language-learning techniques and is used widely in schools, summer schools and universities across the world. It has also been translated into several foreign languages. This volume contains a narrative adapted entirely from ancient authors, including Herodotus, Euripides, Aristophanes and Demosthenes, in order to encourage students rapidly to develop their reading skills. Generous support is provided with vocabulary. At the same time, through the texts and numerous illustrations, students will receive a good introduction to Greek culture, and especially that of Classical Athens. The accompanying Grammar and Exercises volume provides full grammatical support together with numerous exercises at different levels, Greek-English and English-Greek vocabularies, a substantial reference grammar and language surveys.

Since the Bali bombings of 2002 and the rise of political Islam, Indonesia has frequently occupied media headlines. Nevertheless, the history of the fourth largest country on earth remains relatively unknown. Adrian Vickers' book, first published in 2005, traces the history of an island country, comprising some 240 million people, from the colonial period through revolution and independence to the present. Framed around the life story of Pramoedya Ananta Toer, Indonesia's most famous and controversial novelist and playwright, the book journeys through the social and cultural mores of Indonesian society, focusing on the experiences of ordinary people. In this new edition, the author brings the story up to date, revisiting his argument as to why Indonesia has yet to realise its potential as a democratic country. He also examines the rise of fundamentalist Islam, which has haunted Indonesia since the fall of Suharto.

Nobel laureate Erwin Schrodinger's What is Life? is one of the great science classics of the twentieth century. A distinguished physicist's exploration of the question which lies at the heart of biology, it was written for the layman, but proved one of the spurs to the birth of molecular biology and the subsequent discovery of the structure of DNA. The philosopher Karl Popper hailed it as a 'beautiful and important book' by 'a great man to whom I owe a personal debt for many exciting discussions'. It appears here together with Mind and Matter, his essay investigating a relationship which has eluded and puzzled philosophers since the earliest times. Schrodinger asks what place consciousness occupies in the evolution of life, and what part the state of development of the human mind plays in moral questions. Brought together with these two classics are Schrodinger's autobiographical sketches, published and translated here for the first time. They offer a fascinating fragmentary account of his life as a background to his scientific writings, making this volume a valuable additon to the shelves of scientist and layman alike.

The ancient Chinese were profoundly influenced by the Sun, Moon and stars, making persistent efforts to mirror astral phenomena in shaping their civilization. In this pioneering text, David W. Pankenier introduces readers to a seriously understudied field, illustrating how astronomy shaped the culture of China from the very beginning and how it influenced areas as disparate as art, architecture, calendrical science, myth, technology, and political and military decision-making. As elsewhere in the ancient world, there was no positive distinction between astronomy and astrology in ancient China, and so astrology, or more precisely, astral omenology, is a principal focus of Astrology and Cosmology in Early China. Drawing on a broad range of sources, including archaeological discoveries, classical texts, inscriptions and paleography, this thought-provoking book documents the role of astronomical phenomena in the development of the 'Celestial Empire' from the late Neolithic through the late imperial period.

Fascists presents a theory of fascism based on intensive analysis of the men and women who became fascists. It covers the six European countries in which fascism became most dominant - Italy, Germany, Austria, Hungary, Romania and Spain. It is a comprehensive analysis of who fascists actually were, what beliefs they held and what actions they committed. The book suggests that fascism was essentially a product of post World War I conditions in Europe and is unlikely to re-appear in its classic garb in the future. Nonetheless, elements of its ideology remain relevant to modern conditions and are now re-appearing, though mainly in different parts of the world.

The Metaphysics of Morals is Kant's major work in applied moral philosophy in which he deals with the basic principles of rights and of virtues. It comprises two parts: the "Doctrine of Right," which deals with the rights that people have or can acquire, and the "Doctrine of Virtue," which deals with the virtues they ought to acquire. Mary Gregor's translation, revised for publication in Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy, is the only complete translation of the whole text. It includes extensive annotation on Kant's difficult and sometimes unfamiliar vocabulary. A new introduction by Roger Sullivan sets the work in its historical and philosophical context.

In Social Capital, first published in 2001, Nan Lin explains the importance of using social connections and social relations in achieving goals. Social capital, or resources accessed through such connections and relations, is critical (along with human capital, or what a person or organization actually possesses) to individuals, social groups, organizations, and communities in obtaining their objectives. This book places social capital in the family of capital theories (the classical and neo-capital theories), articulates its elements and propositions, presents research programs, findings, and agenda, and theorizes its significance in various moments of interactions between individual actions and social structure (for example, the primordial groups, social exchanges, organizations, institutional transformations and cybernetworks). Nan Lin eloquently introduces a groundbreaking theory that forcefully argues and shows why it is 'who you know', as well as 'what you know' that makes a difference in life and society.

An extensively revised and expanded second edition of the successful textbook on social network analysis integrating theory, applications and network analysis using Pajek. The main structural concepts and their applications in social research are introduced with exercises. Pajek software and data sets are available so readers can learn network analysis through application and case studies. Readers will have the knowledge, skill and tools to apply social network analysis across the social sciences, from anthropology and sociology to business administration and history. This second edition has a new chapter on random network models, for example, scale-free and small-world networks and Monte Carlo simulation; discussion of multiple relations, islands and matrix multiplication; new structural indices such as eigenvector centrality, degree distribution and clustering coefficients; new visualization options that include circular layout for partitions and drawing a network geographically as a 3D surface; and using Unicode labels.

Language demonstrates structure while also showing considerable variation at all levels: languages differ from one another while still being shaped by the same principles; utterances within a language differ from one another while exhibiting the same structural patterns; languages change over time, but in fairly regular ways. This book focuses on the dynamic processes that create languages and give them their structure and variance. It outlines a theory of language that addresses the nature of grammar, taking into account its variance and gradience, and seeks explanation in terms of the recurrent processes that operate in language use. The evidence is based on the study of large corpora of spoken and written language, what we know about how languages change, as well as the results of experiments with language users. The result is an integrated theory of language use and language change which has implications for cognitive processing and language evolution.

This text develops a comprehensive theory of programming languages based on type systems and structural operational semantics. Language concepts are precisely defined by their static and dynamic semantics, presenting the essential tools both intuitively and rigorously while relying on only elementary mathematics. These tools are used to analyze and prove properties of languages and provide the framework for combining and comparing language features. The broad range of concepts includes fundamental data types such as sums and products, polymorphic and abstract types, dynamic typing, dynamic dispatch, subtyping and refinement types, symbols and dynamic classification, parallelism and cost semantics, and concurrency and distribution. The methods are directly applicable to language implementation, to the development of logics for reasoning about programs, and to the formal verification language properties such as type safety. This thoroughly revised second edition includes exercises at the end of nearly every chapter and a new chapter on type refinements.

This book examines the relations between the material and political bases of contentious politics and the construction, diffusion, and endurance of contentious language. Beginning with the language of revolution developed from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, it examines contentious language at work, in gender and race relations and in nationalist and ethnic movements. It closes with an examination of emotions in contentious politics, reflecting on the changes in political language since 9/11 and assessing the impact of religion and recent innovations in electronic communication on the language of politics.

Victor Stoichita challenges the received ideas about the linear progression of Western painting, from the Renaissance, through Mannerism to the Baroque. Eschewing questions of style, he focuses instead on the painting as a framed, transportable, and marketable object that is a specifically modern artistic medium. Arguing that panel painting, from its origins in the Early Renaissance, was a 'self-aware image', Stoichita demonstrates that the artist and his art was often the theme of the painting. He also examines the mirror effect and other 'splitting' strategies such as the mise en abime and intertextual play. By analysing these modalities of self-reflection, Stoichita offers a new and unexpected view of a period and the art it produced once considered to have been definitively classified.

This modern treatment of computer vision focuses on learning and inference in probabilistic models as a unifying theme. It shows how to use training data to learn the relationships between the observed image data and the aspects of the world that we wish to estimate, such as the 3D structure or the object class, and how to exploit these relationships to make new inferences about the world from new image data. With minimal prerequisites, the book starts from the basics of probability and model fitting and works up to real examples that the reader can implement and modify to build useful vision systems. Primarily meant for advanced undergraduate and graduate students, the detailed methodological presentation will also be useful for practitioners of computer vision. * Covers cutting-edge techniques, including graph cuts, machine learning and multiple view geometry * A unified approach shows the common basis for solutions of important computer vision problems, such as camera calibration, face recognition and object tracking * More than 70 algorithms are described in sufficient detail to implement * More than 350 full-color illustrations amplify the text * The treatment is self-contained, including all of the background mathematics * Additional resources at www.computervisionmodels.com

Code-switching - the alternating use of two languages in the same stretch of discourse by a bilingual speaker - is a dominant topic in the study of bilingualism and a phenomenon that generates a great deal of pointed discussion in the public domain. This handbook provides the most comprehensive guide to this bilingual phenomenon to date. Drawing on empirical data from a wide range of language pairings, the leading researchers in the study of bilingualism examine the linguistic, social and cognitive implications of code-switching in up-to-date and accessible survey chapters. The Cambridge Handbook of Linguistic Code-switching will serve as a vital resource for advanced undergraduate and graduate students, as a wide-ranging overview for linguists, psychologists and speech scientists and as an informative guide for educators interested in bilingual speech practices.