This thesis offers a comparative study of Chinese and the U.S. legislations on the issue of cross-border insolvency. China has included one article concerning this issue in its Enterprise Bankruptcy Law promulgated in 2006. Four years after that, when facing a real case, it is found that the legislation is too preliminary to be used. In the meantime, great efforts have been made among many western countries in order to promote international cooperation on this issue. The United States is one of the most active countries. This thesis analyzes the Chinese version of cross-border insolvency legislation, factor by factor. It also does case study of mostly U.S. cases and some other countries’ cases and tries to find out how the courts interpret the corresponding factors. In doing so, it hopes to improve the Chinese legislation by taking international experience as reference.

This thesis offers a comparative study of Chinese and the U.S. legislations on the issue of cross-border insolvency. China has included one article concerning this issue in its Enterprise Bankruptcy Law promulgated in 2006. Four years after that, when facing a real case, it is found that the legislation is too preliminary to be used. In the meantime, great efforts have been made among many western countries in order to promote international cooperation on this issue. The United States is one of the most active countries. This thesis analyzes the Chinese version of cross-border insolvency legislation, factor by factor. It also does case study of mostly U.S. cases and some other countries’ cases and tries to find out how the courts interpret the corresponding factors. In doing so, it hopes to improve the Chinese legislation by taking international experience as reference.

Le mouvement du libre accès à la littérature scientifique attire chaque jour de plus en plus l'intérêt des intervenants dans le domaine de publication scientifique. Les points de vue sont divergents pour des raisons diverses: scientifiques, politiques et économiques. Pour identifier l'effet du facteur de l'accès libre sur l'impact scientifique, la thèse étudiera d'abord les points suivants: 1-Le processus de publication avant et après l'introduction de l'accès libre. 2-Les citations selon divers points de vue disciplinaires. 3-Les citations comme outil d'évaluation des performances scientifiques des recherches. 4-Les différences dans les pratiques de recherche entre le domaine scientifique et le domaine des sciences humaines. Cette étude permettra une meilleure compréhension de la problématique de la thèse et une meilleure clarification des diverses portées du phénomène du libre accès. En effet, en se basant sur cette étude théorique, l'hypothèse de recherche sera définie et la méthodologie de recherche sera conçue. La partie pratique commence par la présentation de la méthodologie de recherche. Elle présente les outils et les moyens qui seront mis en oeuvre pour vérifier l'hypothèse de recherche. Elle définit la plateforme sur laquelle la méthodologie sera appliquée: base de données d'ISI, robot de recherche, infrastructure informatique, méthodes et modèles statistiques. Ensuite, elle présente la mise en oeuvre de la méthodologie de recherche avant de présenter les résultats obtenus. La dernière partie de la thèse porte sur l'étude des résultats obtenus. Elle identifie les forces et les limites des analyses réalisées et détermine si l'hypothèse de recherche a été vérifiée. Pour conclure, elle présente les diverses implications des résultats de la thèse sur les points de vue des intervenants dans le processus de publication. ______________________________________________________________________________ MOTS-CLÉS DE L’AUTEUR : Accès libre, Robot de recherche, Repérage d'information, Scientométrie, Articles scientifiques, ISI, Impact de citations, Publication scientifique.

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Tax treaty protection from international double taxation only goes as far as the treaty's substantive scope. Nations worldwide have adopted the text of Article 2 of the OECD Model Double Taxation Conventions (headed Taxes covered) in concluding bilateral treaties to prevent double taxation in the area of taxes on income and capital and taxes on estates, inheritances, and on gifts. The wording and structure of Article 2 give rise to a host of ambiguities, creating uncertainty for taxpayers regarding the taxes that come within treaty scope. A research strategy that draws on historic materials documenting the development of Article 2 throughout the League of Nations, OEEC, and OECD seeks to shed light on a provision that has retained its basic format and wording since the 1920s. Recent case law and academic literature are analyzed to gain a clearer picture of the common international concepts expressed in tax treaties that use the formulations proposed in the OECD Model Conventions. The research strategy, conceptual models, and proposed results aim to contribute to the understanding of the "taxes covered" and to guide subsequent research and heighten awareness of problems in the interpretation and application of the provision on substantive scope in tax treaties.(author's abstract)

The information overload problem becomes imperative with the explosion of information, and people need some agents to facilitate them to filter the information to meet their personal need. In this work, we conduct a research for the article classification in the tourism domain so as to identify articles that meet users¡¦ information need. We propose an information need orientation model in tourism, which consists of four goals: Initiation, Attraction, Accommodation, and Route planning. These goals can be characterized by 13 features. Some of the identified features can be enhanced by WordNet and Named Entity Recognition techniques as supplement techniques. To test the effectiveness of using the 13 features for classification and the relevant methods, we collected 15,797 articles from TripAdvisor.com, the world's largest travel site, and randomly selected 600 articles as training data labeled by two labelers. The experimental results show that our approach generally has comparable or better performance than that of using purely lexical features, namely TF-IDF, for classification, with fewer features.

Writing a research article is not an easy task for novice researchers, who begin their study as outsiders in the academic community and who must deal with both the apprenticeship in their fields and the challenge of writing in a new genre. Moreover, PhD thesis is a genre which is very frequently &ldquo / recontextualized&rdquo / as a research article by the novice researcher. The aim of this study was to conduct a contrastive analysis of the genre-specific features of introductions in a corpus of theses written in PhD programs in ELT offered by Turkish universities and in a corpus of published research articles in ELT written by expert authors of different nationalities, in order to specify the similarities and differences in the authors&rsquo / use of lexico-grammatical, discoursal and rhetorical features in the two corpora. The analyses included both a hand-tagged and a computerized analysis of the two corpora. Specifically, the vocabulary profiles, the readability statistics, the use of verb tenses and citations, the move-step structures and the author presence markers of the two corpora were subject to contrastive analyses. The analyses revealed that the language of the RA introductions was structurally more academic, lexically dense, and thus, more difficult to read compared to the PhDT introductions. Moreover, although the CARS Model (Swales, 2005), to a large extent described the move-step structure of the RA introductions, it could not account for the move-step structure of the PhDT introductions. With respect to these variations, proposals were made to increase the effectiveness of the target PhD programs in empowering the novice researchers in their access to the discourse community of ELT.

<p>This essay analyse the anti-dumping policy of the European Union, with specific focus on the anti-dumping tariff imposed on imports of ertain footwear from the People’s Republic of China from 1997 to 2002.</p><p>Even though free trade is expected from the members of the World Trade Organization (WTO) there are certain exceptions. One is when there is a suspicion that goods are being dumped in a foreign market, i.e. the exporter sells the product at a lower price in the foreign market than in its home market. Article VI in GATT regulates this together with the Anti-dumping Agreement.</p><p>In 1997 EU imposed an anti-dumping measure on certain footwear imported from the People’s Republic of China. This measure was in effect until 2002 (the maximum time for an anti-dumping tariff is five years). We expect to see a decrease of footwear exports from the People’s Republic of China to the European Union during this period.</p><p>By using a log-linear regression analysis we can see that the EU imports of Chinese footwear did indeed decrease from its trend otherwise during 1997 to 2002. Since the industry overall increased its sales during the same period, we draw the conclusion that the tariff was the reason for the decreased imports.</p>

The purpose of the present study was to investigate Korean EFL learners' judgments of countability of English nouns because a correct judgment of noun countability is a key factor for the appropriate use of English indefinite articles and noun phrases. To investigate the subjects' judgments of noun countability and how they are related to the use of English indefinite articles and noun phrases, fourteen hypotheses were set forth and four task types were designed.Participants were 115 Korean college EFL students and they were given four tasks: a task of judgment of countability of nouns in isolation OCT), a task of judgment of countability of nouns in context (JCC), a fill-in-the-blank task (FB), and an error correction task (EC).Overall the subjects showed a flexible notion of countability. There was a statistically significant difference between their performance of JCI and JCC. There was a positive relation between their judgments of countability in three contexts (isolation, context, and overall context) and their performance on the indefinite articles in FB.There was no relationship between their performance of JCC and OJC (overall judgment of countability) and the indefinite articles in EC.With respect to JCI, a statistically significant difference was found between the performance of the low and advanced learners and between the performance of the intermediate and advanced learners, but it was not found between the performance of the low and intermediate learners.In regard to JCC, no statistically significant difference was found between the performance of the low and intermediate learners and between the performance of the intermediate and advanced learners. A statistically significant difference was found only between the performance of the low and advanced learners.The participants performed better on the count use of concrete nouns than on the noncount use of concrete nouns, whereas they performed better on the noncount use of abstract nouns than on the count use of abstract nouns.There was an interaction between proficiency and the noncount use of concrete nouns, while no interaction was found between proficiency and the count use of abstract nouns. / Department of English

The determiners, including such words as the articles, the and a, and the demonstratives, this and that, have been studied from many points of view. There are grammatical theories of their derivation and use, philosophical investigations and psychological studies, looking at adult use. However, few studies have considered the acquisition of these small, but important, words in child language development. Those studies that do exist tend to regard the child's acquisition as a progressive approximation to, or attainment of, adult usage. Chapter 1 of the thesis reviews the previous literature in the area in order to place in perspective the present research study. Chapter 1 is divided into six sections. The first section serves as a short introduction to the determiners and examines briefly some of the approaches to their study. Philosophical and linguistic studies are mentioned in passing. Historically, the definite, article the and the demonstrative that are derived from the same word in Old English (poet), while a is derived from the numeral one. However, most psychological studies of determiner acquisition have been derived from the assumption that the definite and indefinite (articles are part of one contrastive system. In order to discuss the psychological studies, section 2 examines the grammatical theories, starting with Christophersen (1939) and Jespersen (1949), of the articles and the demonstratives, as contrastive systems of language use. However, a second approach, which is taken up by developmental psycholinguists, is what is termed the functional approach. This approach is advocated primarily by psycholinguists and philosophers of language, who believe that the articles and demonstratives are linked (as they are historically) into one integrated system of determination. Section 3 therefore considers integrated theories of determiner acquisition, commencing from the work of Lyons (1975, 1977). It has been established that there are two theoretical approaches to the study of determiner acquisition, the contrastive approach and the integrated functional approach. The rest of Chapter 1 is concerned with empirical approaches, and section A examines some psychological studies of article acquisition. The work of Brown (1973), Maratsos (1976) and Warden (1973) represents studies based on the assumed contrast between the and a. The work of Bresson (1974) and Karmiloff-Smith (1976, 1979) represents the functional approach to article acquisition. The contrastive approach tends to regard the child as working towards adult competence with the articles, and thus the young child errs in his use. Brown, Maratsos, and Warden each deal at length with the child's apparent egocentric use of the definite article. The child uses the instead of a, when introducing a referent known to himself, to a listener who does not have the same knowledge. Brown draws on spontaneous speech, and considers mainly the correctness of syntactic forms. Maratsos and Warden consider the meanings of the words and the child's developing grasp of the articles as a semantic system. Bresson and Karmiloff-Smith, while both working with French-speaking children, consider the articles as part of a total system of determination. Although Bresson tends to regard the children as erring when they do not possess adult functions of the articles, Karmiloff-Smith, in a very extensive study, looks at what the children produce and understand. She then postulates the functions the determiners have for young children, how the functions are initially established and how they develop and change with an increase in linguistic and cognitive competence. The present research thesis could be viewed as an extension of this approach with English-speaking children. A similar distinction between the contrastive and functional approaches to determiner acquisition is seen with the demonstratives, and section 5 of Chapter 1 considers the work of Clark (1978). She looks at the acquisition of the demonstratives (and other deictic pairs) in terms of the child learning specific contrasts, e.g. this vs. that as proximal vs. non-proximal spatio-temporal distance. While Karmiloff-Smith also deals with the demonstratives in her functional approach, the work of Wales (1978, 1979) is discussed. Wales, while considering experimentally the acquisition of the contrastive deictic terms, also looks at spontaneous use of the determiners in mother-child interaction. Not only is the speech examined, but also the nonlinguistic gestures that accompany the speech of young children. The final section of the review chapter summarises the previous research. Also presented are the broad aims of the experiments that are reported in Chapters 2, 3 and 4. The functional approach is taken, with the. research being based on the notion that the article system and the demonstrative system are not separate and individually contrastive systems, but are linked via the and that, in their deictic functions. The experiments aimed to show how production and comprehension of the determiners can be influenced by various contextual factors. Each experiment was designed to allow for maximum flexibility, and all verbal and nonverbal responses were recorded and subjected to analysis. In this way, a clearer indication of precisely what functions of the articles and demonstratives three year old children are competent with, can be gained. Chapter 2, presenting the article comprehension experiments, commences by outlining the theoretically assumed adult functions of the articles. These functions may not necessarily be the ones on which the three year old child's article system is based. However, the functions are derived from adult-based notions of usage, so it is reasonable to suggest that they will serve as valid assumptions on which to base the experiments. Three experiments were conducted aimed at examining the young child's understanding of assumed contrasts between the functions of the and a. In all but one condition of one experiment, the children did not provide evidence of understanding the theoretically assumed contrasts. Instead, nonlinguistic response bias explanations were put forward of how the children were performing. However it is not known if the response biases arise because the children do not understand the language, or whether such biases (for absolute location, for relative location, depending on the nature of the task) block any potential understanding. Finally, the problem of designing tasks suitable for article comprehension is discussed. Chapter 3 presents the experiments designed to elicit the articles (and other determiners, both linguistic and nonlinguistic). Experiments to elicit only the articles (and their assumed contrast) tend to be fairly un-natural (see Maratsos, 1976), and hence flexible task designs were adopted for the present studies. Many forms of determiner use were elicited by these tasks, and these form the basis for Chapter 3. Experiment 4 studied the already well-documented use of the indefinite article for naming. However, a large incidence (about 30%) of article omission was recorded - an incidence which re-occurred throughout the experiments. Experiments 5 to 7 investigated the effects of various manipulations on subsequent article use. These variables included : the naming of the objects prior to subsequent questioning; altering the form of the question posed; the use of hidden vs. visible arrays; and variation of the class composition of the arrays. It was found that there was an interactive effect of these variables on subsequent article use and the functions of these article forms, but that the form of the question posed. had the greatest effect.