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The starting point for this paper is Jerrold Levinson's taxonomy of perceptual beauty. Despite the ambiguity of the concept, we think we can recognize beauty in different shapes and contexts, which suggests that the different manifestations of beauty have a common feature or a common underlying nature. My claims are 1) that there are good reasons to believe that there are different species of beauty, 2) that everyday scenes can accommodate real cases of beauty that Levinson does not capture in his framework, and 3) that the essay's examples of an everyday scene - Laura and the clothesline - do not fit into Levinson's seven main categories. The conclusion is that we need a new category to accommodate this instance of prosaic beauty. The multiplicity of beauty is greater than we usually assume and that says something about the importance of beauty in human life.

On étudie la théorie et l'application pour plusieurs méthodes dans le domaine de l'estimation de la puissance spectrale. Dans le cas 1D, les deux approches de Levinson et Burg sont exposées dans le même contexte théorique et numérique. Dans le cas 2D, et plus généralement le cas ND, de nouvelles méthodes sont proposées pour l'estimation de la puissance spectrale. Ces méthodes conduisent à des extensions répondant à un critère de positivité et d'une maximisation d'une entropie adaptée à la puissance spectrale : la matrice de corrélation ND doit être définie positive et doit vérifier un critère de maximum d'entropie. Aussi, les systèmes de corrélation ND Toeplitz sont exposés dans le contexte des coefficients de réflexion généralisés pour le cas bloc Toeplitz, et le cas Toeplitz bloc Toeplitz. Dans les deux cas, on propose des nouveaux algorithmes pour la solution du système linéaire autorégressif. La structure ND Toeplitz de la matrice de corrélation est étudiée sous deux conditions. La première est que le support d'extension positive est infini avec une propriété de « matching » approximative. La deuxième est l'extension positive avec une propriété de maximum d'entropie. Suivant la deuxième condition, on formalise une théorie de positivité fondamentale, qui établit la correspondance entre un groupe minimal des coefficients de réflexion généralisés et la matrice de corrélation ND avec le même degré de liberté.

This psychobiography on the life of Karen Horney is an exploratory-descriptive study that aims to explore and describe Horney's life structure development according to Daniel Levinson's (1996) theory of adult development. The method of research uses a qualitative single-case research design that studies her life over her entire lifespan and highlights the individual characteristics of Horney in a holistic manner within her socio-historical context. A purposive sampling procedure was used to select Karen Horney as the subject of the research and only published data was analyzed in the research. Multiple sources of data are used to obtain the information in this research, including an autobiography and three biographies written by three different authors. This data is organized according to the temporal sequence of her lifespan and the developmental periods and time frame of Levinson's theory. Horney's life is described and explored to highlight those areas of her life that conform to the developmental theory and those aspects of her life that are not included in the theoretical constructs of Levinson 's theory. By exploring the significant relationships that Horney developed throughout her life with family, friends, work colleagues, community and religious affiliations, and the important issues in her development, this study verifies Levinson's theory by corroborating his conceptualisation of adult development as a process of sequential stages divided into four main eras of development, linked by three periods of transition. A shortcoming of Levinson's theory relates to his omission of self-esteem issues and religious concerns as relevant factors experienced during the era of pre-adulthood and spiritual concerns during the era of late adulthood.

Dissertation (Ed.D.)--Boston University, 1986 / This qualitative study investigated the reasons why American priests resigned their ministries. Two separate analytical lenses were used. One lens included a thematic analysis of reasons for resignation, and a second lens involved a developmental study of the men applying Levinson's psychosocial theory of adult development. Regarding the developmental analysis, the intent of this study was not to confirm or refute Levinson's theory but to understand the development of the sixteen men by applying his theory. Nevertheless, the results of the developmental analysis seemed to support Levinson's postulation of alternating structure-building and structure-changing periods but appeared to question his construct of age-linked periods especially for men in middle adulthood. Although this study supported his reported developmental tasks, it found that the men in the study dealt with some of them at a later age than postulated. Consequently, the writer concluded that Levinson's theory may need to be modified when applying it to men who have committed themselves to a Catholic professional religious life-style. The men developed differently than Levinson's sample because of the unique structure of the institutional Church and priesthood that seemed to delay the men's attainment of responsibility and independence. Several implications and recommendations for further research were suggested. [TRUNCATED]

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Cette thèse se propose d’obtenir des résultats statistiques sur les zéros non-triviaux de fonctions L. Dans le cas des fonctions L de formes modulaires, on prouve qu’une proportion positive explicite de zéros non-triviaux se situe sur la droite critique. Afin d’arriver à ce résultat, il nous faut préalablement étendre un théorème sur les problèmes de convolution avec décalage additif en moyenne de manière à déterminer le comportement asymptotique du second moment intégral ramolli d’une fonction L de forme modulaire au voisinage de la droite critique. Une autre partie de cette thèse, indépendante de la précédente, est consacrée à l'étude du plus petit zéro non-trivial d’une famille de fonctions L. Ces résultats sont en particulier appliqués aux fonctions L de puissance symétrique. / The purpose of this dissertation is to get some statistical results related to nontrivial zeros of L-functions. In the modular case, we prove and determine an explicit positive proportion of non-trivial zeros lying on the critical line. In order to obtain this result, we need to extend a theorem on shifted convolution sums on average to be able to determine the asymptotic behaviour of the mollified second integral moment of a modular L-function close to the critical line. Independently of these results, we study the smallest non-trivial zero in a family of L-functions. These results are applied to symmetric power L-functions.

The rise of the digital technology, social networking or interactivity have an extensive impact on what is happening in virtual world. Users of Internet are more and more often introduced to the new available on-line tools. Some of them have adapted those new trends with no problems and they have been taking an advantage of them with an ease, whereas others have had problems with converting themselves into the new digital era. Alternatively, others are not fascinated by what Internet offers or they simply cannot afford it due to many circumstances. However, with no doubts, we can say that the Internet and the digital revolution brought about many issues to discuss or to have a research about. To some extent, new trends, especially the expansion of the Internet, are affecting all traditional media and this, in my opinion, might result in the new phenomena like potential division of society into Digital Natives and Digital Immigrants proposed by Prensky (2001a).The project focused on investigating motives for choosing sport websites by both groups with special consideration of interactivity factor. The motives have been checked via in-depth interviews using the sample of ten interviewees both private and professional users of Polish sport informative websites. I wanted to check whether my results either duplicate what Prensky described in his articles or they confirm contradictive opinion given by VanSlyke.Additionally, I have compared those most popular motives with sample of five most often visited Polish sport informative websites, according to Alexa rank (2012). The level of interactivity on those websites was assessed by an appearance of examples of new new media like blogs, podcasts, number of posts on Facebook fan pages, created account on Twitter or channel on YouTube (Levinson, 2010). Also possibility of commenting was taken into consideration. Having checked those variables via cyber ethnography method (secondary method) I was able to identify which of the sampled websites could be considered as most interactive one.Despite persisting limitations, the method has brought reliable and valid data, according to which I have given my conclusions by answering research questions stated at the beginning of this project.

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The thesis explores the form, function and sociolinguistic distribution of explicit apologies in the spoken part of the British National Corpus. The sub-corpus used for the study comprises a spoken text mass of about five million words and represents dialogue produced by more than 1700 speakers, acting in a number of different conversational settings. More than 3000 examples of apologising are included in the analysis. Primarily, the form and function of the apologies are examined in relation to the type of offence leading up to the speech act. Aspects such as the sincerity of the apologies and the use of additional remedial strategies other than explicit apologising are also considered. Variations in the distributions of the different types of apologies found are subsequently investigated for the two independent variables speaker social identity (gender, social class and age) and conversational setting (genre, formality and group size). The effect of the speaker-addressee relationship on the apology rate and the types of apologies produced is also examined. In this study, the prototypical apology, a speech act used to remedy a real or perceived offence, is only one of a number of uses of the apology form in the corpus. Other common functions of the form include discourse-managing devices such as request cues for repetition and markers of hesitation, as well as disarming devices uttered before expressing disagreement and controversial opinions. Among the speaker social variables investigated, age and social class are particularly important in affecting apologetic behaviour. Young and middle-class speakers favour the use of the apology form. No substantial gender differences in apologising are apparent in the corpus. I have also been able to show that large conversational groups result in frequent use of the form. Finally, analysis of the effects of the speaker-addressee relationship on the use of the speech act shows that, contrary to expectations based on Brown & Levinson’s theory of politeness, it is the powerful who tend to apologise to the powerless rather than vice versa. The study implies that formulaic politeness is an important linguistic marker of social class and that its use often involves control of the addressee.