Abstracts The study was designed to achieve three purposes : the first was to explore the categories of universities in China, Netherlands, Taiwan, Japan, United Kingdom and United States. Second one was to build an evaluation model of performance indicators of colleges & universities in terms of three functions : research, instruction and service¡Fand to figure out a model of factorial structure which could grasp the conditions of colleges & universities. Finally, to categorized each college & university in Taiwan accordingly. In order to achieve the above aims, the researcher adopted questionnaire survey as the major research method. Two questionnaire were filled out by three groups of samples - scholars majoring in higher education, the administrators in Section of Higher Education, Ministry of Education, and college deans in nine different academic fields. The total percentage of response was 49.59%. The following six findings have been concluded : 1.There are two reasons for the categorization of colleges & universities in most other foreign countries ¡V natural formation or man-made. Titles of each category was given accordingly. 2.The subjects of this study were in great agreement with what the most important evaluation indicators were, but a trivial discrepancy toward the indicators for service function existed. 3.The theoretical model of performance indicators for colleges & universities was in good fittness for actural data. It could help understand the performance of a higher education institution. 4.The background variables of colleges & universities was significant in influencing the categories, they beloged to, e.g. public or private, scale of institution or number of professors, history of the institution. 5.The researcher, through the method of hierarchical cluster analysis, combined the mean of raw scores and standard score to categorize colleges & universities in Taiwan. 6.According to the deans of colleges & universities, four categories were suggested for colleges & universities in Taiwan. Finally, ten suggestions were raised to the authority in charge of higher education institutions, general colleges & universities in Taiwan and future research. Keyword : functions of colleges & universities, categories of colleges & universities, evaluation indicators of colleges & universities

René Descartes’ 1637 “bête machine” characterization of nonhuman animals has assisted in the strengthening of the Genesis 1:26 and 1: 28 disparate categorization of nonhuman animals and human animals. That characterization appeared in Descartes’ first important published writing, the Discourse on the Method, and can be summarized as including the ideas that nonhuman animals are like machines; do not have thoughts, reason or souls like human animals; and thus, cannot be categorized with humans; and, as a result, do not experience pain or certain other feelings. This characterization has impeded the primary objective of environmental ethics - the extension of ethical consideration beyond human animals - and has supported the argument that not only the nonhuman animal but also the rest of nature has only instrumental worth/value. As is universally recognized, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, just a few decades after Descartes’ death, took issue with Descartes’ dualism by arguing that the Leibnizian monad, with its active power, was the foundation of, at least, all of life. This argument must result in the conclusion that nonhuman and human animals are necessarily categorized collectively, just as Charles Darwin later argued. In fact, when the writings of Descartes and Michel de Montaigne are reviewed, it becomes apparent that Descartes never believed his bête machine characterization but embraced it to achieve not only his philosophical objectives but also his anatomical and physiological objectives. Philosophically, Descartes was answering Montaigne’s skepticism and his use of nonhuman animal examples to discredit human reason. Also, Descartes spent a major part of, at least, the last twenty-two years of his fifty-four year life dissecting nonhuman animals. Finally, the role that the politics and policies of the Christian institutions played in these matters is of primary importance. Similar politics and policies of the Christian institutions have since played, and still play, an important role in the continuing, unreasonable, disparate categorization of human animals and nonhuman animals. Philosophy seems to be the only discipline that can, if it will, take issue with that characterization.

This study took place in the city of Rasht, which is the capital of Gilan Province, situated in North-Western Iran. The aim has been to investigate how a group of young Rashti women constitute their identities through their talk-in-interaction, and how they relate to the concept of Rashti, be it the dialect, people living in a geographical area, or a notion of collective characteristics. The participants constitute their identities by using different social categories to position and categorise themselves and contrast themselves with others. In positioning and categorising they use various discursive means, such as code-switching, active voicing, and extreme-case formulations. Moreover, the social categories also overlap and work together when the participants negotiate and re-negotiate their identities, making an intersectional approach highly relevant. The methods used in this study are of a qualitative nature and belong in the third wave of sociolinguistics (Eckert 2012). The analysed data consists primarily of staged conversations, whereas participant observation, field notes, and natural conversations have been used to help the researcher in understanding the field. The study adopts an emic or participants’ perspective through the use of membership categorisation analysis and conversation analysis, but also within a theoretical intersectionality framework. In many of the conversations, the culture of Rasht and Gilan is a re-emerging theme, and it is contrasted with that of the rest of the country. Gender norms and gender roles are very central to the study, as these young women describe themselves as much freer and less controlled than women in other parts of the country. Gender is made relevant when the participants discuss how the local traditions surpass both national (religious) laws and social codes in other places. The Rashti and Gilaki language varieties also play a role in the constructing of the Rashti identity of the participants. There is, however, a discrepancy between the participants’ values vis-à-vis Rashti and Gilaki as a dialect or a language, and how they value being a Rashti as well as the Rashti and Gilaki culture. In the majority of conversations the participants express a highly positive opinion regarding their Rashti identity, while at the same time the Rashti and Gilaki language varieties are mostly valued in very negative ways.

On the eve of 1920, the U.S. recording industry had been through a number of near-fatal economic downturns since its precarious emergence in the 1890s, and yet stood on the verge of its most influential decade to date. Already in its short history, the recording industry had nearly ceased to exist in the 1890s, saved itself by transforming the phonograph from office machine to nickel-in-the-slot novelty, survived the first of many format wars to come, and reinvented itself by introducing the phonograph into American homes. During the 1920s and 1930s, the recording industry participated in creating genre categories and identifying audiences for music that had previously gone unrecorded. By concentrating on both industry giants (Victor, Columbia) and smaller labels that were key to industry trends (Gennett, Paramount, Okeh), this dissertation's working hypothesis is that a new mode of production in the recording industry between the world wars -- based both on previous business strategies and new market conditions -- allowed a few large corporations to develop into a highly organized industry. This relationship between genre (understood as a configuration of social, cultural, ideological, and aesthetic beliefs) and mode of production (in its most concrete sense, how a given company operates) has continued to be an important one to the record industry, because with each new genre and sub-genre the industry has the potential to connect with underserved or unrecognized audiences. By combining industrial history with cultural analysis, this dissertation analyzes institutional cultures at various record companies and the contributions of musicians and various cultural intermediaries who helped shape U. S. popular music beginning in the early twentieth century. The central questions to which I continually return are: How did the consolidation of the recording industry into distinct company cultures shape the records that were made? What role did these cultures play in the shaping of genres, in terms of both creative control and technological formats? And finally, how do these various aspects interrelate in the context of the recording industry -- both as an industry involved in manufacturing culture and reflecting its own participation as a cultural institution? / text

This thesis describes the development of a Knowledge Management (KM) Assessment tool for the Operational level of the organisation. Its main focus is to help organisations to identify the KM activities and mechanisms that they could improve in order to improve their operational efficiency. Current KM literature is lacking in guiding organisations in what they need to do in order to implement and formalise KM in their operations with a view to improving operational efficiency. Therefore the aim of this thesis is to fill this gap in the literature and also to influence the manner in which KM is practiced. The research project has three distinct stages: the model development, modification and testing stages. The model development stage synthesises KM literature and a pilot study in order to develop a conceptual model of the KM assessment tool. The second stage of the research project describes the application of the tool in three organisations and details the modifications that were made as a result. Finally, the third stage tests the final version of the KM Assessment tool using four case organisations. The KM Assessment tool presented in this thesis is not a prescriptive KM solution; it emphasises the need to approach KM from a process and task specific perspective. Put another way, KM improvements should be implemented to reflect the processes and task charactaristics of each individual organisation. However, the thesis presents a method of evaluation of such that is unform across organisational types

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Lexical categories like noun and verb are foundational to language acquisition, but these categories do not come neatly packaged for the infant language learner. Some have proposed that infants can begin to solve this problem by tracking the frequent nonadjacent word (or morpheme) contexts of these categories. However, nonadjacent relationships that frame categories contain reliable adjacent relationships making the type of context (adjacent or nonadjacent) used for category acquisition unclear. In addition, previous research suggests that infants show learning of adjacent dependencies earlier than learning of nonadjacent dependencies and that the learning of nonadjacent word relationships is affected by the intervening information (how informative it is and how familiar it is). Together these issues raise the question of whether the type of context used for category acquisition changes as a function of development. To address this question, infants ages 13, 15, and 18 months were exposed to an artificial language containing adjacent and nonadjacent information that predicted a category. Infants were then tested to determine whether they 1) detected the category using adjacent information 2) only detected the nonadjacent dependency, with no categorization, or 3) detected both the nonadjacent relationship and the category. The results showed high individual variability in the youngest age group with a gradual convergence towards detecting the category and the associated environments by 18 months. These findings suggest that both adjacent and nonadjacent information may be used at early stages in category acquisition. The results reveal a dynamic picture of how infants use distributional information for category acquisition and support a developmental shift consistent with previous infant studies examining dependencies between words.

This dissertation is an application of the framework of Distributed Morphology to the morphosyntax of Chemehuevi, an endangered Southern Numic language of the Uto-Aztecan family. Following one of the central claims of DM, I argue that word formation in Chemehuevi happens in the syntax and provide evidence for this claim from the formation of lexical categories, as well as from the morphosyntax of the Chemehuevi causative verbs. I frame my discussion of lexical categories around the Root Hypothesis (Marantz 1997, Arad 2005), a notion that there are no underived nouns, verbs, or adjectives in the grammar, but roots that receive interpretation and assignment to a `part of speech' depending on their functional environment. I show that Chemehuevi nouns and verbs are formed when roots are incorporated into nominal or verbal functional heads, many of which are overtly represented in the language. I also demonstrate that there is no distinct class of adjectives in Chemehuevi, and that roots with adjectival meanings are derived into stative verbs or nominalizations, depending on their function.My discussion of predication in Chemehuevi centers around the previously unexplained distribution of the enclitic copula -uk, which under my analysis is viewed as an overt realization of a functional head Pred (based on Baker 2003), which is obligatory in the formation of nominal and adjectival, but not verbal predicates.Another major theme of the dissertation is the notion that word-formation from roots differs from word-formation from derived words, known as the Low vs. High Attachment Hypothesis (Marantz 2000, Travis 2000, etc.). This approach explains the differences between compositional and non-compositional word formation by the distance between the root and functional head(s) attached to it. On the basis of Chemehuevi causatives, I show that causative heads attached directly to the root derive words that exhibit morphophonological and semantic idiosyncrasies, such as allomorphy and availability of idiomatic meanings, while high attachment heads derive words that are fully compositional. This locality constraint on interpretation of roots is explained in terms of phase theory, and I present evidence from Chemehuevi showing that what constitutes a phase may be subject to parametric variation.Each chapter of the dissertation contains a section for non-linguistic audience where I provide a summary of the main points in non-theoretical terms and connect them to practical applications for the purposes of language learning and revitalization.

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